Black Market Capital: Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City
304
Black Market Capital: Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City
304Paperback(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520293687 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2018 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
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.
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. 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. 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. 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." 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 fromreturning 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. 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.
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. In Spain, however, a town's central plaza had long doubled as administrative center and marketplace. Situating the marketplace within eyesight of local authorities made it easier to oversee. 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. 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.
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 andtwo 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, openair 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 segregationaccompanied 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. 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.
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