In the Baratillo, a rogue could turn himself into a gentleman and a casta could become a Spaniard.
Other evidence, however, suggests that the Baratillo also appealed to better-off customers. As Juan de Viera, the administrator of Mexico City’s Colegio de San Ildefonso, wrote in 1778, the Baratillo Grande attracted “every class and quality of person” with its dizzying array of goods. Unlike other eighteenth-century writers, Viera saw not a teeming den of thieves and vagabonds but a lively bazaar that offered something for everyone.23 Archival evidence supports Viera’s observations. In 1729, Don Antonio Velasco, a member of the Real Audiencia, sold a relatively expensive cloak, worth twelve pesos, to a vendor in the Baratillo.24 The cost of such an item was roughly equal to a month’s wages for an unskilled worker in the capital in the eighteenth century.25 Given that historians have shown that members of middling and upper echelons of Mexico City society regularly used pawnshops and the Monte de Piedad, the government-run pawnshop established in 1775, it makes sense that they also would have bought and sold clothing and household goods in the Baratillo.26 The Baratillo was a commercial institution that offered an array of products—both used and new, cheap and high end—and engaged actors of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
THE SHADOW ECONOMY AND THE STATE
The Baratillo was also a site where legal and illegal exchanges were deeply entwined. It was the nexus of Mexico City’s shadow economy, where the circuits of second-hand, stolen, counterfeit, contraband, untaxed, or otherwise illicit goods intersected. This economy linked some of the most elite traders in New Spain to some of the lowliest and connected pulperías, which often doubled as pawnshops, to artisans’ workshops and vendors in the Plaza Mayor. Colonial officials were not of one mind when it came to regulating this trade. While some authorities tried to stamp it out, others condoned or turned a blind eye to it.
An investigation that José Antonio Lince González, Mexico City’s chief assayer and a member of the Real Audiencia, conducted into the illegal sale of gold and silver jewelry in the Baratillo in the early 1780s reveals some of the connections between the Baratillo and the city’s broader economy. The investigation sought to extinguish the trade in jewelry that lacked the “quinto” stamp indicating that the required 20 percent tax had been levied on it. These pieces were often of a lower quality than the twenty-two-carat standard the Crown had imposed. Lince González found that the gold and silver for sale in the Baratillo was coming mainly from three sources: clandestine workshops; pulperías, where the poor pawned such pieces in exchange for short-term loans; and the Real Monte de Piedad.27 The pieces circulated undetected between those locations and the Baratillo, where they blended in with the market’s clothing, tools, and household goods. This trade challenged the rigid barriers the colonial government tried to impose between artisans and merchants, whom colonial law prevented from working together, and linked the Baratillo directly to a government institution—the Monte de Piedad. It also reveals that diverse individuals were involved in the trade: some of the vendors who sold the pieces were single Spaniards, one a married morisco, and another a married Spanish “notable” who had fallen on hard times. Most were clothing sellers who claimed to trade in small valuables on the side, which is to say, they had not manufactured the pieces themselves; they had come into their possession through happenstance. It was a defense that many vendors in the Baratillo used with colonial authorities, with apparent success.28
It is tempting to label the shadow economy Lince González uncovered an informal economy, applying a term from twentieth-century social science to the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Baratillo and the semipermanent street markets scattered around late-colonial Mexico City meet several of the criteria that scholars have used to define the informal economy: its transactions were largely unregulated and untaxed, and many of the businesses were relatively small and family owned and operated.29 Furthermore, one could argue, in the vein of neoliberal approaches to the study of informality, that the trade in unminted gold and silver pieces was a rational response to an overly burdensome regulatory regime. It was a practice that served people’s legitimate economic needs; the law simply had not caught up to reality.30
Yet, as historians and social scientists have emphasized in recent years, creating a rigid dichotomy between formal and informal sectors obscures the many ways legal and extralegal activities were intertwined.31 In the Baratillo, untaxed and irregular goods mixed with patently illicit ones. Stolen jewelry and clothes, counterfeit coins, illegal arms, seditious books, and new and used manufactured goods of all kinds circulated alongside one another in the market. The distinction between the antisocial and the merely extralegal breaks down in the Baratillo’s dense warren of stands, tables, and ambulatory vendors.
Colonial authorities frequently complained that the Baratillo was a distribution point for stolen goods. Although pilfered items of every kind made their way into the market, stolen clothing was especially common. Clothes were expensive in New Spain, due to the high cost of textile production there, and one could convert them into cash easily by pawning or selling them.32 The Baratillo was a particularly attractive place for thieves looking to unload stolen clothes. In an 1814 case, police apprehended a nineteen-year-old Indian named Francisco Pineda from the village of Cuautitlán, located about twenty-five kilometers northwest of Mexico City, for his role in the robbery of three Indians. Pineda and his accomplices stole seven or eight pesos from their victims, along with their clothes and bedsheets, “leaving them to go naked to their village.” Authorities caught Pineda the next day as he sold one of the stolen sheets in the Baratillo. He was wearing the shirt and underpants of one victim when the police found him, suggesting that the thieves sought not only cash but also the clothes themselves. Pineda received a punishment of 200 lashes and eight years of labor at a fort in Acapulco.33
In another case, from 1819, Ángel Ramírez, an indio ladino (or Indian fluent in Spanish) and Victoriano Sánchez, a Spaniard, were charged with breaking into a woman’s home and stealing four black tunics, three shawls, a shirt, and a tablecloth. The police caught the men as they attempted to sell some of the clothes to a trader in the Baratillo for ten pesos. Ramírez assured the authorities of his innocence, claiming that he was selling the clothes on behalf of another man, a common defense. Sánchez, for his part, claimed he was in the Baratillo not because he was involved in any crime, “but rather to find a woman named Guadalupe whom he says he had seen pass through the Baratillo around this time, because he needed to see her”—an explanation the police quickly dismissed.34
These cases illustrate how Mexico City’s shadow economy transcended ethnic divisions, bringing individuals from diverse backgrounds together in the business of illicit commerce. They also reveal the geographic reach of that trade, which drew in people like Pineda, who lived in the capital’s hinterlands.35 And they hint at the important social role the Baratillo played in the city. More than just a place to buy and sell, it was a point where men and women from across the city and beyond also gathered to gossip, flirt, and exchange ideas. Authorities worried about those types of interactions, too. Colonial officials repeatedly complained that the Baratillo attracted an unholy mélange that engaged in illicit transactions that extended beyond trading in stolen goods.
The Baratillo also attracted vendors who businesses violated moral and religious laws. Prostitutes gathered there, and, authorities complained, “under the shadow of darkness, sins of sensuality” abounded.36 The market attracted other vices, too, such as gambling, which colonial authorities repeatedly outlawed.37 On a number of occasions, vendors in the Baratillo came before Mexico’s Inquisition for crimes against the faith. In 1751, the mestiza María del Castillo appeared before the tribunal for practicing witchcraft in the Baratillo Chico—using her supposed powers to save people’s souls, make them fall in love, improve their luck in cockfights, “and other such stupidities.”38 As the location of a number of bookshops, the Baratillo Grande was an emporium of dangerous ideas. In 1768, a Spanish poet went before the Inquisition for writing, publishing, and selling a “libelous ballad” criticizing the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish America the previous
