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THREE

Shadow Economics

The Baratillo has existed since time immemorial…. It is clearly and manifestly in the common good.

JOSEPH RAMÍREZ, Diego Rufino and others to Corregidor Nuño Núñez de Villavicencio, October 16, 1706

ON JANUARY 13, 1724, JUAN DE DIOS ANZURES, a lawyer writing on behalf of a group of shopkeepers in the Plaza Mayor, complained to the viceroy of New Spain that baratilleros and ambulatory vendors were wreaking havoc on their businesses. The vendors peddled items such as imported British linen and silver plate, goods that Dios Anzures claimed only Mexico City’s exclusive merchant guild—the Consulado—had the authority to trade. He reminded the viceroy that royal decrees from the previous century had banned the Baratillo, and in any case, it was supposed to be the marketplace for second-hand clothing, not new products from Castile and China. Worse still, the baratilleros engaged in outright fraud, “selling one thing for another.” They peddled less expensive maná, or plant oil, for olive oil, and the cheaper Guayaquil cacao for one of the superior varieties from Maracaibo or Caracas. In this manner, “they adulterate everything in order to increase their ill-gotten gain.” Dios Anzures pleaded with the viceroy to end those abuses once and for all. His efforts, like others that targeted the Baratillo in the late colonial era, gained little traction.¹

This chapter moves from the elite debates about urban public space that the previous chapter analyzed to an examination of the quotidian transactions that unfolded in the Baratillo. The Baratillo was the hub of Mexico City’s shadow economy, where circuits of second-hand, stolen, counterfeit, and contraband goods converged and, on occasion, became visible to authorities. This trade undermined established players in the local economy, especially middling shopkeepers and artisans. But it also created unlikely bedfellows, linking baratilleros to overseas traders and government officials. Although observers frequently depicted the Baratillo as the exclusive domain of the underclass, the market in fact served a range of actors—from the most humble to the most privileged. Elites, working people, and members of the city’s often-overlooked middle sectors made their living or provisioned their households in the Baratillo.²

The baratilleros turned the market’s broad appeal to their advantage. Employing the political vernacular of the day, they defended the Baratillo’s relevance to urban society and the local economy and asserted their right to practice their trade on the city’s streets and plazas. Their actions show that the Baratillo was not just a vital economic institution in eighteenth-century Mexico City; it was also a key site for political expression and negotiation. The Baratillo survived the colonial era because it offered material benefits to many residents of the capital and because its vendors conveyed that fact to authorities.

In reconstructing the circuits of exchange that intersected in the Baratillo, this chapter challenges some of the binaries that scholars have employed to understand urban economies. In the Baratillo, distinctions between legal and illegal commerce blurred. Products that modern-day social scientists might classify as “informal” because they were untaxed or evaded regulation mixed indiscriminately with stolen and other illicit merchandise. If the boundaries between legal and illegal commerce were ambiguous, government officials helped make them so. Although the Baratillo was technically prohibited in the eighteenth century since no one had rescinded the seventeenth-century decrees that had banned the market, local officials continued to collect rents from its vendors and adjudicate disputes among them. Thus, despite widespread fears that crime in late-colonial Mexico City was on the rise, state agents played a key role in sustaining the black market.

THE BARATILLO IN THE ECONOMY OF LATE-COLONIAL MEXICO CITY

The Baratillo occupied one of the bottom rungs of colonial Mexico City’s commercial hierarchy. At the top of the pyramid were the import merchants with membership in the Consulado. These were Spaniards who often arrived in Mexico with little money but managed to ascend through the merchant ranks by first working in, and then ultimately acquiring, an import warehouse (almacén). The almacenes contained goods from Europe and Asia, shipped to Mexico via Spain or the Philippines, and the businesses were generally worth between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos each. From these warehouses, the importers provisioned retail merchants in the capital as well as provincial traders. The principal retailers of fine imported goods in the capital were the merchants who rented stores, or cajones, in the Parián marketplace and in the arcades that lined the southern and western sides of the Plaza Mayor. Most of these men possessed only one or two cajones, each worth roughly 30,000 to 70,000 pesos. In total, some two hundred stores in the capital offered imported goods in the eighteenth century.³ Beneath the cajo­neros were the owners of tiendas mestizas and slightly smaller neighborhood grocery stores, alternatively called pulperías or cacahuaterías. These stores’ values ranged from less than 1,000 pesos to over 25,000 pesos.⁴ Their owners were often recent immigrants from Spain who would be considered lower middle class, or near the top of the working class.⁵ At the bottom of the mercantile hierarchy were Mexico City’s street vendors—men and women who operated small stands or tables in the city’s public plazas and ambulatory vendors known as buhoneros or mercachifles. Spanish elites derided those individuals, associating the profession with Indians and castas, though in reality many vendors, particularly in the Baratillo, were Spanish.⁶

