to pawnshops, artisans’ workshops, import warehouses, and residents’ homes. It involved Spaniards, Indians, and people of mixed race. Historians have previously shown that commerce in colonial Spanish American cities created economic and social ties between men and women of different backgrounds; this study suggests that those connections continued well after independence.21
The Baratillo’s beneficiaries also included government officials. Public marketplaces produced large and relatively consistent revenue streams for Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento, and municipal officials fiercely defended their jurisdiction over them. City council members often pushed back against colonial or national officials who tried to disband the Baratillo, fearing the loss of income that would result. Market administrators also had personal investments in the Baratillo. They typically earned salaries for overseeing the market, or a percentage of the fees they collected, and they received gratificaciones, or bribes, that vendors paid them to facilitate transfers of their stalls. These were informal transactions that vendors and municipal officials institutionalized over time. The mere act of categorizing the Baratillo as a public marketplace and collecting rent from its vendors conferred a degree of legitimacy on those businesses. In these ways, agents of the state often did more to sustain the Baratillo than to rein it in.22
THE STATE
The involvement of state actors in the Baratillo reveals the limitations of the concept of “the state” itself for the study of Mexican history. There was no consistent state agenda when it came to the Baratillo. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, authorities expressed ambivalence about the market. After furious attempts to disband it in the 1690s, the Spanish Crown made little effort to enforce those prohibitions in the eighteenth century, even as it intervened aggressively in many other areas of Mexico’s economy and society. National-era governments followed the same pattern, issuing edicts that ordered the market to disappear only to rescind or forget about them later. Local officials, charged with regulating the day-to-day affairs of the city and providing public services to its residents, rarely shared the same priorities as national ones. Some had personal relationships with the baratilleros, forming patronage networks that mixed business and politics. The varied and often conflicting objectives of authorities in Mexico City meant that baratilleros never confronted a unitary government. This book thus disaggregates the state, seeing it not as a single actor but many competing ones.
Rivalries between government authorities in the capital, particularly between local and national officials, date to the colonial period, when members of the Ayuntamiento, dominated by American-born Creoles, clashed with peninsular officials over local affairs. The friction continued after Mexico’s independence from Spain as national officials gradually whittled away at the Ayuntamiento’s autonomy. And those same tensions lie at the heart of the twenty-first-century effort to transform the Federal District into a state with its own constitution—the campaign into which vendors in Tepito inserted themselves in 2016.23 Baratilleros, in fact, found themselves at the center of debates over local autonomy many times over the centuries. Vendors in the market understood those intragovernmental rivalries and used them to their advantage by playing local and national officials against one another. Mexico City’s institutional dynamics played an important role in the Baratillo’s history, and understanding them is key to making sense of the market’s persistence.24
This study highlights the importance of municipal government, which often receives short shrift from historians. While national authorities developed the ambitious plans that draw most scholars’ attention, local officials enacted many of the policies that had the greatest impact on people’s lives. Municipal officials also had the most interaction with subjects and citizens. The Ayuntamiento was the principal vehicle through which vendors in the Baratillo expressed their grievances.25 Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, baratilleros petitioned, lobbied, and collaborated with officials on the Ayuntamiento. They did not simply resist government attempts to regulate or quash their market; they used Mexico City’s institutions to access the urban political arena and exert influence over government decision making.26
URBAN POLITICS
The letter the vendors in Tepito sent to Mexico City’s mayor in 2016 built on a long tradition of political engagement. Baratilleros had been political players in Mexico City since the colonial era. In the eighteenth century, they petitioned colonial authorities using the political vernacular of the day, asserting that their trade served the common good, and, during the Enlightenment, public utility. They were not pursuing ideological agendas with these efforts; rather, they were using the political tools available to them under the Spanish monarchy to protect or advance their material interests and assert their rights to the city.27 After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, vendors quickly adopted the political mechanisms that republican rule offered.28 They demanded, as citizens and constituents, that local officials uphold their obligations to provide adequate policing and infrastructure for public markets. They lobbied elected officials on the Ayuntamiento for support when government initiatives endangered their businesses, and they threatened to vote uncooperative council members out of office. Vendors also engaged in the capital’s emerging public sphere. In 1842, the baratilleros printed a combative letter to the Ayuntamiento in El Siglo Diez y Nueve, the country’s leading liberal newspaper of the era, seeking to gain public support in a dispute with the Ayuntamiento. They continued to use the press, forming alliances with sympathetic editors and publishers, throughout the nineteenth century. They deftly navigated both the colonial and republican-era judicial systems.
In charting this course, the baratilleros benefited from important allies. Although critics of the Baratillo penned thousands of pages of diatribes about the market over the centuries, other residents of Mexico City, including elected officials and other members of the political elite, offered quieter but equally consistent support for the vendors. In nearly every controversy that engulfed the Baratillo, individuals raised their voices in defense of the baratilleros. Some had economic interests in the market. They may have owned a business in the Baratillo or a store nearby or had other financial dealings with baratilleros. In other cases, defending the Baratillo advanced a political agenda, as it did for Vicente García Torres, publisher of the newspaper El Monitor Republicano, who used the Baratillo as a poster child for the liberal principles of free trade and individual rights in the early 1870s. Baratilleros formed patronage networks that served the interests of elite, middling, and popular actors in the capital.29
In other cases, the baratilleros’ supporters had no obvious material motivation. Those individuals expressed a paternalistic sympathy for the downtrodden that extended even to vendors in the city’s thieves’ market. Although historians typically associate those sentiments with the consensual politics of the old regime, they did not disappear after Mexico’s independence from Spain. Throughout the nineteenth century, government officials, newspaper editors, and other urban residents expressed a concern for the well-being of the baratilleros. These were attitudes that cut across partisan lines and continued throughout the Porfiriato, a period that scholars often identify with technocratic government and social Darwinism. In their petitions and letters to the press, vendors played to these sentiments. They stressed their poverty and vulnerability and chastised opponents for their callousness. Throughout the Baratillo’s history, efforts to eliminate or further marginalize the market competed with these expressions of support, which the vendors themselves engendered.30
This discourse of poverty, however, masks a more complicated social reality. Many of the vendors in the Baratillo were not, in fact, poor. Some operated substantial businesses. Many had backgrounds in the skilled trades, and, as a whole, they were relatively well educated.31 The nature of their trade, which skirted taxes and other regulatory hurdles, offered the potential for significant profit. Those factors, combined with the fact that baratilleros, unlike other street vendors, were predominately male, helped them gain access to Mexico’s political arena.32 While many vendors sent petitions to local and national authorities, only baratilleros seem to have succeeded in getting theirs published in the
