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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 events leading up to and following the 1692 riot, revealing the fissures that divided agents working at different 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 officials frequently complained 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 In his letter to Admiral Pez, Sigüenza y Góngora stated, on more than one occasion, that it was the people in the Baratillo who 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. The students snatched the prisoner from Suárez and set fire to the whipping post located in the market, which authorities had placed there “to terrorize the baratilleros,” nearly causing the whole plaza to go up in flames as it had four years earlier. The interim viceroy of New Spain, Juan Ortega y Montañéz, perhaps mindful of his predecessor’s absence during the 1692 riot (Galve supposedly hid in the Convent of San Francisco while the plaza burned), left the palace that evening to personally oversee the efforts to restore order in the market and apprehend the aggressors.⁵³

The incident produced a flurry of correspondence as officials attempted to determine what, exactly, had happened that day and who was responsible. The viceroy, who served simultaneously as archbishop of Mexico, became engaged in a heated, months-long exchange with the rector of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, Juan de Palacios. The viceroy was furious that a group of students preparing to join the clergy had acted with such “grave indecency”—men who in their hair and clothing styles “imitated their inferiors.”⁵⁴ Ortega y Montañéz complained that, “in their clothes and long hair these men looked secular, profane, anything but disciples.”⁵⁵ Given their appearance and comportment, how could Suárez and the alcaldes of the criminal court have known that their attackers were students? Ortega y Montañéz urged the rector to adopt stricter dress codes for his students to avoid this type of confusion in the future. He also reminded Palacios of the entrance requirements that he expected the rector to uphold: no one whose parents or grandparents had appeared before the Inquisition, nor anyone who had “any note of infamy” attached to his name could enter the university. Most importantly, blacks, mulattos, chinos, and slaves of any ethnicity were strictly prohibited so that “the evil races do not pervert those of a better nature.” The viceroy was careful to make an exception for Indians, “who, as free vassals of His Majesty can and should be admitted”—an opportunity that existed on paper but in practice was rarely extended.⁵⁶

As the investigation into the student uprising progressed in the spring of 1696, it became increasingly unclear whether the instigators were, in fact, students. Eyewitness testimony at first confirmed Suárez’s initial impression that his attackers attended the university, but other witnesses were less sure of the men’s identity. Both Juan de Morales, a Spanish iron vendor in the Baratillo, and Andrés Martínez, a free mulatto who also sold in the market, stated that they could not see well enough to say for sure whether the men were students. Martínez noted that the vagabonds who lingered around the Baratillo often “took the name of students in order to commit similar crimes … and get away with them.” Fernando Suárez, another vendor, echoed this last point, telling officers from the criminal court that he doubted the offenders attended the university because he had never before seen students “attempting to impede Justice,” as those who freed the prisoner had done on March 27.⁵⁷ Within a few months of the incident, Spanish authorities had determined that the offenders were not students after all, but were more likely vendors in the Baratillo.⁵⁸

The March 1696 uprising elicited a quick response from the colonial government. On March 30, three days after the incident, Viceroy Ortega y Montañéz reissued the order banning the Baratillo, this time printing a proclamation that was read aloud and posted around the city. The edict demanded that the Baratillo be “uprooted, banished, and exterminated” from the Plaza Mayor and everywhere else in the city, and that all baratilleros remove their stands from the plaza within two days or face the confiscation and burning of their merchandise. Any vendor who continued to conduct business after this period would now face the death penalty, a significantly harsher punishment than what Galve had ordered in 1689, and an extraordinary measure to prevent the reestablishment of a street market, given the Spanish government’s general aversion to capital punishment. Ortega y Montañéz also gave the taverns surrounding the Plaza Mayor two days to relocate to the adjacent Plaza Volador. The Plaza Mayor, apart from the merchants’ shops in the alcaicería that was then under construction, would serve from that point forward only for vendors of glass, gravestones (for the adjacent cemetery), and fruits and vegetables. Stands there would not be allowed to have roofs made of the reed matting that had helped spread the fire of 1692; they could only be covered by a canvas, and were forbidden from having sides of any kind (so authorities could see what was happening inside).⁵⁹ Ortega y Montañéz ordered the alcaldes del crimen to begin making regular rounds in the Plaza Mayor to ensure that “there is not the same amount of combustible material that can so quickly and effectively cause a fire.”⁶⁰

