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TWO

The Baratillo and

the Enlightened City

There is in the Plaza of Mexico a traffic prohibited by law … that is so problematic that ending it has eluded me…. I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it.

THE DUKE OF LINARES, Viceroy of New Spain, to his successor, the Duke of Arión, on disbanding the Baratillo (1716)

We live in more freedom than in Geneva.

“ORDENANZAS DEL BARATILLO,” Ordinance 2

THE “ORDENANZAS DEL BARATILLO” was a legal code for a world turned upside down. Its pseudonymous author, Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache, describes the Baratillo marketplace as a college of mischief, where “more than four thousand student-vagabonds” congregate each day to receive instruction from the “doctors in the faculty of trickery.” There, attendees “dress, eat, play, and procreate using only their own devices, lacking any home or family besides the tepacherías and pulquerías … of the city.”¹ According to the “Ordenanzas,” the vendors, customers, and hangers-on who gathered in the Baratillo could do exactly as they pleased, and right under the noses of the highest religious and secular authorities in New Spain. In this telling, the Baratillo represented all that had gone wrong with Spain’s colonial project in Mexico, where racial and social hierarchies had dissolved into thin air, producing “so many and such distinct castes and tongues that there is more confusion in this kingdom than in the Tower of Babel.” It was a place that inverted colonial hierarches, where plebeians became nobles, and nobles, plebeians; where mixed-race castas were in charge and Spaniards suffered institutionalized discrimination. The rulers had become the ruled.²

In the Age of Reason, the Baratillo was its antithesis. “We are not perfectly rational,” Chreslos Jache’s baratilleros proclaimed, “or even people at all, but animals from India that very closely resemble man, like a portrait of him.” Though the “Ordenanzas” were a work of fiction, they spoke to real anxieties among colonial authorities. The Baratillo’s thicket of improvised stands and portable tables defied any logical organization, challenging reformers’ attempts to tame the Plaza Mayor and transform the viceregal capital into a model for Enlightenment urban planning. In the eighteenth century, new ideas about the city crisscrossed the Atlantic World, and comfort, cleanliness, order, functionality, and above all utility became the guiding principles for urban public administration. European writers and architects of the era, applying the work of the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) to cities, saw the metropolis as a living being in which the free circulation of air, water, and people was necessary to keep the body alive and healthy.³ Under the Bourbon dynasty, which assumed control of the Spanish Crown after the death of King Charles II in 1700, New Spain’s viceroys adopted these ideas and tried to implement them in Mexico City.⁴ They pursued projects such as lighting and paving the city’s streets and plazas, straightening and extending streets beyond the ordered grid of the central traza, and removing animal and human waste from public thoroughfares to facilitate the flow of people and goods through the city.⁵ Officials also sought to reorganize Mexico City’s public market system, particularly its main market complex in the Plaza Mayor. Those efforts culminated in the early 1790s when the Count of Revillagigedo II, the most ambitious of New Spain’s Bourbon viceroys, removed the food markets from the plaza in order to transform the square into a plaza de armas. In Revillagigedo’s vision of the city, the main square was as a venue for the performance of royal power, not for the quotidian commerce of the poor.

Despite the Baratillo’s seeming incompatibility with eighteenth-century visions of the city, the market attracted relatively little attention from royal officials in this era. Despite the Crown’s furious efforts to disband the Baratillo in the late seventeenth century, the market continued to operate in the Plaza Mayor throughout the eighteenth century, before Revillagigedo forced it, along with all other semipermanent market stalls, from the square in 1790. But that decision did not spell the end of the Baratillo, either. The market’s vendors, with the blessing of the local government, simply reconstituted the market a few blocks away. Why, then, did Bourbon reformers, in their efforts to transform Mexico City into an exemplar of rational urban planning, not set their sights on such a glaring locus of irrationality?

The Baratillo survived the Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century, in part, because Mexico City’s elites were deeply ambivalent about it.⁶ While many elites certainly shared Chreslos Jache’s view that the Baratillo represented Mexico City’s worst elements, others saw in the Baratillo a lively bazaar that served the needs of a diverse population. Government officials were similarly divided: some complained about the robberies and other crimes the market seemed to breed while others noted the Baratillo’s fiscal benefits for the Ayuntamiento (the vendors may have been trading in stolen goods, but most paid rent to the city for their stands), or simply accepted its existence as a necessary evil. In an era of government activism, authorities’ approach to the city’s thieves’ market was characterized more by inaction than regulatory zeal.

Colonial authorities’ ambivalence toward the Baratillo during the eighteenth century forces us to reconsider some longstanding assumptions about the Bourbon Reforms in Mexico City. The prevailing view posits that in the eighteenth century colonial elites sought to control the urban masses by instituting new rules and embarking on ambitious public works projects aimed at changing popular behaviors. According to this interpretation, authorities transformed the social geography of the city and helped create antagonistic new identities between elites and plebeians.⁷ Focusing on the implementation of those plans, however, rather than on their design alone, reveals that Mexico City’s elites were far from united behind them. Those projects encountered resistance not just from street vendors and other popular actors, as historians have previously shown; they also provoked fierce opposition from local elites. For reasons ranging from the personal to the political, those individuals opposed the broader urban renewal program that successive Spanish viceroys sought to implement. There was no consensus on the part of elites about what an Enlightened Mexico City would look like, or on what role the Baratillo would have in it.⁸

Nor did the colonial state pursue a singular agenda when it came to urban reform. In Mexico, colonial government was characterized by poorly defined and overlapping jurisdictions, personal animosities, and tensions between American-born Creoles and peninsular Spaniards.⁹ The friction between the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City and the Spanish Crown was particularly intense. The Ayuntamiento had long enjoyed significant autonomy, and its members zealously guarded their purview over local affairs. Bourbon reformers who sought to shore up the Crown’s control over its American colonies and turn the capital of Spain’s wealthiest overseas colony into a showcase capital of Enlightened urban planning attempted to curtail those freedoms, and they intervened with increasing frequency in the Ayuntamiento’s business. The Baratillo, which stood in the most important public space in Spain’s most important American city, found itself at the center of those long-simmering tensions.