Women participated at every level of colonial commerce except the highest, and they were most visible in the humbler establishments.⁷ The Baratillo, however, was an exception to this rule. Although women appeared on virtually every list of vendors in the Baratillo throughout the late colonial and early national periods, they always constituted a small fraction of the total. Female vendors were far more common in the markets for foodstuffs. The discrepancy probably stems from the Baratillo’s close relationship with artisanal trades in which men predominated.⁸

People of every racial background sold in the Baratillo. Despite frequent assertions by the Baratillo’s detractors that the market was a haven for castas, many, if not most, baratilleros were Spanish. A search of marriage records in the eighteenth century, for example, revealed twenty-seven men with the profession of “baratillero” whose race the file identified. Among those men were eighteen Spaniards, three mestizos, three castizos, one indio chino, one morisco, and one mulatto.⁹ The relatively high proportion of Spaniards and the absence of Indians in the sample is likely to stem from the ethnic makeup of the trades from which many vendors hailed, namely, metalwork, garment making, and carpentry. Spaniards predominated in all of those professions.¹⁰

The Baratillo’s businesses were also diverse in scale. Cajones inside the Baratillo Grande were expensive: they generally rented for 200 pesos per year during the second half of the eighteenth century—the same price as stores located in the Parián itself.¹¹ Businesses in the Baratillo Grande were worth anywhere from a couple hundred pesos to several thousand.¹² Vicente Viola, the Genovese owner of a cajón in the Baratillo who died in 1767, sold products such as mirrors, screens, glasses, and other household goods imported from China and Europe, as well as stockings and woolen clothing. He had two employees, and he owned another store in Chalco, a town about thirty kilometers southeast of Mexico City. The contents of his business in the Baratillo were auctioned for a little over 1,500 pesos after his death.¹³ Some cajones were worth considerably more: Josef Fianca had two cajones in the Baratillo Grande whose combined value in 1780 totaled 25,000 pesos.¹⁴ Still, many other businesses in the Baratillo were much humbler. An open-air stand, or puesto, rented for around one peso per week in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while vendors selling from tables or baskets paid only a couple of reales per week to the Ayuntamiento.¹⁵ Vendors of chía water and prepared foods, usually indigenous women, set up between the stands of the Baratillo Grande and paid little or nothing in rent.¹⁶ Those businesses were much less likely to produce written inventory records.

As in other sectors of the colonial economy, businesses in the Baratillo depended heavily on credit.¹⁷ Import merchants sold baratilleros on credit avería—goods damaged in transit—and other products unfit for sale in their own retail outlets.¹⁸ Vendors in the Baratillo also operated a credit system among themselves. In a 1730 case against one Don Santiago Roque, who administered a stand that sold paño, a course woolen cloth, several witnesses testified that when clothing sellers in the Plaza Mayor did not have enough money to buy the cloth they needed, the would pawn their clothes to Roque in exchange for fabric. Once they sold the clothes they had made from that cloth, they would buy back the clothes they had left as collateral.¹⁹ The 1767 inventory of Vicente Viola’s assets illustrates just how integral credit, and pawnbroking in particular, were to a baratillero’s business. The file lists more than twenty individuals who owed Viola money, many identified simply as “Mariano the painter” or “the sugar confectioner in the Plaza de las Vizcaínas.” Viola also counted a number of pawned items as assets.²⁰ More than a household subsistence strategy, pawnbroking was a key lubricant of the urban economy that incorporated street vendors, artisans, shopkeepers, and consumers.²¹

The Baratillo’s customers are the most difficult participants in the market to profile because the archives offer few clues about who, exactly, shopped there. Impressionistic accounts from the era suggest that it catered mainly to the destitute and those who cared little about the provenance of the articles they purchased. In a scene in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s 1816 novel, El periquillo sarniento, the Baratillo plays precisely this role. When Perico, the protagonist, and Januario, his friend and mentor in mischief, win fifty pesos in a card game, Januario proposes:

Let’s go to the Parián, or better yet, to the Baratillo, so we can buy some decent clothes, which will help improve our lot. They will get us better treatment everywhere … because I assure you, my brother, that although they say the habit does not make the monk … when a decent person walks around—in the streets, in house calls, in games, in dances, and even in temples—he enjoys certain attention and respect. Thus, it’s better to be a well-dressed pícaro than an hombre de bien in rags.²²

Here Lizardi plays to popular conceptions that the Baratillo’s customers were rogues and lowlifes. With a little cash, those individuals could acquire the castoffs of the wealthy and pass themselves off as respectable people. This theme appears in many late-colonial writings about the Baratillo; it was a place where the identities of both people and goods became unrecognizable, where hierarchies and the categories used to construct them became vulnerable. In the Baratillo, a rogue could turn himself into a gentleman and a casta could become a Spaniard.