It is difficult to avoid reading a double meaning into these words, for in replacing the more “combustible” stalls of vendors selling used ironware and gold and silver trinkets, the viceroy was also taking steps to avoid the kind of social combustion that had left the palace partially in ruins a few years earlier. The incident of March 1696 made it all too clear to Spanish authorities that despite being located directly under their noses, the Plaza Mayor was still a chaotic and largely unsupervised bazaar, where colonial subjects of every class and ethnic background intermingled. The confusion over the identities of the men involved in the scuffle only reinforced the viceroy’s concern that in the Baratillo social and racial hierarchies dissolved and left in their place a great mass of people who were indistinguishable from one another. The backgrounds of the witnesses who testified in the 1696 case attest to the diverse composition of the market: Indians, mestizos, mulattos, and poor Spaniards all bought and sold in the Baratillo. Authorities viewed the mingling of students with other colonial subjects in public spaces with particular suspicion. Even before the 1692 riot, Church officials had prohibited anyone wearing a habit (including students) from entering the Baratillo.⁶¹ Then, just two days after the riot in Mexico City, students led an uprising in Guadalajara. And in 1693, the Crown issued a decree prohibiting Indians and students from meeting with one another.⁶² Upon learning of the 1696 uprising, King Charles II reissued many of the same orders from 1692, again focusing on the mingling of Indians and non-Indians in the center of the city and on the Baratillo’s continued existence as threats to public order. In the same breath, the Crown decreed that “the Indians who live dispersed in the center of the city and in the houses of Spaniards must return to their barrios … and that the concourse that is called the Baratillo cease completely.”⁶³ The king made clear that a “commerce so pernicious and prejudicial to good customs and the public cause” had no business occupying such a privileged site.⁶⁴

The instability Mexico City experienced in the 1690s could scarcely have come at a worse time for the Spanish Crown. By many historians’ reckoning, the end of the seventeenth century saw Spain at its weakest. Wounded by expensive European wars, uprisings in Spain, and pirate attacks along the coasts of its American possessions, including New Spain, the Spanish government was ill prepared to deal with a major rebellion in Mexico.⁶⁵ Those conditions created a palpable insecurity among Spanish elites in Mexico City. More than any other period before the outbreak of Miguel Hidalgo’s revolution in 1810, the years following the 1692 riot saw colonial authorities living in fear of a generalized Indian or casta rebellion. Besides the uprising in Guadalajara, in which the crowd threw stones at members of the Audiencia, a riot had also broken out in Tlaxcala, where six thousand Indians had sacked the municipal palace only days after the riot in Mexico City.⁶⁶

The situation was scarcely calmer four years later. Soon after the March 27, 1696, incident in the Baratillo, colonial officials learned of a meeting of potential conspirators against the Crown in the Jesús Nazareno Plaza. The Mexico City corregidor received word on April 30 that a group had congregated there to plan a revolt in the capital once the Spanish fleet had left Veracruz for Spain. More troubling still, officials also heard that Indians in the pueblos (indigenous villages) of San Juan and Santa Clara were hiding guns in their homes in preparation for the rebellion.⁶⁷ Viceroy Ortega y Montañéz responded by issuing a decree in May 1696 that prohibited any person, regardless of social status, from buying, selling, or carrying small arms in Mexico City.⁶⁸ Any place where a group of people, particularly individuals from different social or ethnic groups, congregated was a dangerous one. Market plazas, unique in their attraction for men and women from all walks of life, posed a particular threat. As François Rabelais, the sixteenth-century French humanist, had suggested a century earlier, the social mixing that occurred in the marketplace provided the ideal location for the concoction and dissemination of dangerous ideas.⁶⁹ The Baratillo, with its infamous combination of vagabonds, thieves, and frustrated artisans and peddlers of every racial background, was the perfect site for plotters to hatch their next rebellion.

The Baratillo represented everything that Spanish authorities feared in colonial society: the indiscriminate mixing of men and women from every class and calidad—many of whom engaged in illicit and immoral activities under the cover of the market’s jumble of stalls. Yet even the 1692 riot and the sweeping redesign of the Plaza Mayor markets that it precipitated did not lead to the elimination of the Baratillo. If anything, the market only became more vibrant in the aftermath of the riot. So why did it prove so difficult for authorities to eradicate a trade they all seemed to agree was a grave threat to the rule of law? Answering that question requires a deeper examination of the ways the Baratillo was embedded in Mexico City’s economy, politics, and society.