Explaining why the Baratillo, a notoriously retrograde institution, survived the Bourbons’ modernizing reforms thus requires taking a closer look at the urban politics of eighteenth-century Mexico City, particularly the politics of the street. This chapter, in examining the Bourbon Reforms from the perspective of the Baratillo and the other Plaza Mayor markets, shows that the city’s streets and plazas were not simply sites where “the state and the common people clashed,” as historians have often argued, but venues that fostered alliances and rivalries that often transcended class lines.¹⁰ As Mexico City’s local and metropolitan elites battled for control over the urban built environment, local officials made common cause with vendors in the city’s most notorious thieves’ market. Those vendors did not sit on the sidelines as the Crown and the Ayuntamiento debated their future. Their actions influenced the outcome of those decisions and helped ensure that the Baratillo would remain part of the urban landscape in Mexico City long after Bourbon rule had ended.

THE BARATILLO AND ITS CRITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Despite the efforts of the Habsburg monarchy to eliminate the Baratillo in the 1690s, the market remained in Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor throughout most of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the century, the Baratillo had grown into two distinct markets, with one area, known as the Baratillo Grande, occupying the center of the alcaicería, which locals came to call the Parián (after the Chinese-run mercantile district in Manila that it supposedly resembled), and another, the Baratillo Chico, in the plaza itself. A work by Juan de Viera, the administrator of Mexico City’s Colegio de San Ildefonso, completed in 1778, offers the best depiction of the two Baratillos. He describes the Baratillo Chico, also known as the “Baratillo de los Muchachos,” as a place that offered just about any “curiosity” one could imagine—from keys to knives to little bells—and most of all, used clothes. There were hat sellers, stocking sellers, tanners, and “Indian guitar-makers who sold instruments to other Indians.”¹¹ In José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez’s 1769 map of the city, the Baratillo Chico appears just outside the Parián, though it may have migrated to different areas of the plaza over time (see figure 2).

FIGURE 2. Detail of José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Plano de la Ymperial México con la nueva distribución de territorios parroquiales, 1769. Oriented toward the west, this map shows the two “Varatillos” in the eighteenth century: the Baratillo Grande, in the center patio of the Parián, and the Baratillo Chico in the Plaza Mayor, directly outside the Parián. Colección Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City.

Composed of small jacales, or huts, in the central patio of the Parián, the Baratillo Grande offered a similarly broad range of merchandise as the Baratillo Chico, though with a greater selection of upscale items. Viera describes the clocks, glasses, “thousands of things made of silver,” swords, shields, firearms, harnesses, books, and “the finest fabrics” that one found there. Two of the aisles on the outer ring of the market housed shoe sellers who offered footwear “for both plebeians and the most polished people.”¹² That the Baratillo Grande sold wares for both wealthy and poorer consumers, and appears to have sold new in addition to used goods, means that at times it is difficult to separate it from the Parián itself in the historical record. Indeed, in many places, the Parián is referred to as the “Parián del Baratillo”—a combination that joined a term derived from the word “cheap” with the name of the city’s high-end emporium for imported goods from Asia and Europe.¹³ The juxtaposition speaks to the heterogeneity of the Plaza Mayor’s commerce, where, as one travel writer observed: “one sees two diametrically opposed extremes: supreme wealth and supreme poverty.”¹⁴ Despite the differences between the Baratillo Grande and Chico, relatively few writers in the eighteenth century distinguished between the two.

Although Viera viewed the Baratillo as a colorful bazaar that offered something for everyone, other observers saw something more sinister. Some, like the author of the “Ordenanzas,” saw the Baratillo as a glaring example of the failures of New Spain’s sistema de castas, where miscegenation had created a vast mixed-race underclass that threatened the social stability of the city and viceroyalty. The author’s 377 “ordinances” depict an alternate universe where the castas reigned and the gachupines—a pejorative term for Spaniards—were ostracized. This perversion of colonial society had its own police, a Real Audiencia, and lawyers, doctors, and clergy. The Baratillo even had its own racial classification system, an inversion of the sistema de castas that mirrored Mexico’s monetary denominations. The system included the categories of half-Spaniard, quarter-Spaniard, tlaco de español (one-eighth Spaniard), and two, four, and eight cacaos of Spaniard. Here, Chreslos Jache satirizes the colonial monetary system, which included both silver coins (pesos and reales) and informal tokens (tlacos) and cacao beans, and suggests the racialized terms in which colonial subjects thought about money. Tlacos and cacao beans were seen as the currency of the multiracial and indigenous underclass, while the larger-denomination peso formed part of an ostensibly Spanish economy.¹⁵

The “Ordenanzas” go on to explain how the Baratillo was governed by a brotherhood, which admitted Indians, Africans, and every possible combination of mixed-race people—anyone but Spaniards and their purebred offspring.¹⁶ The fictitious guild of the baratilleros (which, to the author’s horror, welcomed both men and women) did not just exclude Spaniards; it expressed revulsion toward them. In this author’s telling, Mexico’s Creoles bore much of the blame for Mexico’s degraded condition. They disdained work and diluted Spanish blood and culture by allowing non-Spanish women to wet-nurse their babies and by educating different races in the same schools.¹⁷ The “Ordenanzas” played to Spanish fears of racial degeneration—the idea that in the New World, Spanish domination and Spanishness itself were under threat from Indians, Africans, and castas.

