historians generally view the public sphere as restricted to the country’s letrados, or lettered men, is extraordinary.33 Other vendors did not have the same clout prior to the twentieth century.34 This study reveals much about the lives of men and women who made their living on the streets of Mexico City. But it also tells a story that is unique to those who trafficked in the shadow economy.
Baratilleros’ political tactics produced a remarkable record of nonviolent resolutions. Indeed, one of the most surprising aspects of the Baratillo’s history is how infrequently tensions between vendors and government officials led to physical confrontations. Vendors were able to achieve their goals, or at least mitigate the negative effects of decisions that went against them, by negotiating with authorities. Their success in keeping the market in operation for centuries without resorting to violence may hold clues for understanding how, during eras when much of rural Mexico became embroiled in revolution, Mexico City largely avoided it.35 The politics of the Mexico City street, where vendors in the thieves’ market routinely bargained with local and national authorities, produced compromise far more often than conflict.
THE STREET
In uncovering the political and economic relationships that tied baratilleros to other actors in Mexico City, this book challenges traditional views about the role of public streets and plazas in Latin American society. Historians have long viewed streets and plazas as sites where modernizing elites clashed with recalcitrant popular groups—where the poor resisted, through protest or subtler strategies, elite attempts to assert control over public spaces that were essential to their work and social lives.36 But the Baratillo’s history suggests that a far wider swath of local residents engaged in Mexico City’s street economies than the most vulnerable and that vendors did more than protest government policies they found problematic. Furthermore, the capital’s governing elites rarely agreed on how to manage its public spaces. While imperial and national authorities wanted clean, orderly streets and plazas where troops could exercise, people and goods could move freely, and leaders could display their power for the public, members of the Ayuntamiento, which depended on rent from the vendors who occupied those public spaces, often saw things differently. They defended the Ayuntamiento’s jurisdiction over public markets, plazas, and thoroughfares against interference from higher authorities, which in some cases meant defending the baratilleros. The Baratillo’s history provides little support for the idea that urban elites made a consistent or unified effort to eliminate elements of urban popular culture they found distasteful.37
Nor were the baratilleros united in opposition to the government. Prior to the twentieth century, vendors in the market were loosely organized, if they were organized at all. There was no guild to create a common identity or common cause among the baratilleros, and no clear leadership structure.38 Internal dissension was common, and competing vendor factions often sought help from government officials to gain advantage over their rivals within the market. Far from a site that drew neat battle lines between rich and poor, the Baratillo was a venue where elite, middling, and popular actors forged alliances that cut across class and ethnic lines.
If cross-class collaboration helped sustain the Baratillo, it did little to attack the underlying inequalities that created the market in the first place. The seventeenth-century Baratillo, like Tepito in the twenty-first century, was a place where men and women made their living on the street, at the law’s margins, with few rights to protect their livelihoods. For hundreds of years, the Baratillo operated in this liminal state—tolerated, but never legal. The Tepito vendors’ 2016 request for constitutional protection illustrates the precariousness of their trade and the contingent nature of their rights. The Baratillo’s existence was always provisional—a negotiated arrangement that could come apart at any moment.39
SOURCES
The shadow economy, by its very nature, leaves little behind for historians to study. Transactions take place off the books and outside the view of regulators and record keepers. But the Baratillo, as a public marketplace and a site that attracted frequent attention from authorities, left a paper trail. Over three hundred years, the market generated thousands of pages of government correspondence, vendor petitions, market censuses, travelers’ accounts, newspaper articles, and notarial and judicial records. These sources provide an entry point for the study of individuals and economic exchanges that have long eluded historians. Yet the window they open is frustratingly narrow, and it opens and shuts abruptly with changes to Mexico’s institutional landscape. Guild records, for example, paint a vivid picture of the Baratillo’s commerce during the eighteenth century. When the guilds lost their monopolies and their investigative authority in the early nineteenth century, however, that documentary trail goes cold. Newspapers and municipal market records fill its place, though inadequately. Indeed, although the extant documentation on the Baratillo provides a glimpse of Mexico City’s shadow economy, much remains hidden from view. Quantitative data, beyond inconsistent registers of the rent the vendors paid to the city, are almost nonexistent. Apart from occasional references, there is little record of the prices vendors charged their customers, much less the volume of their sales. Demographic information about the market’s vendors and customers is even more elusive.40 What is evident, however, is that the Baratillo played an indispensable role in Mexico City’s economy for centuries—providing jobs for vendors and basic household goods to consumers. The vendors turned that economic clout into political capital, ensuring that the black market never went out of business.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
This book contains six chapters. The first three deal with the late colonial period, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, while chapters 4 through 6 examine the post independence era to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This chronology challenges traditional periodizations in the historiography of Mexico and Latin America, which compartmentalize the colonial and national eras into separate fields of inquiry. The Baratillo’s history resists such neat divisions. Both the Baratillo and the Ayuntamiento, the body charged with overseeing it, were colonial-era institutions that survived the transition from imperial to republican rule. The longue-durée approach of this study provides fresh insight into how nationhood and republican politics transformed old-regime institutions and the people who relied on them—and how they did not.41
Chapter 1, “A Pernicious Commerce,” examines the efforts of New Spain’s last Habsburg viceroys to eliminate the Baratillo in the late 1680s and 1690s, focusing on their response to the 1692 riot that ravaged the Plaza Mayor. Following the riot, Spanish authorities sought to reengineer the Plaza Mayor, forcing the Baratillo out and replacing it with a masonry alcaicería—later known as the Parián—that was designed for the capital’s elite import merchants. The chapter explores why colonial authorities found the Baratillo so troubling, how they sought to eliminate it, and why that effort ultimately failed.
Chapter 2, “The Baratillo and the Enlightened City,” examines the Baratillo’s role in eighteenth-century reforms to Mexico City’s public administration and its built environment. While New Spain’s Bourbon rulers took a number of steps to transform the physical and social worlds of Mexico City’s poor, the government never targeted the Baratillo—a site that was synonymous with crime, license, and plebeian sociability. To understand this apparent contradiction, the chapter examines the politics of urban reform in eighteenth-century Mexico City, which saw royal, viceregal, and local authorities jostle for control over urban public spaces.
Chapter 3, “Shadow Economics,” moves from an analysis of elite debates over urban renewal policies to an examination of the quotidian transactions that took place in and around the Baratillo in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The shadow economy linked the baratilleros to some of Mexico’s elite overseas merchants while pitting them against the capital’s artisan guilds and
