that the Baratillo was the city’s main distribution point for stolen jewelry, clothing, iron tools, and virtually anything else that had resale value. The viceroy Count of Salvatierra’s 1644 prohibition of the Baratillo describes how the market offered a venue for slaves and servants to easily dispose of the items they stole from the houses of their masters and employers, undetected by authorities.22 There, vendors would pass off those goods to witting or unwitting customers at a fraction of their “true value.” Or, as Ibáñez noted sometimes occurred, “the owner would find the thief selling what he had taken” from his victim.23 The authorities struggled to apprehend the culprits who traded “furtively” in these goods; at first sight of officials, they would simply hide them underneath their cloaks.24
The presence of vagabonds in the Baratillo only added to authorities’ suspicions that the marketplace was a den of criminal activity. As men who lacked a specific trade or occupation that anchored them in a particular community, vagabonds were a source of anxiety for all European governments in the early modern period. In sixteenth-century New Spain, the Crown saw vagrancy as a threat to the precarious control it exerted over its vast new possessions. To assert its sovereignty over the subject populations of the Americas, Spain needed to establish a permanent settler population. The Crown passed legislation, to little effect, encouraging Spaniards to take up farming in order to create a more lasting attachment to the land.25 Royal officials worried about what the conquistadors would do once they were no longer needed as soldiers. The single men that the conquest had attracted, if they could not be lured into settling down to work the land, were apt to become rootless and engage in pernicious and exploitative relationships—both economic and sexual—with indigenous people. Thus, although the Crown also worried about indigenous mobility—creating reducciones to concentrate Indian populations in new towns—Spanish vagabonds presented a special problem for colonial authorities. Not only did they challenge the permanence of the colonial project; their mixing with Indians and Africans also challenged the coherence of the “two republics” system that Spain had implemented to govern its subjects.
TWO REPUBLICS CONVERGE
The Spanish established the separate república de españoles and república de indios in the mid-sixteenth century in order to protect the indigenous population from the abuses of Spaniards, Africans, and mixed-bloods and to better provide Indians with a Christian education. Indians were to be governed by their own institutions, though in all cases overseen by Spanish officials and ultimately subject to the authority of the Real Audiencia (the highest court in New Spain) and the viceroy. In Mexico City, a physical segregation accompanied the legal distinction between the Spanish and Indian republics. The Crown stipulated that the Spanish population concentrate in a thirteen-square-block area surrounding the Plaza Mayor, called the traza, while the indigenous population would reside in barrios outside the traza, administered by semiautonomous Indian governments.26 This segregation proved impossible to enforce, however, since Spanish businesses and households depended on indigenous labor and often required their employees to live in their places of work. Some Spaniards also chose to live in the barrios.27
Miscegenation created additional problems. To address the rapidly growing population of mixed-race offspring of Indians, Spaniards, and Africans, the Crown developed the sistema de castas, a hierarchical ordering of colonial subjects according to their proportion of Spanish blood. At its height, the system identified over forty racial categories, though in practice only eight or so of these saw widespread use: español (Spaniard), indio (Indian), mestizo (offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian), castizo (Spaniard-mestizo), negro (of African descent), mulato (Spaniard-African), morisco (mulatto-Spaniard), and chino (Asian).28 Yet the word sistema—system—overstates the coherence of those efforts, and recent scholarship has emphasized just how fluid those categories were and how inconsistently colonial authorities applied them.29 The criteria for belonging to these groups were subjective: dress, occupation, and behavior could be as significant as skin color or lineage in determining who fell into which category. While the Inquisition often looked to parish records to determine the race of an accused subject, local priests tended to rely on the self-declarations of parents when composing birth registries.30 Over time, miscegenation only made distinguishing between the different groups more difficult. Even if these racial categories were porous and negotiable, however, they nonetheless represented an ideal that Spanish authorities clung to: a society in which they could recognize, and appropriately categorize, all of their subjects.
The Plaza Mayor markets, which brought wealthy Spanish overseas merchants, indigenous food vendors, and baratilleros of every background into the same space, defied that vision. Along with the Baratillo, a nighttime market in the plaza known as the tianguillo aroused particular concern among local authorities. In 1680, the Mexico City corregidor worried about the dangerous mix of people that was meeting in this nocturnal marketplace, which “brought together runaway slaves, mestizos, Indians, and even Spaniards into a concourse with women … and in many cases it was not possible to tell whether they were single or married.” The Plaza Mayor markets were supposed to close at eight in the evening, but this one routinely went until ten or eleven, providing cover for many “offenses against God.” There were “regular meetings of scandalous women and men carrying weapons.”31 The Baratillo attracted a similarly varied group of people. In virtually every judicial proceeding involving the market, the subjects involved included Indians, Spaniards, and people of mixed race. Authorities frequently referenced the market’s diverse composition, describing the “gente de todas calidades” (people of all qualities) that gathered there as evidence of the threat it posed to the social peace.32
Although the mixing of races and genders in the Plaza Mayor markets unnerved Spanish authorities in Mexico City, for most of the colonial era, they made little effort to stop it. The local economy was too reliant on cross-cultural exchanges—with non-Spaniards involved in virtually all aspects of commerce and production—for officials to keep those groups separate from one another. In the wake of the 1692 riot, however, that is precisely what Spanish officials sought to do.
THE BARATILLO AND THE 1692 RIOT
In the months following the riot, Spanish officials, led by Viceroy Galve, conducted an exhaustive investigation into its causes. Galve believed the root problem lay with the comingling of Indians with Spaniards, Africans, and people of mixed race in the traza.33 Several weeks after the riot, Galve formed a committee of parish priests, which also included Sigüenza y Góngora, to analyze “the difficulties that result from Indians living in the center of the city.” The report found that the practice “has impeded the order of the city and the governance of its natives.” The priests wrote that, “hidden in back patios and recesses of these houses, where it is not easy to find them, these Indians live in the company of mestizos and vagabonds, secretly scheming such savage iniquities as those that have been recently carried out.” In the words of one parish priest, the “bad customs and idleness” of the mestizos, mulattos, and Africans had rubbed off on Mexico City’s Indians by living in close proximity to them. The priests wanted to be able to identify their indigenous parishioners to ensure that they fulfilled their obligations to the Church.34 For Galve and the colonial government, however, distinguishing between colonial subjects of different racial backgrounds was important in its own right. It was essential for the proper policing of the city. Galve gave Mexico City’s Indians twenty days to return to their barrios and threatened any resident of the traza who let Indians into his home with a hefty 100-peso fine and two years of exile from the city.35
Galve’s committee believed that the ethnically heterogeneous Baratillo had provided the spark for the riot. Both Sigüenza y Góngora and another, anonymous, witness suggested that the crowd of Indians that had gathered in the Plaza Mayor only became violent after it passed through the Baratillo. Under interrogation, the witness described how the “contemptible people of the Baratillo—mulattos, mestizos, and other zaramullos” joined forces with the Indians carrying the purportedly dead woman on their shoulders.36