Of course, Chreslos Jache’s “Ordenanzas” was a work of satire, not ethnography. Nevertheless, other writers of the era saw similar depravities in the Baratillo. Hipólito Villarroel’s treatise, Enfermedades políticas que padece la capital de esta Nueva España, written between 1785 and 1787, dedicates a special section to the Baratillo. The author describes the market as “this cave or deposit for the petty theft that apprentices, artisans, maids, and household servants commit, and in sum all the plebeian people—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas that are allowed to live as inhabitants in this city.” Villarroel’s diatribe suggests that the Baratillo was a melting pot for Mexico’s non-Spanish population—a site where the colony’s poor blended together into a homogeneous and threatening mass. The ínfima plebe, the term Villarroel and his contemporaries employed for this multiracial underclass, “is composed of different castas that have procreated the links between the Spaniard, Indian, and Black; but confusing in this way his first origin, such that now there are no voices to explain and distinguish between these classes of people that make up the greatest number of inhabitants of the kingdom.” The poor of New Spain, he went on, “form a monster of so many species that [comprise] the inferior castes, to which are added infinite Spaniards, Europeans, and Creoles, lost and vulgarized with poverty and idleness.”¹⁸ Poor Spaniards, a regular presence in the Baratillo, only heightened those anxieties, as their existence further eroded racial hierarchies.¹⁹

Church officials, too, found much to dislike in the Baratillo. A number of them wrote in support of Viceroy Revillagigedo II’s decision to remove the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in 1789, whose sight, they complained, had “tormented our eyes” before the viceroy reorganized the markets. From their perspective, the Baratillo was a place where “people went naked, others stole to fuel their wickedness, [and] homicides were frequent. It seems as if we are talking about a city without Religion or a King or Government, but all this happened in the Plaza Mayor of the Metropolis of the most Christian North America, in the great Mexico.” The Baratillo’s bad reputation, they worried, extended far and wide: “In all the Kingdom it was known what went on in that place.”²⁰ In sum, for many eighteenth-century observers, the Baratillo was a hub of criminality and oppositional culture—an obstacle to order, reason, and good governance.

THE BOURBONS REFORM MEXICO CITY’S MARKETS

Even though Mexico City’s Bourbon authorities received a litany of complaints about the Baratillo, they did little to address them. They did not make any concerted attempt to enforce the prohibitions that Habsburg rulers had issued throughout the seventeenth century. Nor do they appear to have issued any new decrees banning the Baratillo.²¹ Indeed, eighteenth-century authorities were decidedly ambivalent about the Baratillo. The instructions that the viceroy Duke of Linares left to his successor in 1716 capture their indecisiveness. Upon leaving office that year, Linares warned the Duke of Arión: “There is in the Plaza of Mexico a traffic prohibited by law or decree that is so problematic that ending it has been a great challenge for me, being that what is stolen [in the city] is sold there, only disguised. In this way many articles are sold, especially to Indians or hicks, as scoundrels are called here, who are readily provided with the trinkets they need.”²² Faced with this dilemma, Linares found himself unable to render a decision: “I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it,” he wrote, finally, leaving his successor “with the door open to provide what he determines most convenient.”²³ The Baratillo may have been an entrepôt for stolen goods, but the city’s poor depended on those products, and the viceroy was not eager to take them away.

Making sense of Bourbon-era authorities’ relative uninterest in the Baratillo, particularly compared to the attention New Spain’s Habsburg rulers paid the market during the seventeenth century, requires understanding the nature of the Bourbon Reforms, which involved multiple and often competing objectives. The Spanish Crown, for its part, focused on increasing revenue. Officials sought to accomplish this goal by establishing government monopolies, raising taxes on various types of transactions, and promoting trade across the Spanish Empire. They also sought to rationalize and centralize the Spanish government, first on the Iberian Peninsula and then in Spain’s overseas possessions. They professionalized administrative positions that the Crown had previously contracted out to private parties and created new administrative units. For example, the Bourbons brought the French system of intendancies to Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century and then to New Spain in 1786. In 1782, they divided Mexico City into eight cuarteles mayores, each comprised of four cuarteles menores, appointing officials to oversee each subsection of the city.²⁴ These changes attacked what the Bourbons saw as a haphazard structure of government that the Habsburgs had fostered over the centuries. Tighter control over their territories, they believed, would lead to greater tax revenues.

In New Spain, Bourbon authorities also embarked on ambitious urban renewal projects, turning the viceregal capital into a laboratory for Enlightened urban planning. Some of these innovations put Mexico City at the vanguard of the Atlantic World: the city was building sidewalks around the same time as Paris and well before Madrid, for example.²⁵ However, those public works projects did not always form part of the larger, metropolitan project of increasing tax revenues. Rather, they were often the prerogatives of individual viceroys and, at times, were at odds with the interests of the Spanish Crown because they incurred significant costs and produced no new revenue streams. In 1792, for example, the Crown demanded that Viceroy Revillagigedo II immediately cease his street-paving project because it had run grossly over budget.²⁶ The Mexico City Ayuntamiento, the body charged with both funding and implementing many of these infrastructure projects, also pushed back—sometimes forcefully. Its members viewed efforts by the Crown and the viceroys to rationalize city finances and remake the city’s built environment as an attack on the traditional autonomy of the local government.²⁷ Thus, the Bourbon Reforms did not constitute a single, coherent project but a series of individual ones, with different objectives and sources of support that produced conflict more often than consensus. Far from a single entity with a common goal, the eighteenth-century colonial state consisted of multiple institutions and many competing interests.²⁸

