centrality of the Baratillo’s commerce to the late-colonial urban economy. It also illustrates the ways that economics and politics intertwined in the market, as vendors pursued multiple strategies to protect their businesses from outside threats.
Chapter 4, “The Dictator, the Ayuntamiento, and the Baratillo,” takes readers into the national period with a focus on a largely forgotten urban renewal campaign that the nineteenth-century strongman Antonio López de Santa Anna and the Mexico City Ayuntamiento undertook in the early 1840s. Removing the Baratillo was central to Santa Anna’s ambitious, if short-lived, reform agenda. He encountered resistance, however, from baratilleros who pushed back by writing petitions and airing their grievances in the Mexico City press—decades before historians have found popular actors engaging in Mexico’s public sphere. The episode shows how the laws and the rhetoric of republicanism gave vendors new tools to defend their businesses against government policies that threatened them.
Chapter 5, “Free Trading in the Restored Republic,” focuses on an 1872 court case that divided vendors in the Baratillo and pitted them against the Mexico City Ayuntamiento. The case drew the attention of some of Mexico’s most prominent citizens, including Vicente García Torres, publisher of El Monitor Republicano, the leading newspaper of the era, and reached Mexico’s Supreme Court, sparking a constitutional crisis. The case shows the improbable range of actors in Mexico City who had stakes in the Baratillo and the degree to which the market’s vendors succeeded in turning a debate over its future into a national conversation about individual rights and the rule of law.
The sixth chapter, “Order, Progress, and the Black Market,” examines the Baratillo’s awkward fit within Porfirian Mexico City, when the country’s autocratic president Porfirio Díaz sought to modernize the nation and its capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the events that led to the Baratillo’s relocation to the neighborhood of Tepito, in 1902. Facing the threat of the market’s closure, the baratilleros bargained with the municipal government, reaching a compromise to move to Tepito—a location the vendors proposed themselves. The chapter contributes to recent scholarship that revises earlier depictions of the Porfiriato as a monolithic dictatorship, emphasizing instead the multiple ways that Mexico’s government and citizens maintained a tense and unequal peace for more than thirty years.
The epilogue, “The Baratillo and Tepito,” briefly traces the intertwined histories of the Baratillo and the neighborhood of Tepito in the twentieth century. Like many other decisions regarding the Baratillo, its move to Tepito was supposed to be temporary. Yet the market remained, and over the decades it grew into a sprawling marketplace for second-hand, stolen, contraband, and pirated goods that consumed the neighborhood. By the middle of the century, Mexico City newspapers rarely referred to the Baratillo by name; instead, they used the same disparaging language that observers had traditionally employed to describe the Baratillo for the neighborhood itself. Today, Tepito is the most famous barrio in Mexico, with a distinctive oppositional identity that is inextricably tied to its role as the epicenter of Mexico City’s black market.
ONE
A Pernicious Commerce
The Baratillo shall be eradicated, banished, and exterminated so that there is not a single baratillero left, under penalty of death.
JUAN ORTEGA Y MONTAÑÉZ,
Viceroy of New Spain, March 30, 1696
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 8, 1692, a line formed outside of Mexico City’s municipal granary. Hundreds of people had gathered there in hopes of buying corn, but there was not nearly enough. After a poor harvest, the city was suffering from an acute grain shortage. Tempers began to flare, so officials allowed some of those waiting outside to enter the granary to verify that it was empty. Inside, an Indian woman fell to the ground after she fainted or, according to other accounts, an official struck her. Members of the crowd, comprised mainly of Indians but also castas—people of mixed race—and some Spaniards, picked the woman up and carried her on their shoulders through the city’s Plaza Mayor. Claiming she had died from her injuries (a fact elite observers later disputed), they went to the home of the city’s corregidor, or local magistrate, demanding justice, and then on to the other seats of authority that ringed the plaza. They walked to the home of the archbishop, who refused to see them, and then to the royal palace, where, finding the viceroy not at home, they began pelting the building with stones and chanting “Death to the viceroy and the corregidor!”
According to the most famous account of the riot, by the Creole intellectual Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the crowd then carried the woman through the Baratillo, the sprawling market for second-hand goods located in the middle of the plaza. They did so, according to Sigüenza y Góngora, “in order to incite the zaramullos”—the scoundrels who congregated there—and draw them into the fight. With help from the zaramullos, the protest devolved into a full-fledged riot as more than ten thousand people, by Sigüenza y Góngora’s estimation, filled the square. Soon the rioters were carting matting from the reed-roofed market stalls to set ablaze in front of the palace door. As the flames spread through the building, the rioters set fire to the Ayuntamiento, the seat of municipal government, and then the markets and shops located in and around the plaza. Looters, led by people from the Baratillo, broke the locks on the stores and took whatever merchandise they could get their hands on before the fire consumed them. By the time it was all over, the riot had taken the lives of at least fifty people and caused more than three million pesos in damage.1
The riot, one of only two major uprisings in Mexico City during the colonial era, reverberated through the government. Officials responded with a broad crackdown. They executed fifteen people for their participation in the riot—an extraordinary use of capital punishment in a society where authorities preferred more utilitarian punishments.2 They shuttered the city’s pulquerias (taverns that served pulque, a Mesoamerican alcoholic beverage); ordered Indians living in the city center to return to the barrios, the peripheral neighborhoods designated for native residences; and prohibited Indians from wearing Spanish clothing.3 And they banned the Baratillo. Officials had long complained that the market’s maze of improvised stalls provided cover to criminals. Now, officials worried, those spaces were fomenting acts of subversion—a threat to Spanish rule itself.
In the weeks following the riot, officials with the Spanish Crown and Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento began to formulate plans to dramatically reengineer the Plaza Mayor, a design, they hoped, that would prevent a repeat of the events of June 8.4 Removing the Baratillo was central to authorities’ vision of the redesigned plaza. The Baratillo’s role in the explosion of violence that June evening lent a new sense of urgency to the government’s efforts to stamp out the trade, which authorities had banned at least three times even before the riot. Indeed, when Spain’s King Charles II approved plans for a new merchant exchange in the Plaza Mayor, he did so in hopes that “with the greater concourse of merchants, the excesses … of the zaramullos of the Baratillo will be reined in.”5 Merchants would replace vendors, and respectable subjects would supplant thieves.
The project represented the Crown’s first concerted attempt to alter the physical design and social composition of Mexico City’s main square since the 1520s, when the Spanish began construction of a new city atop the ruins of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. That undertaking, like the other measures the colonial government adopted immediately after the riot, enjoyed limited and fleeting success. Spanish authorities failed to prevent the Baratillo from returning to the plaza, where it would remain until the end of the eighteenth century. And the markets of the Plaza Mayor continued to attract vendors and consumers of all stripes—from the humblest to the most privileged. Their plan failed because Mexico City elites were not of one mind about the Baratillo, or the Plaza Mayor markets in general. This chapter examines the
