levels of government in the viceregal capital. Those tensions benefited the vendors of the Baratillo, helping them to weather an effort by Spain’s highest authorities to banish their commerce.
THE PLAZA MAYOR AND ITS MARKETS
After the Spanish and their indigenous allies conquered Tenochtitlán in 1521, Hernán Cortés ordered a Spanish plaza constructed in the footprint of the city’s ceremonial center. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Spanish gradually replaced the indigenous structures that ringed the square with their own. On the east side of the plaza, Cortés built his residence, Las Casas Nuevas, on the ruins of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma’s palace. The Crown later purchased that property from Cortés’s son Martín and converted the building into the viceregal palace. In 1532, the Spanish constructed the Ayuntamiento on the south side of the plaza behind the main canal leading out of the city.6 On the northern edge of the plaza, Cortés ordered the city’s cathedral raised on the site where the Great Temple of the Mexica (the ethnic group that ruled Tenochtitlán and dominated the Aztec Empire) had stood.7
Although the Mexica ceremonial center, with its temples, palaces, and rectilinear shape, provided the template for the Spaniards’ Plaza Mayor, it lacked one element that became central to the Spanish plaza: a marketplace. Tenochtitlán, like its sister city Tlatelolco, possessed a large and vibrant marketplace. However, that market was located on the southwestern side of the city, not in the ceremonial center.8 In Spain, however, a town’s central plaza had long doubled as administrative center and marketplace.9 Situating the marketplace within eyesight of local authorities made it easier to oversee.10 The placement also offered fiscal benefits: the Spanish plaza was a municipal space, owned by the local government, where the ayuntamiento would charge rent to market vendors and shopkeepers and use that revenue to fund its basic functions. With this purpose in mind, in 1527 Spain’s King Charles I gave six solares (house lots) to the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City, established five years earlier, so that it could build a consistory, jail, meat market, and shops. The Ayuntamiento subsequently took control of the portales (archways) in front of the houses that lined the west side of the plaza in order to build shops there as well, again for the purpose of generating tax revenue.11 This space came to be known as the Portal de Mercaderes and housed many of the city’s finest shops throughout the colonial period. We do not know when, precisely, vendors of food staples and basic household goods began to fill the Plaza Mayor. That transition appears to have occurred gradually, over the course of the sixteenth century, as Spaniards slowly assumed control over quotidian aspects of local governance like food distribution, which had remained in indigenous hands for decades after the conquest.12
MAP 1. Plaza Mayor, 1596. Based on the 1596 rendering, Plaza Mayor de la ciudad de México y de los edificios y calles adyacentes, located in Spain’s Archivo General de Indias. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, AGI, MP-México, 47. Map created by Bill Keller.
By the early seventeenth century, however, so many vendors had congregated in the Plaza Mayor that Spanish authorities feared they were sowing chaos. In 1609, the viceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco, complained that buhoneros, or ambulatory vendors, were crowding the square and leading to “much disorder,” leaving it utterly “without policing.” Velasco charged the city’s corregidor and two representatives from the Ayuntamiento with collecting rent from the vendors—money that would accrue to the municipal government. He made this arrangement possible by transferring ownership of the Plaza Mayor from the Crown to the Ayuntamiento. The viceroy’s decree, which King Philip III sanctioned in 1611, ended the practice of granting royal licenses to individual mesilleros—the petty merchants who set up tables in the central square—and gave the local government the authority to charge vendors rent so that it could augment “the small quantity of propios [income-producing municipal properties] that this city had” and help pay for “the expenses of fiestas and other things that are offered every year” in the city.13 Street vendors were now the responsibility of the municipal government, not the Crown.
This seemingly mundane bureaucratic transfer had significant ramifications. Rent from the Plaza Mayor markets became the bedrock of the Ayuntamiento’s annual budget, and members of the city council became fiercely protective of the site. Yet Crown officials, it turned out, were not willing to surrender full control of the most prominent public space in the viceregal capital to local authorities and continued to dictate how they wanted the plaza used. From this point forward, the Plaza Mayor served as both a venue for the performance of royal power—through public celebrations, Inquisition trials, and executions—and a cash cow for the local government. Those competing roles created tensions between the local and royal governments that endured throughout the colonial era.
When, precisely, the Baratillo became part of the Plaza Mayor’s commerce is unclear. There does not appear to have been a precedent for this type of second-hand market in Tenochtitlán prior to the arrival of the Spaniards.14 Baratillos did exist, however, in Madrid. In the second half of the sixteenth century, there was a baratillo in that city’s Plaza Mayor and in other plazas around the city.15 The first evidence of Mexico City’s Baratillo surfaces in a decree that banned the market, in 1635. That document, however, did not survive, and we know of its existence only because a file from the end of the seventeenth century refers to it.16 The oldest surviving source dates to 1644. This, too, was an order for the Baratillo to disband, or at least for its principal activity of the period—selling ironware—to cease.17 The Baratillo’s history, then, seems to parallel the growth of other forms of commerce in the Plaza Mayor—beginning, perhaps, as early as the second half of the sixteenth century and flourishing in the seventeenth, as the Spanish gradually solidified their control over the production and distribution of basic goods in the local economy. It comprised one section of the sprawling market complex in the plaza that was populated by semi-enclosed wooden stalls with thatched roofs (cajones), smaller, open-air puestos, portable tables (mesillas), and ambulatory vendors known as buhoneros or mercachifles. The impermanent nature of the Baratillo’s stands and tables meant that it probably migrated to different locations in the plaza over the course of the seventeenth century.
By the 1680s, the Baratillo had become a major problem for Spanish officials. Its reputation for lawlessness fanned fears that crime in Mexico City was spiraling out of control. It even drew the attention of King Charles II.18 On August 31, 1688, the king sent a letter to the incoming viceroy of New Spain, the Count of Galve, asking for his recommendation on whether the government should permanently disband the Baratillo. A letter that Simón Ibáñez, an alcalde del crimen, or judge on Mexico City’s highest criminal court, had sent to the king a year earlier had prompted the inquiry. Ibáñez painted the Baratillo as a grave threat to public welfare. He argued that the tolerance that previous viceroys had extended toward the baratilleros needed to cease, because the market was providing refuge for “idle people and vagabonds” every day of the year, even on the most solemn holidays. Ibáñez urged his superiors to ban the Baratillo immediately to stop further crimes before they occurred.19 On November 19, 1689, the viceroy rendered his decision, ordering that: “No person of any state or quality, on any day of the year, may attend said Baratillo, nor sell, trade, or contract any good that until now has been bought there, whether new or used, or of any other sort, nor can they do so with the pretext of selling any of the adornments … chairs, blankets, stirrups … or jewels that were typically furnished there.”20 The consequences for those caught violating the ban were steep: confiscation of their wares, one hundred lashes for the first offense, two hundred for the second, and deportation to the Philippines for six years of hard labor for the third. As for the Indians who sold “obras de sus manos” (handmade goods), whom the criminal court had recommended be allowed to remain in the Baratillo, Galve banned them from selling there as well—under punishment of forced servitude in the city’s obrajes, or textile workshops.21 No one, regardless of race or ethnicity, could attend this market.
Colonial