Mexico City’s public marketplaces were sites where those conflicts played out. Markets were among the Ayuntamiento’s most prized possessions. They contributed as much as 50 percent of the local government’s annual tax receipts during the colonial era, leading members of the Ayuntamiento to zealously defend their jurisdiction over these valuable municipal assets.²⁹ But royal authorities, including viceroys and Crown officials based in Spain, saw marketplaces as ripe for reform. They viewed the city’s markets as disorderly and visually unappealing and as public assets that, with some changes, could produce even more income for the local government, helping to wean it off the Crown’s support. Royal authorities had been trying to shore up the Mexico City Ayuntamiento’s finances for more than a century. Indeed, ceding the Plaza Mayor to the Ayuntamiento in the early seventeenth century was a step toward this goal: the Crown transferred control of the square specifically so the city could generate income for its operations by renting space to vendors and shopkeepers.³⁰

In the eighteenth century, Bourbon authorities implemented new layers of royal supervision over the Ayuntamiento’s finances, which incensed the Creole elites who dominated the body.³¹ In 1708, King Philip V created a new position, the superintendent of propios and arbitrios.³² Similar to the co­­rregidor, the superintendent, who would be a member of Mexico’s Audiencia, was a royal official whom the Crown charged with supervising local affairs, in this case the Ayuntamiento’s financial dealings. Then, in the 1740s, Bourbon officials professionalized the position of rent collector for the Plaza Mayor markets. The Ayuntamiento had outsourced that job since 1694, putting the contract out for multiyear bids. The practice was not unusual: the Spanish employed this form of contracting, known as the asiento, for everything from collecting tribute to managing the transatlantic slave trade. Upon the death of Francisco Cameros, who held the asiento from 1694 until his death in 1741, Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón, the superintendent of propios and arbitrios, sought to end the outsourcing of this job, noting that Cameros had administered the plaza “without having put in place rule or method.”³³ He demanded that the Ayuntamiento take control of rent collection itself by choosing from its own members a juez de plaza (plaza judge) for the Plaza Mayor markets. In theory, the order gave the Ayuntamiento more direct control over its public marketplaces; but it did so in a way that also strengthened royal authorities’ oversight of the local government.³⁴

Municipal officials took a number of steps in the 1750s and 1760s to address Trespalacios y Escandón’s complaints about the Plaza Mayor: they ordered the stands’ sides and roofs removed, so that authorities could better monitor what was going on inside them, and cleared the markets’ internal passageways to improve the flow of people and goods. In 1753, the plaza judge banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in the Plaza Mayor—an effort to crack down on public drunkenness and the unruly behavior it provoked.³⁵ But those efforts were short lived, and Trespalacios y Escandón ultimately found the Ayuntamiento’s management of the Plaza Mayor markets as unsatisfactory as Cameros’s. Upon inspecting the Plaza Mayor in 1760, the superintendent, still in his post, saw “complete confusion, all transit choked, and the whole area … filled with puestos [arranged] according to the desires” of each vendor. In that year, Trespalacios y Escandón unveiled a major redesign of the Plaza Mayor (see figures 3 and 4). Under the plan, occupants of the Baratillo Grande inside the Parián would no longer be allowed to live in their cajones, and the market’s dense alleyways would be converted into orderly streets. The puestos of the Plaza Mayor, located between the Parián and the viceregal palace, would be reorganized into neat rows separated by product. Vendors would no longer be permitted to congregate in front of the cathedral and palace. Finally, the Plaza Mayor would be paved with cobblestones so the area would not become submerged in mud during the rainy season.³⁶

FIGURE 3 and 4. Plaza Mayor, ca. 1760. These two anonymous images depict the Plaza Mayor before and after Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón’s 1760 reorganization project. Both images are oriented toward the east, with the Parián in the foreground and the palace in the background. The first image (figure 3) highlights the chaotic nature of the marketplaces of the Plaza Mayor and Plaza del Volador (which the rendering notes was “as disorganized as the [Plaza] Mayor”). In the second image (figure 4), the Plaza Mayor’s stalls are arranged neatly in rows and both the Baratillo Grande (inside the Parián) and the Plaza del Volador are now free of market stands. Like Villalpando’s painting of the Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot, this second image probably reflected Trespalacios y Escandón’s aspirations for the space more than reality. Images located in Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la Ciudad de México, ed. Mario de la Torre, 2 vols. (Mexico City: INAH, 1996), 1:27, 29.

Trespalacios y Escandón was overly optimistic about his ability to bring order to the Plaza Mayor markets. In 1769, one of the municipal rent collectors wrote to complain that the “vendedores volantes”—literally, “flying vendors,” or street vendors without fixed stalls—continued to operate in the plaza, making it impossible for him to keep an accurate count of all the merchants in the market, much less collect rent from them. These vendors appeared one day and then disappeared the next.³⁷ By the 1770s, baratilleros, tortilla sellers, and other petty merchants had reoccupied the space in front of the palace and other locations where Trespalacios y Escandón had banned vending.³⁸ The construction projects he ordered did not proceed according to schedule, either; the Plaza Mayor paving project remained incomplete in 1789 when Viceroy Revillagigedo II assumed his post.³⁹

The arrival of the royal inspector José de Gálvez brought additional scrutiny of the Ayuntamiento. Between 1765 and 1771, Gálvez toured New Spain and made a lengthy series of recommendations to the Spanish Crown for reforming the viceroyalty’s governing institutions.⁴⁰ Like other Bourbon-era reforms, these were aimed at standardizing haphazard or informal practices and professionalizing public services that the local government had long outsourced to third parties. When it came to Mexico City’s market administration, Gálvez recommended that the municipal employee who served as the plaza judge receive a salary of 500 pesos per year, rather than 6 percent of the markets’ revenues—the existing arrangement. The plan also called for the elimination of gratificaciones—tips that vendors paid market officials to facilitate the sale or transfer of market stalls and other bureaucratic processes. Finally, Gálvez’s plan demanded that the city remove the movable stands that were blocking the entrances to the Parián and the ambulatory vendors who clogged the passageways between the market stands in the plaza.⁴¹

