Black Market Capital - Andrew Konove

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brought the French system of intendancies to Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century and then to New Spain in 1786. In 1782, they divided Mexico City into eight cuarteles mayores, each comprised of four cuarteles menores, appointing officials to oversee each subsection of the city.24 These changes attacked what the Bourbons saw as a haphazard structure of government that the Habsburgs had fostered over the centuries. Tighter control over their territories, they believed, would lead to greater tax revenues.

      In New Spain, Bourbon authorities also embarked on ambitious urban renewal projects, turning the viceregal capital into a laboratory for Enlightened urban planning. Some of these innovations put Mexico City at the vanguard of the Atlantic World: the city was building sidewalks around the same time as Paris and well before Madrid, for example.25 However, those public works projects did not always form part of the larger, metropolitan project of increasing tax revenues. Rather, they were often the prerogatives of individual viceroys and, at times, were at odds with the interests of the Spanish Crown because they incurred significant costs and produced no new revenue streams. In 1792, for example, the Crown demanded that Viceroy Revillagigedo II immediately cease his street-paving project because it had run grossly over budget.26 The Mexico City Ayuntamiento, the body charged with both funding and implementing many of these infrastructure projects, also pushed back—sometimes forcefully. Its members viewed efforts by the Crown and the viceroys to rationalize city finances and remake the city’s built environment as an attack on the traditional autonomy of the local government.27 Thus, the Bourbon Reforms did not constitute a single, coherent project but a series of individual ones, with different objectives and sources of support that produced conflict more often than consensus. Far from a single entity with a common goal, the eighteenth-century colonial state consisted of multiple institutions and many competing interests.28

      Mexico City’s public marketplaces were sites where those conflicts played out. Markets were among the Ayuntamiento’s most prized possessions. They contributed as much as 50 percent of the local government’s annual tax receipts during the colonial era, leading members of the Ayuntamiento to zealously defend their jurisdiction over these valuable municipal assets.29 But royal authorities, including viceroys and Crown officials based in Spain, saw marketplaces as ripe for reform. They viewed the city’s markets as disorderly and visually unappealing and as public assets that, with some changes, could produce even more income for the local government, helping to wean it off the Crown’s support. Royal authorities had been trying to shore up the Mexico City Ayuntamiento’s finances for more than a century. Indeed, ceding the Plaza Mayor to the Ayuntamiento in the early seventeenth century was a step toward this goal: the Crown transferred control of the square specifically so the city could generate income for its operations by renting space to vendors and shopkeepers.30

      In the eighteenth century, Bourbon authorities implemented new layers of royal supervision over the Ayuntamiento’s finances, which incensed the Creole elites who dominated the body.31 In 1708, King Philip V created a new position, the superintendent of propios and arbitrios.32 Similar to the co­­rregidor, the superintendent, who would be a member of Mexico’s Audiencia, was a royal official whom the Crown charged with supervising local affairs, in this case the Ayuntamiento’s financial dealings. Then, in the 1740s, Bourbon officials professionalized the position of rent collector for the Plaza Mayor markets. The Ayuntamiento had outsourced that job since 1694, putting the contract out for multiyear bids. The practice was not unusual: the Spanish employed this form of contracting, known as the asiento, for everything from collecting tribute to managing the transatlantic slave trade. Upon the death of Francisco Cameros, who held the asiento from 1694 until his death in 1741, Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón, the superintendent of propios and arbitrios, sought to end the outsourcing of this job, noting that Cameros had administered the plaza “without having put in place rule or method.”33 He demanded that the Ayuntamiento take control of rent collection itself by choosing from its own members a juez de plaza (plaza judge) for the Plaza Mayor markets. In theory, the order gave the Ayuntamiento more direct control over its public marketplaces; but it did so in a way that also strengthened royal authorities’ oversight of the local government.34

      Municipal officials took a number of steps in the 1750s and 1760s to address Trespalacios y Escandón’s complaints about the Plaza Mayor: they ordered the stands’ sides and roofs removed, so that authorities could better monitor what was going on inside them, and cleared the markets’ internal passageways to improve the flow of people and goods. In 1753, the plaza judge banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in the Plaza Mayor—an effort to crack down on public drunkenness and the unruly behavior it provoked.35 But those efforts were short lived, and Trespalacios y Escandón ultimately found the Ayuntamiento’s management of the Plaza Mayor markets as unsatisfactory as Cameros’s. Upon inspecting the Plaza Mayor in 1760, the superintendent, still in his post, saw “complete confusion, all transit choked, and the whole area … filled with puestos [arranged] according to the desires” of each vendor. In that year, Trespalacios y Escandón unveiled a major redesign of the Plaza Mayor (see figures 3 and 4). Under the plan, occupants of the Baratillo Grande inside the Parián would no longer be allowed to live in their cajones, and the market’s dense alleyways would be converted into orderly streets. The puestos of the Plaza Mayor, located between the Parián and the viceregal palace, would be reorganized into neat rows separated by product. Vendors would no longer be permitted to congregate in front of the cathedral and palace. Finally, the Plaza Mayor would be paved with cobblestones so the area would not become submerged in mud during the rainy season.36

Konove

      Trespalacios y Escandón was overly optimistic about his ability to bring order to the Plaza Mayor markets. In 1769, one of the municipal rent collectors wrote to complain that the “vendedores volantes”—literally, “flying vendors,” or street vendors without fixed stalls—continued to operate in the plaza, making it impossible for him to keep an accurate count of all the merchants in the market, much less collect rent from them. These vendors appeared one day and then disappeared the next.37 By the 1770s, baratilleros, tortilla sellers, and other petty merchants had reoccupied the space in front of the palace and other locations where Trespalacios y Escandón had banned vending.38 The construction projects he ordered did not proceed according to schedule, either; the Plaza Mayor paving project remained incomplete in 1789 when Viceroy Revillagigedo II assumed his post.39

      The arrival of the royal inspector José de Gálvez brought additional scrutiny of the Ayuntamiento. Between 1765 and 1771, Gálvez toured New Spain and made a lengthy series of recommendations to the Spanish Crown for reforming the viceroyalty’s governing institutions.40 Like other Bourbon-era reforms, these were aimed at standardizing haphazard or informal practices and professionalizing public services that the local government had long outsourced to third parties. When it came to Mexico City’s market administration, Gálvez recommended that the municipal employee who served

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