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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

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