The Ayuntamiento found the plan distressing. Its members claimed that the salary Gálvez proposed for the regidor (councilman) who held the plaza judge post amounted to a significant pay cut. They also warned the Crown of the impact the changes would have on impoverished street vendors. They even included in their response written complaints from vendors in and around the plaza who predicted that the changes would lead to their “extinction.”⁴² The aldermen emphasized that Mexico City was not Madrid, and the Crown could not simply transpose Spanish laws onto New Spain: “the constitution, the customs, and even the laws of this country are different from those of Spanish cities,” they argued.⁴³ This line of reasoning—that what was good for Spain was not necessarily good for Mexico—was one the Ayuntamiento used repeatedly in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Crown’s reforms were an attack on the sovereignty of the local government and a threat to the livelihoods of the Creole elites who participated in the often-lucrative business of colonial government. Those families had strong incentives to maintain the existing structure of local government, including its market system.

The baratilleros may have engaged in a nefarious trade, but they also paid rent to the Ayuntamiento, and revenue, regardless of its source, was something royal and local governments alike welcomed. Although the Baratillo was not the market that provided the largest tax revenues (typically the Parián was), its contribution was far from negligible. In 1791, the city collected a total of 7,146 pesos from the stands located in the Baratillo Grande and in the Plaza Mayor—just under 5 percent of the Ayuntamiento’s gross revenue that year.⁴⁴ The Ayuntamiento suffered from frequent budget shortfalls and its members were loath to eliminate any asset that generated revenue.⁴⁵ Indeed, when officials at Mexico City’s cathedral, located just off the Plaza Mayor, sought to remove the Baratillo from the square in 1729 because of the “public sins” that people regularly committed there, the Ayuntamiento invoked its jurisdiction over the Plaza Mayor and blocked the proposal.⁴⁶

Frictions between royal and municipal authorities help explain the Baratillo’s persistence during a period of ambitious urban renewal projects. Members of the Ayuntamiento resisted royal efforts to limit the body’s autonomy and curtail the income that their positions afforded them, which sometimes led them to defend institutions as unsavory as the Baratillo. Furthermore, because the market produced significant revenues for the city, the Spanish Crown may not have been eager to do away with it, either, as it wanted to ensure that its most important American city was a fiscally sound one. Even if some reformers sought to dramatically reengineer Mexico City society in the eighteenth century, not every colonial official, and especially not the members of the Ayuntamiento, was on board with those plans. Tensions between local and royal authorities continued to rise before coming to a head under New Spain’s most ambitious Bourbon viceroy, the Second Count of Revillagigedo.

REVILLAGIGEDO II AND THE APOGEE OF REFORM

More than any other viceroy of New Spain, Revillagigedo II, who governed from 1789 to 1794, was determined to transform the seat of his jurisdiction into a model of Enlightened urban planning.⁴⁷ Soon after arriving in the capital, he set in motion a series of administrative changes and public works projects. The scope of Revillagigedo’s reforms was sweeping. He began extending the ordered grid of the traza to the city’s outlying barrios (see figure 5), minted new coins, and established new regulations on taverns and gambling. He even limited the number of times church bells could ring.⁴⁸ Revillagigedo fixated on the unsanitary conditions of the city’s public thoroughfares and plazas, picking up the paving project that his predecessors had begun decades before and implementing a property tax that provided a faster and more reliable revenue stream to fund it.⁴⁹ Although local elites’ frustrations with royal authorities had been brewing for decades, Revillagigedo’s term brought a significant escalation of those tensions. The viceroy made unilateral decisions that the Mexico City Ayuntamiento believed drained local resources and posed an existential threat to its autonomy. The project that most incensed local officials was his transformation of the Plaza Mayor.

FIGURE 5. Ignacio Castera, Plano ichnographico de la Ciudad de Mexico …, 1794. Castera was Mexico City’s chief architect and the mastermind behind many of Revillagigedo’s public works projects. This map, which is oriented toward the east, shows Castera’s plan to extend the traza beyond the traditional city center, integrating indigenous barrios and some of Mexico City’s hinterlands into the urban grid. The text on the left side of the map discusses how the project will lead to the “correction and extirpation of crimes in the Barrios” by opening up alleys and dead-end streets. Library of Congress.

Upon arriving in Mexico in 1789, the viceroy expressed horror at the state of the plaza that lay in front of his palace. The reforms of previous Bourbon viceroys had failed to turn the Plaza Mayor into a respectable space. The square, in his estimation, was “a confused labyrinth of huts, pigsties, and matted shelters … inside of which evildoers could easily hide themselves, day or night, and commit the most horrible crimes.” In full view of the viceroyalty’s highest authorities were open latrines where both men and women took care of their “corporal needs.” Officials routinely removed drunkards who had passed out in the street so stagecoaches did not run them over. Worse still, “with too much frequency, under the shadow of darkness, sins of sensuality were witnessed in the doorways, corners, and cemeteries [surrounding the Plaza Mayor], to the extent that the Fathers considered closing off the atrium in order to avoid sacrileges in the doorways of their Church.” In sum, “all of this made the Plaza so disgusting, and a sight so abominable, that no decent person dared enter it without an urgent motive.”⁵⁰

Within months of his arrival in Mexico, Revillagigedo began a two-pronged effort to modernize the distribution of basic staples in the city and transform the Plaza Mayor. To accomplish those goals, he ordered that the city’s main food market move from the Plaza Mayor into the adjacent Plaza del Volador. The only market that would remain in the central square was the Parián. The remainder of the plaza would be cleared of all its tables and stands and left for a more dignified public to stroll through at its leisure. The formal process of relocating the food market began on December 14, 1789, when the Ayuntamiento signed a contract to rent the Plaza del Volador from its owner, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca (the descendants of Hernán Cortés) for five years at a cost of 2,500 pesos per year.⁵¹ This was a steep increase in spending for the municipal government, which owned the Plaza Mayor and thus did not have to pay rent to operate a market there. Over the next two years, the Ayuntamiento, under orders from the viceroy, spent nearly 44,000 pesos paving the Plaza del Volador with cobblestones and building fountains, cajones, puestos, and portable stands. In January 1792, the new marketplace began operation.⁵²