A PLACE TO REMEDY THEIR MISERY

When Mexico City residents awoke on March 30, 1696, three days after the incident with González de Castro, the Baratillo had disappeared from the Plaza Mayor. The market was far from vanquished, however. Just three days later, a new decree permitted used clothing vendors back in the plaza.⁷⁰ Though there are no other sources documenting the reestablishment of the Baratillo in the next few years, it was substantial enough by December 1700 that Francisco Cameros, the Plaza Mayor’s asentista, or lessee, had reorganized its vendors, putting sellers of ribbons and ruanes—a type of cotton cloth made in the city of Ruan, France—in the center area of the new alcaicería, leaving the market for second-hand goods in the Plaza Mayor itself.⁷¹ These twin Baratillos came to be known as the Baratillo Grande and the Baratillo Chico, and remained in those locations until the end of the eighteenth century. Despite several viceregal and royal decrees banning the market over the previous decade, the imposition of the death penalty for anyone who defied those orders, and hundreds of pages of correspondence dedicated to preventing its reestablishment, the Baratillo remained a fixture in the Plaza Mayor for nearly another hundred years—far outlasting Mexico’s Habsburg rulers. The Baratillo’s longevity stemmed not only from the perseverance of its vendors, whose livelihoods depended on their continued defiance of royal decrees, but also from more unlikely sources of support: members of the capital’s elite.

Throughout the Baratillo’s history, Mexico City residents’ disdain for the market was tempered by their sympathy for its vendors and customers. Those conflicting sentiments are apparent in the deliberations that took place in 1689, after the Crown asked Galve and the Audiencia for advice on what to do about the market. On November 14, 1689, the members of the Audiencia weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the Baratillo before ultimately deciding to disband it. The report opens by describing the market as a place where the poor could “remedy their misery” by selling their “little jewels and cheap trinkets.” It was an institution where, they observed, the “immense number of needy” in New Spain found recourse for their poverty.⁷² In a separate investigation in 1693, the Audiencia noted that “Indians and many others” bought and sold in the market each day, where stolen goods were available at irresistibly low prices. In other words, there was significant popular demand for the Baratillo’s offerings.⁷³

But the market also provided material benefits to middling and wealthier residents of Mexico City, and those connections were instrumental in the market vendors’ ability to continually defy eviction orders. In the summer of 1693, after Viceroy Galve had complained that previous decrees banning the Baratillo had merely fueled its growth, three officials on the criminal court sought to find out why those orders had proved so ineffective. The officials made a vague reference to the “many interested parties in this disorder and abuse.”⁷⁴ One of those men, the alcalde del crimen Gerónimo Chacón, clarified the meaning of that phrase in a subsequent letter to the Crown. He argued that the government needed to issue a decree prohibiting “any merchant who has an almacén [import warehouse], or store from selling linen, silk, thread, paper, or other goods to any baratillero,” or face a fine of one thousand pesos for each offense. In Chacón’s view, it was not only the city’s destitute who were sustaining the Baratillo but also some of its most elite merchants—only the wealthiest of whom owned an almacén. Those men were providing the barati­lleros with merchandise to sell on the street. Chacón also laid blame with the city’s master artisans who made “stirrups, brakes, spurs, candelabras, and other similar things.” By trading with vendors in the Baratillo, those artisans flouted colonial regulations that stipulated that artisans could sell their manufactures only from their own workshops.⁷⁵ Baratilleros also worked with ambulatory vendors. Chacón sought to ban all petty street vendors from the plaza, “because the buhoneros that are vulgarly called mercachifles on the street lend their hand to the baratilleros and mesilleros of the plaza.”⁷⁶ The Baratillo thus formed part of a commercial network that spanned from the highest echelons of Mexico City’s mercantile hierarchy to the lowest.

In redesigning the Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot, colonial—which is to say, royal—officials were unanimous in their desire to keep the Baratillo out of the plaza. But they were also cognizant of the challenges involved in realizing that goal. The ties between elite and petty vendors in the Plaza Mayor markets were substantial. Indeed, the cajoneros, or store owners, of the Plaza Mayor agreed to help finance the construction of the alcaicería in 1693 only if the local government allowed small traders to sell in the spaces between the cajones. Petty vendors—particularly those that sold fruits and vegetables—had long engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the cajoneros; the vendors paid rent to the cajoneros in exchange for a shaded space to sell their goods while the cajoneros benefited from both that rental income and the additional foot traffic the food vendors drew to their stores.⁷⁷

Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento also may have been reluctant to enforce the Crown’s ban on the Baratillo. Although no member of the Ayuntamiento seems to have spoken out in support of the market in the period immediately following the riot, the city council had previously defended the Baratillo when royal officials sought to shutter it. The Duke of Albuquerque, viceroy of New Spain from 1653 to 1660, convinced the Ayuntamiento to clear the Baratillo and other freestanding stalls from the Plaza Mayor in 1658, but only after offering the Ayuntamiento a small share of the royal tax on pulque sales in the city to make up for the lost rent. The arrangement lasted for only a decade.⁷⁸ Much of the baratilleros’ merchandise may have been stolen or otherwise illicit, but the vendors paid rent to the municipal government to ply their wares in the Plaza Mayor—and this was income the Ayuntamiento needed.

Following the destruction of the cajones and mesillas of the Plaza Mayor in the 1692 fire, local officials were scrambling to make up the lost revenue. Without the rental income from those businesses, the city was hemorrhaging more than ten thousand pesos per year.⁷⁹ Markets were by far the Ayuntamiento’s greatest source of revenue in the late seventeenth century: between 1682 and 1687, rent from puestos, mesillas, and cajones constituted more than half of the municipal government’s propios for that period.⁸⁰ So local officials may have resisted royal attempts to remove any rent-paying vendors from the Plaza Mayor. In the summer of 1693, the city’s corregidor (a royal official, but one who sat on the city council), Teobaldo Gorráez, pushed back against the Audiencia’s efforts to clear the plaza of all the mesilleros and buhoneros, arguing that the city simply could not afford to lose the rent those vendors paid to the Ayuntamiento. He also reminded the members of the Audiencia who sought to ban street vending altogether that “selling on the streets is done in Madrid and all great places.”⁸¹

Although local and royal officials initially seemed to agree on the need for a drastically redesigned Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot, that consensus masked deep and longstanding tensions between the Ayuntamiento and the Crown. The city council, dominated by American-born Creoles, was fiercely protective of its autonomy and its purview over local affairs. Public markets—particularly the ones located in the Plaza Mayor—were among the body’s most prized possessions because of the steady revenue they produced. The different branches of government in colonial Mexico City had very different visions and objectives for the city’s main square: while peninsular officials increasingly saw the space as a venue for exercising the power and authority of the Spanish Crown, local officials benefited from the heterodox commerce that filled the plaza and often resisted efforts to reform it. The baratilleros were not up against a unified colonial state but a highly fractious one, where official decrees concealed deep disagreements within and between governing institutions in Mexico City.

CONCLUSION

The 1692 riot spurred Spanish officials to readopt Hernán Cortés’s original vision for the colonial capital, enforcing ethnic and physical boundaries that miscegenation and the local economy had long since rendered irrelevant. They took advantage of the crisis the riot provoked to do more than simply reissue legislation aimed at keeping Indians and Spaniards apart from one another: they sought to reengineer the city’s principal public space. In the Plaza Mayor, where Indians, Spaniards, and castas and men and women of all social classes mixed indiscriminately, the failures of the two-republic model were glaring, and they had led to a frightening attack on colonial authority. Decades before their Bourbon successors sought to transform the city through far more ambitious public works projects, New Spain’s last Habsburg officials acted on a similar impulse to take control of a public space that, despite being located directly under their noses, lay beyond their authority. Spanish officials in the 1690s sought to reconstruct the Plaza Mayor as a site where they could effectively rule over a multiracial population, unencumbered by a maze of market stalls sheltering nefarious activities. They did so by building an ornate new marketplace for the shops of overseas merchants, organizing disorderly food stalls into neat rows, and banishing the Baratillo. Together, those projects represented an attempt to turn a social engineering project into a physical one—the first major effort to do so since the founding of the Spanish city in the 1520s.

Apart from the construction of the alcaicería, however, which stood in the city’s main square until 1843, none of those undertakings had any lasting impact. The Plaza Mayor food markets remained disorganized and vulnerable to fire throughout the eighteenth century, and the Baratillo’s absence from the plaza was short lived. While governments would continue, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to attempt to turn the Plaza Mayor into a more suitable site for elite consumption and the expression of royal power, those efforts faced opposition from elite and popular groups alike. The persistence of the Baratillo, in particular, highlights how little consensus there was behind urban renewal projects that sought to transform the city’s principal public spaces.