Other evidence, however, suggests that the Baratillo also appealed to better-off customers. As Juan de Viera, the administrator of Mexico City’s Colegio de San Ildefonso, wrote in 1778, the Baratillo Grande attracted “every class and quality of person” with its dizzying array of goods. Unlike other eighteenth-century writers, Viera saw not a teeming den of thieves and vagabonds but a lively bazaar that offered something for everyone.²³ Archival evidence supports Viera’s observations. In 1729, Don Antonio Velasco, a member of the Real Audiencia, sold a relatively expensive cloak, worth twelve pesos, to a vendor in the Baratillo.²⁴ The cost of such an item was roughly equal to a month’s wages for an unskilled worker in the capital in the eighteenth century.²⁵ Given that historians have shown that members of middling and upper echelons of Mexico City society regularly used pawnshops and the Monte de Piedad, the government-run pawnshop established in 1775, it makes sense that they also would have bought and sold clothing and household goods in the Baratillo.²⁶ The Baratillo was a commercial institution that offered an array of products—both used and new, cheap and high end—and engaged actors of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

THE SHADOW ECONOMY AND THE STATE

The Baratillo was also a site where legal and illegal exchanges were deeply entwined. It was the nexus of Mexico City’s shadow economy, where the circuits of second-hand, stolen, counterfeit, contraband, untaxed, or otherwise illicit goods intersected. This economy linked some of the most elite traders in New Spain to some of the lowliest and connected pulperías, which often doubled as pawnshops, to artisans’ workshops and vendors in the Plaza Mayor. Colonial officials were not of one mind when it came to regulating this trade. While some authorities tried to stamp it out, others condoned or turned a blind eye to it.

An investigation that José Antonio Lince González, Mexico City’s chief assayer and a member of the Real Audiencia, conducted into the illegal sale of gold and silver jewelry in the Baratillo in the early 1780s reveals some of the connections between the Baratillo and the city’s broader economy. The investigation sought to extinguish the trade in jewelry that lacked the “quinto” stamp indicating that the required 20 percent tax had been levied on it. These pieces were often of a lower quality than the twenty-two-carat standard the Crown had imposed. Lince González found that the gold and silver for sale in the Baratillo was coming mainly from three sources: clandestine workshops; pulperías, where the poor pawned such pieces in exchange for short-term loans; and the Real Monte de Piedad.²⁷ The pieces circulated undetected between those locations and the Baratillo, where they blended in with the market’s clothing, tools, and household goods. This trade challenged the rigid barriers the colonial government tried to impose between artisans and merchants, whom colonial law prevented from working together, and linked the Baratillo directly to a government institution—the Monte de Piedad. It also reveals that diverse individuals were involved in the trade: some of the vendors who sold the pieces were single Spaniards, one a married morisco, and another a married Spanish “notable” who had fallen on hard times. Most were clothing sellers who claimed to trade in small valuables on the side, which is to say, they had not manufactured the pieces themselves; they had come into their possession through happenstance. It was a defense that many vendors in the Baratillo used with colonial authorities, with apparent success.²⁸

It is tempting to label the shadow economy Lince González uncovered an informal economy, applying a term from twentieth-century social science to the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Baratillo and the semipermanent street markets scattered around late-colonial Mexico City meet several of the criteria that scholars have used to define the informal economy: its transactions were largely unregulated and untaxed, and many of the businesses were relatively small and family owned and operated.²⁹ Furthermore, one could argue, in the vein of neoliberal approaches to the study of informality, that the trade in unminted gold and silver pieces was a rational response to an overly burdensome regulatory regime. It was a practice that served people’s legitimate economic needs; the law simply had not caught up to reality.³⁰

Yet, as historians and social scientists have emphasized in recent years, creating a rigid dichotomy between formal and informal sectors obscures the many ways legal and extralegal activities were intertwined.³¹ In the Baratillo, untaxed and irregular goods mixed with patently illicit ones. Stolen jewelry and clothes, counterfeit coins, illegal arms, seditious books, and new and used manufactured goods of all kinds circulated alongside one another in the market. The distinction between the antisocial and the merely extralegal breaks down in the Baratillo’s dense warren of stands, tables, and ambulatory vendors.