Revillagigedo sought to make the Plaza del Volador marketplace the kind of clean, organized, and efficient market that authorities had tried in vain to create in the Plaza Mayor since the 1690s. To that end, he ordered the drafting of an expansive new set of regulations for the city’s public markets in 1791. These were as significant as the construction projects themselves because they continued to be in force decades after Revillagigedo’s term as viceroy had ended—indeed, long after Mexico’s independence from Spain.⁵³ The rules specified that the Volador market contain rows separated according to the type of product sold and banned all forms of cooking. They also created additional levels of oversight for both the main market and the satellite markets in the outlying barrios that had been under construction intermittently since the 1770s.⁵⁴ The plaza judge would continue to oversee the daily operations of the main market and arbitrate disputes that arose within it. Beneath him would be an administrador, or rent collector, who would earn 1,200 pesos per year. Finally, the day-to-day policing and cleaning of the markets was left to guarda-ministros, paid 15 pesos per month and provided with uniforms of blue wool, black collars, and white buttons. The Reglamento specified, for the first time, the responsibilities of the plaza judge, which had previously been dictated by custom and the desires and abilities of the officeholder.⁵⁵ The regulations were also printed, adding another layer of formality and permanence.

Revillagigedo’s Reglamento also banned the practice of the traspaso—the transfer of a cajón from one merchant to another. This institution had existed for as long as there were markets in the Plaza Mayor and involved traders paying guantes (fees) to merchants to obtain the right to their space in the plaza, and gratificaciones to municipal market officials to facilitate those exchanges.⁵⁶ Revillagigedo sought to formalize this process by forcing merchants to go through official channels to transfer their stands to other vendors, leaving the occupant with a license issued by the Ayuntamiento—a written record.⁵⁷ The viceroy also sought to make the process of obtaining market stalls fairer, declaring that the spaces occupied by movable stands would now be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.⁵⁸ Revillagigedo probably objected to the traspaso because it was done off the books, making it more difficult for the government to oversee, and because gratificaciones lined the pockets of individual officials while depriving the government of fees.

The Ayuntamiento sought to enforce the traspaso ban soon after it went into effect but ran into fierce resistance from the Consulado, the exclusive guild of overseas merchants. The Consulado argued that the prohibition conflicted with the government’s stated goal of promoting free trade (comercio libre), as the system of guantes and gratificaciones helped smooth the cumbersome process of legally transferring rights to a market stall.⁵⁹ The merchants appear to have prevailed in the long run, as the practice resurfaces in documents from the early nineteenth century.⁶⁰ Indeed, many of Revillagigedo’s innovations would prove difficult to implement or sustain because they encountered entrenched opposition from various quarters.

THE BARATILLO MOVES TO THE PLAZA DEL FACTOR

The Baratillo survived the sweeping transformation of the Plaza Mayor because of the combined efforts of municipal officials and the market’s vendors. Revillagigedo made no mention of the Baratillo in his initial plans for the redesign of the Plaza Mayor—a surprising omission, given that the market embodied many of the attributes he found most detestable about the space. The construction, however, must have displaced the Baratillo Chico when the government cleared all of the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in late 1789. That market all but vanishes from the historical record until the summer of 1792, when a document reveals that it had moved to the Plaza de las Vizcaínas, located in the far southwestern corner of the city.⁶¹ It remained there only temporarily; a year later a plan surfaced to relocate the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor, located a few blocks northwest of the Plaza Mayor, in the present-day site of Mexico City’s legislative assembly.

MAP 2. Mexico City, 1793. Based on Diego García Conde, Plano general de la Ciudad de México … , 1793, engraved in 1807. Reproduced in Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlás histórico de la ciudad de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: INAH, 1996), 1:340. Map created by Bill Nelson and Andrew Konove.

The Ayuntamiento’s desire for revenue led it to relocate the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor. The original plan for that plaza, which emerged in May 1791, was to build a stone marketplace in the square as part of an ongoing effort to create neighborhood food markets in peripheral areas of the city.⁶² By August 1792, however, the Ayuntamiento had run out of money for the project and decided to sell the stones from the half-built structure in order to help pay for wooden stands instead. The proceeds still left the city short of the funds it needed to finish the now more modest project and it was only able to complete it after receiving an 8,000-peso loan from a local convent.⁶³ Municipal market officials and Mexico City’s corregidor, Bernardo Bonavía, decided that moving the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor was a better financial decision for the city than putting a food market there. Bonavía ordered “that the Baratillo be transferred to the [Plaza del Factor] in order to populate it … [as] the movement of the Baratillo will attract with it the transfer of other puestos [and] I do not doubt that greater rents will be achieved in the Plaza del Factor.”⁶⁴ The superintendent of propios and arbitrios and the viceroy agreed, and the move was authorized in August 1793.⁶⁵ Local and royal officials thus saw the Baratillo not as an intolerable nuisance but as an important source of revenue, even a driver of neighborhood economic development.

