LITMIR.BIZ

FIGURE 2. Detail of José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Plano de la Ymperial México con la nueva distribución de territorios parroquiales, 1769. Oriented toward the west, this map shows the two “Varatillos” in the eighteenth century: the Baratillo Grande, in the center patio of the Parián, and the Baratillo Chico in the Plaza Mayor, directly outside the Parián. Colección Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City.

      Composed of small jacales, or huts, in the central patio of the Parián, the Baratillo Grande offered a similarly broad range of merchandise as the Baratillo Chico, though with a greater selection of upscale items. Viera describes the clocks, glasses, “thousands of things made of silver,” swords, shields, firearms, harnesses, books, and “the finest fabrics” that one found there. Two of the aisles on the outer ring of the market housed shoe sellers who offered footwear “for both plebeians and the most polished people.”¹² That the Baratillo Grande sold wares for both wealthy and poorer consumers, and appears to have sold new in addition to used goods, means that at times it is difficult to separate it from the Parián itself in the historical record. Indeed, in many places, the Parián is referred to as the “Parián del Baratillo”—a combination that joined a term derived from the word “cheap” with the name of the city’s high-end emporium for imported goods from Asia and Europe.¹³ The juxtaposition speaks to the heterogeneity of the Plaza Mayor’s commerce, where, as one travel writer observed: “one sees two diametrically opposed extremes: supreme wealth and supreme poverty.”¹⁴ Despite the differences between the Baratillo Grande and Chico, relatively few writers in the eighteenth century distinguished between the two.

      Although Viera viewed the Baratillo as a colorful bazaar that offered something for everyone, other observers saw something more sinister. Some, like the author of the “Ordenanzas,” saw the Baratillo as a glaring example of the failures of New Spain’s sistema de castas, where miscegenation had created a vast mixed-race underclass that threatened the social stability of the city and viceroyalty. The author’s 377 “ordinances” depict an alternate universe where the castas reigned and the gachupines—a pejorative term for Spaniards—were ostracized. This perversion of colonial society had its own police, a Real Audiencia, and lawyers, doctors, and clergy. The Baratillo even had its own racial classification system, an inversion of the sistema de castas that mirrored Mexico’s monetary denominations. The system included the categories of half-Spaniard, quarter-Spaniard, tlaco de español (one-eighth Spaniard), and two, four, and eight cacaos of Spaniard. Here, Chreslos Jache satirizes the colonial monetary system, which included both silver coins (pesos and reales) and informal tokens (tlacos) and cacao beans, and suggests the racialized terms in which colonial subjects thought about money. Tlacos and cacao beans were seen as the currency of the multiracial and indigenous underclass, while the larger-denomination peso formed part of an ostensibly Spanish economy.¹⁵

      The “Ordenanzas” go on to explain how the Baratillo was governed by a brotherhood, which admitted Indians, Africans, and every possible combination of mixed-race people—anyone but Spaniards and their purebred offspring.¹⁶ The fictitious guild of the baratilleros (which, to the author’s horror, welcomed both men and women) did not just exclude Spaniards; it expressed revulsion toward them. In this author’s telling, Mexico’s Creoles bore much of the blame for Mexico’s degraded condition. They disdained work and diluted Spanish blood and culture by allowing non-Spanish women to wet-nurse their babies and by educating different races in the same schools.¹⁷ The “Ordenanzas” played to Spanish fears of racial degeneration—the idea that in the New World, Spanish domination and Spanishness itself were under threat from Indians, Africans, and castas.

      Of course, Chreslos Jache’s “Ordenanzas” was a work of satire, not ethnography. Nevertheless, other writers of the era saw similar depravities in the Baratillo. Hipólito Villarroel’s treatise, Enfermedades políticas que padece la capital de esta Nueva España, written between 1785 and 1787, dedicates a special section to the Baratillo. The author describes the market as “this cave or deposit for the petty theft that apprentices, artisans, maids, and household servants commit, and in sum all the plebeian people—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas that are allowed to live as inhabitants in this city.” Villarroel’s diatribe suggests that the Baratillo was a melting pot for Mexico’s non-Spanish population—a site where the colony’s poor blended together into a homogeneous and threatening mass. The ínfima plebe, the term Villarroel and his contemporaries employed for this multiracial underclass, “is composed of different castas that have procreated the links between the Spaniard, Indian, and Black; but confusing in this way his first origin, such that now there are no voices to explain and distinguish between these classes of people that make up the greatest number of inhabitants of the kingdom.” The poor of New Spain, he went on, “form a monster of so many species that [comprise] the inferior castes, to which are added infinite Spaniards, Europeans, and Creoles, lost and vulgarized with poverty and idleness.”¹⁸ Poor Spaniards, a regular presence in the Baratillo, only heightened those anxieties, as their existence further eroded racial hierarchies.¹⁹

      Church officials, too, found much to dislike in the Baratillo. A number of them wrote in support of Viceroy Revillagigedo II’s decision to remove the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in 1789, whose sight, they complained, had “tormented our eyes” before the viceroy reorganized the markets. From their perspective, the Baratillo was a place where “people went naked, others stole to fuel their wickedness, [and] homicides were frequent. It seems as if we are talking about a city without Religion or a King or Government, but all this happened in the Plaza Mayor of the Metropolis of the most Christian North America, in the great Mexico.” The Baratillo’s bad reputation, they worried, extended far and wide: “In all the Kingdom it was known what went on in that place.”²⁰ In sum, for many eighteenth-century observers, the Baratillo was a hub of criminality and oppositional culture—an obstacle to order, reason, and good governance.

      THE BOURBONS REFORM MEXICO CITY’S MARKETS

      Even though Mexico City’s Bourbon authorities received a litany of complaints about the Baratillo, they did little to address them. They did not make any concerted attempt to enforce the prohibitions that Habsburg rulers had issued throughout the seventeenth century. Nor do they appear to have issued any new decrees banning the Baratillo.²¹ Indeed, eighteenth-century authorities were decidedly ambivalent about the Baratillo. The instructions that the viceroy Duke of Linares left to his successor in 1716 capture their indecisiveness. Upon leaving office that year, Linares warned the Duke of Arión: “There is in the Plaza of Mexico a traffic prohibited by law or decree that is so problematic that ending it has been a great challenge for me, being that what is stolen [in the city] is sold there, only disguised. In this way many articles are sold, especially to Indians or hicks, as scoundrels are called here, who are readily provided with the trinkets they need.”²² Faced with this dilemma, Linares found himself unable to render a decision: “I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it,” he wrote, finally, leaving his successor “with the door open to provide what he determines most convenient.”²³ The Baratillo may have been an entrepôt for stolen goods, but the city’s poor depended on those products, and the viceroy was not eager to take them away.

      Making sense of Bourbon-era authorities’ relative uninterest in the Baratillo, particularly compared to the attention New Spain’s Habsburg rulers paid the market during the seventeenth century, requires understanding the nature of the Bourbon Reforms, which involved multiple and often competing objectives. The Spanish Crown, for its part, focused on increasing revenue. Officials sought to accomplish this goal by establishing government monopolies, raising taxes on various types of transactions, and promoting trade across the Spanish Empire. They also sought to rationalize and centralize the Spanish government, first on the Iberian Peninsula and then in Spain’s overseas possessions. They professionalized administrative positions that the Crown had previously

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