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in the market each day, where stolen goods were available at irresistibly low prices. In other words, there was significant popular demand for the Baratillo’s offerings.⁷³

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

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

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

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

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

      CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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