By this point, only the occupants of the former Baratillo Chico had moved to the Plaza del Factor. After reorganizing the Plaza Mayor, Viceroy Revillagigedo initially allowed the vendors of the Baratillo Grande to remain in the central patio of the Parián. But then, in March 1794, the viceroy announced a new project to rebuild that space.⁶⁶ Officials relocated the occupants of the Baratillo Grande to the Plazuela de Jesús and the catty-cornered Plazuela de la Paja, a few blocks south of the Plaza Mayor. But vendors disliked the location, so, in August 1794, a group of fourteen men who sold in the Plaza del Factor wrote to the superintendent of propios and arbitrios asking that the authorities amend the “distance and disunion” between their Baratillo and the one located across town. Appealing to “both Majesties,” temporal and spiritual, the baratilleros offered a sophisticated and compelling case that merging the two markets served the best interests of the public. The superintendent consented to the baratilleros’ request and by 1796 the Baratillo was once again a single institution, now located in the Plaza del Factor.⁶⁷ It was the first of several times that the vendors of the Baratillo would play a role in determining where their market would be located.

By the mid-1790s the Plaza Mayor had become the clean, orderly, and, above all, respectable commercial center of Mexico City that colonial officials had sought to create for over one hundred years (see figure 6). No used clothing or iron vendors, nor any of the fruit and vegetable, prepared food, or pulque stands that used to clutter the city’s main square were in sight. It had become a plaza de armas—a vast open space where the army, stationed in New Spain since the 1760s, could offer public displays of the king’s power for his subjects. Religious officials in the capital were ecstatic about the changes the viceroy had brought: “In fewer than four years, the policing of the city was perfected such that even the most sophisticated cities of Europe do not surpass it,” they wrote.⁶⁸ The viceroy’s improvements, however, did not sit as well with the Creole elites who controlled the Mexico City Ayuntamiento.

FIGURE 6. Anonymous, Vista de la Plaza Mayor de México …, 1793. The text reads: “View of the main Plaza of Mexico, reformed and beautified by order of His Excellency Viceroy Count of Revilla Gigedo in the year 1793.” Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Archivo General de Indias, Spain, AGI, MP-México, 446.

THE AYUNTAMIENTO TAKES THE VICEROY TO COURT

Members of the Ayuntamiento were furious about the viceroy’s meddling in local affairs. They complained that the municipal government was responsible for paying for and executing the viceroy’s projects but had no say in their design.⁶⁹ The cost, scope, and, above all, the unilateral nature of Revillagigedo’s reforms so angered Ayuntamiento members that they brought a formal complaint against him in January 1795, shortly after he had left office. The juicio de residencia, as the proceeding was called, raised dozens of grievances against the viceroy for undertaking public works projects and enacting fiscal reforms that placed a great financial strain on the city and went against the interests of its residents. The ideas were poorly conceived, the Ayuntamiento argued, and money did not go toward solving the most pressing needs.⁷⁰

No project riled municipal officials more than the renovation of the Plaza Mayor and the relocation of the city’s principal marketplace. Indeed, the Ayuntamiento’s first accusation in the juicio was that the construction of the new market in the Plaza del Volador “has deprived the City of those fat profits that it earned with the produce and other stands that the Plaza Mayor contained, depriving the public of an annual rent of as much as twelve thousand pesos.”⁷¹ Revillagigedo had also raised rents for the cajones and puestos of the new market, provoking an outcry from vendors in 1792, and, the Ayuntamiento argued, ultimately increasing costs for the city’s consumers.⁷² The complainants also objected to the viceroy’s stipulation that the puestos could never return to the plaza, foreclosing the possibility that the city could raise additional revenue in the future from that space. The Ayuntamiento argued that the entire Plaza Mayor project was pointless, since the puestos that were constructed in the Volador were exactly the same as the original ones in the Plaza Mayor, except that they now had roofs made of tejamanil (wooden shingles) instead of blankets, ultimately leaving the new market just as vulnerable to fire as its predecessor. Indeed, one had already broken out in May 1794.⁷³

The viceroy’s public works projects brought the long-simmering tensions between local and peninsular authorities to a boil. In the years immediately preceding Revillagigedo’s term, the Crown had stepped up its efforts to chip away at the autonomy of local institutions in the Americas and subject their finances to greater scrutiny by royal authorities. The 1786 establishment of intendancies, in particular, eroded local control by creating a new layer of royal administration throughout New Spain. In the same year, the Crown established the Junta Superior de Real Hacienda, yet another royal body charged with overseeing municipal finances in New Spain.⁷⁴ With the creation of that entity, the Council of the Indies ordered that all of the viceroyalty’s ayuntamientos submit budgets to royal authorities for review. The Mexico City Ayuntamiento refused. It took a decree from the king himself in 1797 for the Ayuntamiento to comply.⁷⁵

For members of the Ayuntamiento, Revillagigedo’s reforms, particularly the public works projects, were a step too far. What most frustrated local elites was that Revillagigedo refused to let the city participate in the decision-making process. Rather than consult with the Ayuntamiento, Revillagigedo relied on outside experts (peritos) in planning the projects. There was no transparency in the bidding or construction process; the viceroy gave orders verbally rather than in writing, an “extrajudicial” process, the Ayuntamiento claimed, and nobody knew how much the projects would cost until the money was already spent.⁷⁶ Furthermore, the viceroy had intervened in the city’s most proprietary sphere of influence and the source of a large part of its annual income: its public markets.⁷⁷ Ever since 1609, when the Crown deeded the Plaza Mayor to the Ayuntamiento so it could establish a market there, that space had played a central role in how the Ayuntamiento managed the city.

