Black Market Capital

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Andrew Konove. Black Market Capital

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Black Market Capital

URBAN POLITICS AND THE SHADOW ECONOMY IN MEXICO CITY

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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 shopkeepers, who saw them as disloyal competition. In reconstructing these relationships, the chapter reveals the 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.

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