initiated the looting of the Plaza Mayor shops that night: “I have said that the zaramullos of the Baratillo accompanied [the Indians] from the moment they passed through the market with the india who pretended to be dead.” “While the Indians set the fire,” he continued, the zaramullos “began breaking down the doors and roofs [of the shops], which were very flimsy, and carrying away the cash and merchandise they found there.”37 The baratilleros had taken advantage of the protest to make away with what was not theirs.
Trial records offer further, albeit circumstantial, evidence that baratilleros were participants in the riot. The majority of those convicted for their involvement were artisans. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mexico City’s artisans simultaneously battled the Baratillo and sustained it, as the market provided an illegal outlet for selling manufactured goods in which both guild members and unaffiliated individuals participated. Indeed, one of the individuals colonial authorities identified as a leader of the riot, an Indian man named Joseph, was a hat maker whom other witnesses had seen selling in the Baratillo. In all, four tailors, seven or eight hat makers, and ten shoemakers were implicated in the riot. These were all professions with a significant presence in the Baratillo.38
The multiethnic composition of the riot, which Indians led but involved men and women of every caste, motivated colonial officials to realize the urban plan that Cortés had sought to impose on the ruins of Tenochtitlán nearly two centuries earlier. Galve ordered the city’s Indians “back” to their barrios, where many probably had never lived, and enforced sumptuary laws regulating Indians’ clothing that residents had similarly ignored for generations. His actions exemplified what Inga Clendinnen called the “chronic utopianism of Spanish colonial legislation”—Spaniards’ belief that they could shape American society through laws they had little ability to enforce.39 That the viceroy felt the need to delineate the boundaries of the traza, street-by-street, in his July 10, 1692, decree ordering Indians to relocate to the barrios suggests how little meaning that designation held for residents of Mexico City at the end of the seventeenth century.40 The impracticality of these measures did little to deter Galve; indeed, beyond enforcing imaginary boundaries, he sought to dramatically redesign the Plaza Mayor in order to limit the kinds of dangerous interactions that he believed had led to the uprising.
While the riot and the resulting fire caused extensive damage to the Plaza Mayor markets and the surrounding buildings, they also provided the government with a clean slate—an opportunity to re-create the plaza from scratch. A little more than a week after the riot, Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento, charged with carrying out the reconstruction, outlined a plan for rebuilding the Plaza Mayor that called for the construction of two rows of stores with iron doors similar to those that lined the plaza on its southern and western borders. The motivations for replacing the plaza’s market stalls with a new structure made of stone were fourfold: to reduce the risk of fire by replacing wooden stands with a more fire-resistant material; to improve the aesthetic appearance of the plaza, leaving it “free, spacious, uncluttered, and controlled”; to attract businesses that would increase tax revenues for the local government; and finally, to change the social composition of the vendors and customers who occupied the space.41 To achieve all of these goals, the first step was eliminating the Baratillo.
Although the fire of June 1692 had destroyed or badly damaged the stores of the plaza’s more established merchants, it had less effect on the Baratillo, where the more portable nature of its stands made them easier to replace. The market appears to have been humming only a month after the riot, and by the summer of 1693 authorities were complaining of an “incomprehensible number of baratilleros” peddling their wares in the plaza “at all hours of the day.”42 In July of that year, Viceroy Galve complained that previous orders for the Baratillo’s closure “have not led to the just and proper extirpation of the Baratillo but instead have seemed a motivation for its expansion.”43 In August of 1693, the alcalde del crimen Don Gerónimo Chacón noted that the situation had gotten so out of hand that a policeman had been killed for trying to enforce the ban on the market.44 Since previous decrees had had little effect in closing the Baratillo, authorities now believed that they could eliminate it by depriving it of its central location and replacing it with a market of a completely different nature.45
The project sought to turn the Plaza Mayor into a site worthy of its location at the center of Spanish power in North America. To that end, on December 30, 1694, King Charles II ordered the construction of an imposing new structure, an alcaicería (later known as the Parián), on the western side of the square—a much more ambitious undertaking than the Ayuntamiento’s original plan.46 The new stores, or cajones, would be large enough for the merchants to live in them with their families, which, the Crown believed, would help reduce the risk of fire. The greatest advantage, however, would come from the replacement of the Baratillo with a more reputable commercial institution. With merchants taking the place of baratilleros, “the Plaza will become more beautiful, safer, and the rents more stable.”47
Half a century before New Spain’s Bourbon rulers embarked on a series of sweeping urban reforms in the capital, Spain’s last Habsburg ruler, a man historians have described as sickly and incompetent—anything but Enlightened—sought to achieve some of the same goals.48 The 1694 plan would transform the Plaza Mayor, turning chaos into order and a site of plebeian sociability into one fit for the city’s respectable classes.49 In his letter to Admiral Pez, Sigüenza y Góngora called the Plaza Mayor an “ill-founded village” and a “pigsty.” The Plaza Mayor, in his estimation, was no place for improvised markets for foodstuffs and second-hand goods: “Due to bad government, such stands have been permitted there (which, by nature, should be free and clear), making it so easily combustible.”50 A painting of the Plaza Mayor that Viceroy Galve commissioned before leaving office in 1696 sought to capture that vision—depicting a marketplace organized in neat rows and an alcaicería where well-dressed men and women could shop in comfort and style (see figure 1). Local and royal officials seemed to agree that Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor could no longer host such a disorderly and heterogeneous commerce. But removing the baratilleros and the other itinerant and semipermanent vendors from the main square would prove more difficult than those men imagined.
FIGURE 1. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Vista de la Plaza Mayor de México, ca. 1695. In this depiction of the Plaza Mayor, damage to the palace from the 1692 fire is visible in the background. The alcaicería, later known as the Parián, is in the foreground. Market stalls fill the Plaza Mayor between the alcaicería and the palace. The dating of this painting is somewhat of a mystery. Scholars believe it was commissioned and painted under Viceroy Galve, whose term ended in 1696. Yet it depicts a completed alcaicería, which was not, in fact, finished until 1703. Iván Escamilla González and Paula Mues Orts argue that Galve probably used the painting to show the king a transformed plaza, featuring a completed alcaicería, a palace in the process of reconstruction, and market stalls organized in orderly rows. It was a vision still unrealized when Galve left office in February 1696. See Escamilla González and Mues Orts, “Espacio real, espacio pictórico y poder: ‘Vista de la Plaza Mayor de México’ de Cristóbal de Villalpando,” in La imagen política, ed. Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico City: UNAM, 2006): 177–204.
THE PLAZA ERUPTS AGAIN
On March 27, 1696, just before sunset, the alcalde del crimen Don Manuel Suárez Muñoz was attempting to remove vagabonds from the Baratillo, which continued to operate in the Plaza Mayor despite the earlier prohibitions.51 Inside the market, one of Suárez’s deputies spotted a man who had helped a prisoner escape from jail a few days earlier. As the deputies took this suspect, one Francisco González de Castro, into their custody, some students who were in the Baratillo demanded with “immodest voices, almost like plebes” that Suárez and his men let González go, for he too was a student.52 From there, the situation deteriorated.