Colonial authorities frequently complained that the Baratillo was a distribution point for stolen goods. Although pilfered items of every kind made their way into the market, stolen clothing was especially common. Clothes were expensive in New Spain, due to the high cost of textile production there, and one could convert them into cash easily by pawning or selling them.³² The Baratillo was a particularly attractive place for thieves looking to unload stolen clothes. In an 1814 case, police apprehended a nineteen-year-old Indian named Francisco Pineda from the village of Cuautitlán, located about twenty-five kilometers northwest of Mexico City, for his role in the robbery of three Indians. Pineda and his accomplices stole seven or eight pesos from their victims, along with their clothes and bedsheets, “leaving them to go naked to their village.” Authorities caught Pineda the next day as he sold one of the stolen sheets in the Baratillo. He was wearing the shirt and underpants of one victim when the police found him, suggesting that the thieves sought not only cash but also the clothes themselves. Pineda received a punishment of 200 lashes and eight years of labor at a fort in Acapulco.³³

In another case, from 1819, Ángel Ramírez, an indio ladino (or Indian fluent in Spanish) and Victoriano Sánchez, a Spaniard, were charged with breaking into a woman’s home and stealing four black tunics, three shawls, a shirt, and a tablecloth. The police caught the men as they attempted to sell some of the clothes to a trader in the Baratillo for ten pesos. Ramírez assured the authorities of his innocence, claiming that he was selling the clothes on behalf of another man, a common defense. Sánchez, for his part, claimed he was in the Baratillo not because he was involved in any crime, “but rather to find a woman named Guadalupe whom he says he had seen pass through the Baratillo around this time, because he needed to see her”—an explanation the police quickly dismissed.³⁴

These cases illustrate how Mexico City’s shadow economy transcended ethnic divisions, bringing individuals from diverse backgrounds together in the business of illicit commerce. They also reveal the geographic reach of that trade, which drew in people like Pineda, who lived in the capital’s hinterlands.³⁵ And they hint at the important social role the Baratillo played in the city. More than just a place to buy and sell, it was a point where men and women from across the city and beyond also gathered to gossip, flirt, and exchange ideas. Authorities worried about those types of interactions, too. Colonial officials repeatedly complained that the Baratillo attracted an unholy mélange that engaged in illicit transactions that extended beyond trading in stolen goods.

The Baratillo also attracted vendors who businesses violated moral and religious laws. Prostitutes gathered there, and, authorities complained, “under the shadow of darkness, sins of sensuality” abounded.³⁶ The market attracted other vices, too, such as gambling, which colonial authorities repeatedly outlawed.³⁷ On a number of occasions, vendors in the Baratillo came before Mexico’s Inquisition for crimes against the faith. In 1751, the mestiza María del Castillo appeared before the tribunal for practicing witchcraft in the Baratillo Chico—using her supposed powers to save people’s souls, make them fall in love, improve their luck in cockfights, “and other such stupidities.”³⁸ As the location of a number of bookshops, the Baratillo Grande was an emporium of dangerous ideas. In 1768, a Spanish poet went before the Inquisition for writing, publishing, and selling a “libelous ballad” criticizing the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish America the previous year.³⁹ In 1791, the Tribunal accused another Spanish bookseller in the Baratillo of “propositions,” for telling people that monks and friars served no purpose.⁴⁰ To their critics, the baratilleros trafficked not only in pilfered goods but also in seditious thought and moral perversions.

Yet, even as authorities prosecuted some economic exchanges in the Baratillo vigorously, they condoned others. The mere act of collecting rent from vendors in the Baratillo, which the Ayuntamiento did throughout the market’s history, conferred a degree of legitimacy on its businesses. Officials also participated directly in extralegal activities in the Baratillo by accepting gratificaciones, the tips or bribes that vendors paid local officials to transfer ownership of a business in the plaza and expedite other bureaucratic processes.⁴¹ On at least one occasion, officials contradicted standing prohibitions of the Baratillo by acknowleding the baratilleros’ right to practice their trade. In 1777, the regidor (city councilman) Don Thomás Fernández sought to remove the the baratilleros who trafficked in used iron goods in the Plaza Mayor. His argument was the familiar one: its vendors were selling keys, nails, knives, and other implements that servants had stolen from their masters’ homes, in addition to prohibited weapons. This activity gave rise to “drunkenness, stupidity, and other vices” from which the “miserable people” suffered. Fernández acknowledged that the trade in stolen goods required both vendors and customers, and the latter were far from innocent, because they bought “knowing that those pieces [had been] stolen.”⁴² Fernández’s complaint resulted in a new ordinance, in May 1778, from the fiel ejecutoría, the branch of the Ayuntamiento responsible for enforcing consumer laws, stating that the sale of new or used iron in the Baratillo was a violation of guild regulations.⁴³

Yet the city stopped short of removing the vendors’ mesillas altogether, as Fernández had wanted. In fact, the plaza judge determined, in a June 1785 report, that doing so would violate King Philip III’s original 1611 decree granting petty vendors the right to practice their commerce in the Plaza Mayor and the Mexico City Ayuntamiento the authority to collect rent from them. Municipal officials, the judge concluded, would have to find new ways of preventing the “inconveniences” these vendors caused. He added, with a note of resignation, that “even if the puestos and mesillas are exterminated, with the hardware, iron, and tin shops remaining open, the evil-doers will never lack a place to buy and sell” their stolen goods.⁴⁴