was not always the nucleus of Mexico City’s black market. That reputation developed during the twentieth century, after a market called the Baratillo moved there. For three hundred years, the Baratillo—from the Spanish word barato, or cheap—was the city’s principal marketplace for second-hand goods and its most notorious thieves’ market. New and used manufactured products—including clothing, tools, furniture, and books—circulated alongside stolen jewelry, counterfeit coins, and illegal weapons. The Baratillo’s reputation was every bit as sinister as Tepito’s is today. Church officials in the eighteenth century called it “the center of wickedness” and “a refuge for lost men.”5 Exposés in Mexico’s nineteenth-century press detailed the depravity of the market and the people who gathered there: one author called it “Hell’s ante-room.”6 Authorities banned it on a number of occasions, yet the market outlasted every government of the colonial and early-national eras. Indeed, the Baratillo never went away: after moving to Tepito in 1902, the market gradually outgrew the confines of the plaza there and spread through the surrounding streets. By the mid-twentieth century, the Baratillo and Tepito were synonymous. Tepito had become the black-market barrio.
What explains the persistence of an institution that many Mexico City residents saw as a magnet for crime and a threat to the social order? Answering that question requires looking beyond government decrees and impressionistic accounts of the market to explore the shadowy networks that linked the Baratillo’s vendors to mercantile and political elites in Mexico City. The Baratillo, it turns out, served far more people than criminals and the poor. In the colonial era, vendors in the market—baratilleros, as they were known—traded with some of the wealthiest overseas merchants in Mexico. In the nineteenth century, prominent newspaper publishers sided with vendors in their disputes with local and national authorities (despite the sensational stories those same papers printed about the crimes that took place in the market). Even the local government at times worked to keep the Baratillo in business. The vendors may have traded in stolen goods, but they paid rent to the city—revenue the municipal government, or Ayuntamiento, welcomed.7 Baratilleros were not passive actors in these relationships. They sent petitions to government officials, filed lawsuits, curried favor with the press, and used the apparatuses of local and national government to assert the legitimacy of their trade and defend their right to practice it in public streets and plazas. Baratilleros possessed political capital—black market capital—that they employed with striking success. The Baratillo flourished for hundreds of years, then, because diverse actors conspired to preserve it. Those individuals forged alliances that extended from the streets to the halls of government to the pages of the capital’s newspapers. The Baratillo was not simply a site for illicit economic exchange; it was also a place where men and women from across the social spectrum engaged in Mexican politics. In Mexico City, the black market was as much a political institution as it was an economic one.8
This book traces the history of the Baratillo from its first appearance in the historical record in the mid-seventeenth century through its relocation to Tepito at the beginning of the twentieth. In doing so, it sheds light on one of Mexico City’s most enduring yet least-understood institutions. The Baratillo, like Tepito today, played an outsized role in the Mexican imagination, symbolizing everything that was criminal, dangerous, and lowly. It was the subject of the first important work of satire written in Mexico, the eighteenth-century “Ordenanzas del Baratillo,” and it appears a number of times in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento—considered the first Latin American novel.9 The eighteenth-century Diccionario de gobierno y legislación de las Indias defines “Baratillo” as an illicit marketplace in Mexico City, even though many other cities in Spanish America had their own baratillos (in this study, I capitalize Mexico City’s Baratillo to distinguish it from the others).10 Indeed, although the Baratillo, in its general form or purpose, was not unique to Mexico or even the Hispanic world—London had its Rag Fair and Lisbon its Feira da Ladra, to name just two examples—few other second-hand markets had the high profile or the staying power of Mexico City’s Baratillo.11 Despite the Baratillo’s notoriety, longevity, and importance to the society and economy of Mexico City, this study is the first to reconstruct its history.12
In narrating the Baratillo’s long history, this book contributes to our understanding of urban life in Mexico and Latin America in several ways. First, it reveals the centrality of extralegal commerce to the broader economy of Mexico City between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. The Baratillo was the hub of the city’s shadow economy, which incorporated illicit, informal, as well as legal second-hand exchanges and engaged men and women of all backgrounds. These trade circuits flourished in the gray areas, or shadows, of Spanish and Mexican law. Second, the book highlights the multifaceted nature of the state in Mexico City. Baratilleros dealt with local, imperial, and national authorities that pursued different political agendas, some of which coincided with their own. The state in Mexico City was never a single actor but many competing ones, and vendors in the Baratillo used those rivalries to their advantage. Third, the book deepens our understanding of urban politics in Mexico City between the late-colonial era and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The Baratillo did not survive solely because of the economic benefits it provided to urban residents; it also endured because the baratilleros used the political tools available to them in every era to assert its relevance. Vendors who trafficked in the shadow economy enjoyed a degree of access that historians have rarely observed among non-elite actors prior to the twentieth century. Fourth and lastly, the book offers a new perspective on urban public space in Mexico. The Baratillo’s history shows that streets and plazas were not simply venues for conflict between elite and popular groups, as the traditional view holds. Nor did diverse individuals merely rub shoulders with one another in the Baratillo. Instead, the market plaza was a site where men and women from all walks of life exchanged goods and ideas.
THE SHADOW ECONOMY
The Baratillo played a vital role in the local economy. For over three hundred years, it provisioned Mexico City’s consumers with textiles, tools, and household goods and provided employment to hundreds of vendors and their families at any given time.13 While economic policies in Mexico shifted dramatically between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries—from mercantilism to free trade to industrialization—the Baratillo’s product mix remained remarkably constant.14 No matter what political regime ruled the country or which economic paradigm its leaders adopted, Mexican consumers demanded the kinds of goods the Baratillo offered, regardless of their provenance.15
The Baratillo thrived in the contested space between legality and illegality. The market’s very existence was a legal contradiction: royal and national authorities repeatedly banned it, yet local officials allowed it to continue, treating it, in some ways, as any other public marketplace. The transactions that took place in the Baratillo do not fit neatly into any single legal category, either. By reputation, it was the city’s main distribution point for stolen, prohibited, or otherwise illicit goods—the trade that readers today know as the black market.16 Yet some exchanges in the Baratillo did not violate any laws. Other transactions might fall under the modern-day category of the informal economy.17 The Baratillo’s opponents routinely complained that baratilleros did not pay taxes on their sales, and, during the colonial era, many vendors in the market sold outside the highly regulated channels of the guild system, which stipulated who had the right to sell a particular good and where. Although such actions were technically illegal, officials generally did not view them as antisocial—as threatening to the social peace.18 Vendors and their advocates added further ambiguity by routinely challenging authorities’ interpretation of the law. The Baratillo’s history thus highlights the malleable boundary between legality and illegality and the ways that actors from across the social spectrum helped shape its contours.19
The Baratillo and the larger shadow economy of which it formed a part linked diverse individuals and institutions in Mexico City. While the Baratillo may have catered primarily to the city’s poor and working classes, urban elites and individuals from the capital’s middle sectors also benefited from