In its case against the viceroy, the Ayuntamiento pitched itself as the body that had the interests of the broader public in mind. Some projects, the juicio claimed, were “useless and not at all necessary for the public; others were, on the contrary, quite detrimental.” Throughout the juicio de residencia, the Ayuntamiento argued that Revillagigedo’s reforms were harmful for Mexico City’s general population, especially its poorest members, and questioned the “public utility” of projects like sidewalks and curbs—employing the same Enlightenment vocabulary Bourbon reformers used to justify their public works projects.⁷⁸ Members of the Ayuntamiento objected to Revillagigedo’s description of the Plaza as a “latrine,” countering that “the Plaza was not in such decadence as he wants it to appear, and every class of people moved comfortably about it.”⁷⁹ The heterogeneity of the Plaza Mayor markets, according to this argument, was one of the greatest assets of the space. It offered something for everyone.⁸⁰ In the juicio de residencia, Mexico City’s Creole elites expressed their resentment for peninsular interference in local affairs, and for the entire Europeanizing project that Revillagigedo and other Spanish viceroys sought to realize in Mexico City.⁸¹ They disputed the notion that their city could or should become a laboratory for Enlightenment ideas, asking: “Because things have been done in Spain and other cities in Europe … should the same be done in the Americas?” Their answer to this rhetorical question was a resounding no: “The practice[s] that [are] observed in Madrid and in other capitals of Europe are not adaptable to Mexico.”⁸²

CONCLUSION

Revillagigedo’s reforms left a significant imprint on Mexico City. Above all, he transformed the city’s main plaza from a site that had hosted a diverse commerce in foodstuffs and new and used goods into the kind of orderly, dignified space that the Spanish Crown had sought to create since the end of the seventeenth century. The removal of the Baratillo and the food markets from the Plaza Mayor marked the first time in Mexico City’s history that the retail activities of the rich and poor were physically separated from one another. By 1795, the main square housed only the commerce of the Parián—without the disreputable Baratillo Grande in its center patio—and the shops in the archways that lined its southern and western sides. Merchants who sold goods that lay beyond the reach of the vast majority of Mexico City’s population occupied those spaces. Food vendors now had their own market in the adjacent Plaza del Volador while the market for second-hand goods was relegated to the periphery of the old traza. The process of creating a refashioned, respectable public space at the heart of the viceregal capital did not begin with Revillagigedo or even the Bourbon dynasty. The effort to transform the Plaza Mayor into a safer, more beautiful, and more lucrative commercial space for the local government began in the wake of the 1692 riot with the decision to eradicate the Baratillo and construct the alcaicería, and continued in fits and starts throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, Revillagigedo’s efforts were more ambitious than those of his predecessors, and their impact on the urban geography was significant.

Like the urban renewal projects that previous viceroys had spearheaded, however, Revillagigedo failed to accomplish all, or even most, of what he set out to do. By the end of his term, the paving project, begun decades earlier, was still not finished, and the straightening of city streets beyond the traza had barely begun. His attempts to reform the city’s market administration were not much more successful. The masonry market in the Plaza del Factor was never built. A fire had broken out in the Plaza del Volador market even before Revillagigedo left office, and the owner of the plaza, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca, was so dissatisfied with its arrangement with the city that the family threatened not to renew the Ayuntamiento’s lease on the land in 1807, nearly forcing the government to relocate the city’s principal food market.⁸³ Although Revillagigedo had successfully cleared the Plaza Mayor of its ramshackle wooden stalls, some vendors continued to defy the ban on selling there. In 1794, officials complained that shoe sellers and other vendors were peddling their wares in the plaza at night, after the doors to the Parián had closed for the evening.⁸⁴ Moving the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor produced a litany of complaints from neighbors and vendors alike, as officials struggled to suppress a troublesome nighttime market on the streets surrounding the plaza.⁸⁵ Nor did the reorganization of the city’s markets seem to have the desired effect on municipal revenues: Revillagigedo’s successor, the viceroy Marquis of Branciforte, worried in a letter from September 1795 that “most of the cajones of the Parián have been abandoned” due to the disappearance of the “crowd of people that for so many years that site attracted.”⁸⁶

The Bourbon Reforms, like those of their Habsburg predecessors, failed to realize their objective of reengineering Mexico City’s principal public spaces in the eighteenth century because they encountered opposition from various quarters—not only from popular groups but also other elites, who, for reasons both personal and political, took issue with those projects. The fault lines in those struggles often formed between peninsular and local authorities who had very different prerogatives when it came to urban governance. There were also significant conflicts within those groups: while the Crown ultimately supported Revillagigedo in his juicio de residencia, which concluded only after his death, it had opposed many of his initiatives during his time as viceroy due to their high cost.⁸⁷ In Mexico City, Bourbon reforms to public administration and the built environment did not represent a coherent program that elites imposed upon the poor; rather, they constituted a diverse set of policy prescriptions and projects that were as controversial among elites as they were among the popular classes.

Those tensions played out in the Baratillo and on the streets of the eighteenth-century city, where both the governing elite’s ambivalence about the market and the vendors’ strategies for resisting policies that adversely affected them come into focus. Despite the Baratillo’s seeming incompatibility with Bourbon reformers’ vision of a clean, orderly, and rational city, authorities in Mexico City were far from unified in their desire to disband it, and made little attempt to do so throughout most of the eighteenth century. To observers such as the author of the “Ordenanzas,” the Baratillo was the uncontested domain of a multiracial criminal underclass. But other elites were not so sure; the market offered a range of goods for well-to-do and poor residents alike, employed people that might otherwise engage in even more nefarious activities, and provided the chronically cash-strapped Ayuntamiento with a consistent source of revenue.

Disagreements among colonial elites do not, on their own, explain the persistence of the Baratillo during this period of activist government. Understanding the Baratillo’s significance to Mexico City society in this era also requires an examination of the quotidian exchanges that took place in the market. Beyond its contribution to the coffers of local government, the Baratillo played an indispensable role in the local economy, and its commerce involved a broad cross-section of society. Vendors leveraged those connections to assert the legitimacy of their trade and defend it from attacks by government officials and rival merchants. The keys to the Baratillo’s success in outlasting colonial rule lie as much in the transactions of the shadow economy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as they do in the power struggles between local and metropolitan elites.