even as authorities prosecuted some economic exchanges in the Baratillo vigorously, they condoned others. The mere act of collecting rent from vendors in the Baratillo, which the Ayuntamiento did throughout the market’s history, conferred a degree of legitimacy on its businesses. Officials also participated directly in extralegal activities in the Baratillo by accepting gratificaciones, the tips or bribes that vendors paid local officials to transfer ownership of a business in the plaza and expedite other bureaucratic processes.41 On at least one occasion, officials contradicted standing prohibitions of the Baratillo by acknowleding the baratilleros’ right to practice their trade. In 1777, the regidor (city councilman) Don Thomás Fernández sought to remove the the baratilleros who trafficked in used iron goods in the Plaza Mayor. His argument was the familiar one: its vendors were selling keys, nails, knives, and other implements that servants had stolen from their masters’ homes, in addition to prohibited weapons. This activity gave rise to “drunkenness, stupidity, and other vices” from which the “miserable people” suffered. Fernández acknowledged that the trade in stolen goods required both vendors and customers, and the latter were far from innocent, because they bought “knowing that those pieces [had been] stolen.”42 Fernández’s complaint resulted in a new ordinance, in May 1778, from the fiel ejecutoría, the branch of the Ayuntamiento responsible for enforcing consumer laws, stating that the sale of new or used iron in the Baratillo was a violation of guild regulations.43
Yet the city stopped short of removing the vendors’ mesillas altogether, as Fernández had wanted. In fact, the plaza judge determined, in a June 1785 report, that doing so would violate King Philip III’s original 1611 decree granting petty vendors the right to practice their commerce in the Plaza Mayor and the Mexico City Ayuntamiento the authority to collect rent from them. Municipal officials, the judge concluded, would have to find new ways of preventing the “inconveniences” these vendors caused. He added, with a note of resignation, that “even if the puestos and mesillas are exterminated, with the hardware, iron, and tin shops remaining open, the evil-doers will never lack a place to buy and sell” their stolen goods.44
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