LITMIR.BIZ

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

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

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

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

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

      A PLACE TO REMEDY THEIR MISERY

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

      Throughout the Baratillo’s history, Mexico City residents’ disdain for the market was tempered by their sympathy for its vendors and customers. Those conflicting sentiments are apparent in the deliberations that took place in 1689, after the Crown asked Galve and the Audiencia for advice on what to do about the market. On November 14, 1689, the members of the Audiencia weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the Baratillo before ultimately deciding to disband it. The report opens by describing the market as a place where the poor could “remedy their misery” by selling their “little jewels and cheap trinkets.” It was an institution where, they observed, the “immense number of needy” in New Spain found recourse for their poverty.⁷²

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