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revenues—the existing arrangement. The plan also called for the elimination of gratificaciones—tips that vendors paid market officials to facilitate the sale or transfer of market stalls and other bureaucratic processes. Finally, Gálvez’s plan demanded that the city remove the movable stands that were blocking the entrances to the Parián and the ambulatory vendors who clogged the passageways between the market stands in the plaza.⁴¹

      The Ayuntamiento found the plan distressing. Its members claimed that the salary Gálvez proposed for the regidor (councilman) who held the plaza judge post amounted to a significant pay cut. They also warned the Crown of the impact the changes would have on impoverished street vendors. They even included in their response written complaints from vendors in and around the plaza who predicted that the changes would lead to their “extinction.”⁴² The aldermen emphasized that Mexico City was not Madrid, and the Crown could not simply transpose Spanish laws onto New Spain: “the constitution, the customs, and even the laws of this country are different from those of Spanish cities,” they argued.⁴³ This line of reasoning—that what was good for Spain was not necessarily good for Mexico—was one the Ayuntamiento used repeatedly in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Crown’s reforms were an attack on the sovereignty of the local government and a threat to the livelihoods of the Creole elites who participated in the often-lucrative business of colonial government. Those families had strong incentives to maintain the existing structure of local government, including its market system.

      The baratilleros may have engaged in a nefarious trade, but they also paid rent to the Ayuntamiento, and revenue, regardless of its source, was something royal and local governments alike welcomed. Although the Baratillo was not the market that provided the largest tax revenues (typically the Parián was), its contribution was far from negligible. In 1791, the city collected a total of 7,146 pesos from the stands located in the Baratillo Grande and in the Plaza Mayor—just under 5 percent of the Ayuntamiento’s gross revenue that year.⁴⁴ The Ayuntamiento suffered from frequent budget shortfalls and its members were loath to eliminate any asset that generated revenue.⁴⁵ Indeed, when officials at Mexico City’s cathedral, located just off the Plaza Mayor, sought to remove the Baratillo from the square in 1729 because of the “public sins” that people regularly committed there, the Ayuntamiento invoked its jurisdiction over the Plaza Mayor and blocked the proposal.⁴⁶

      Frictions between royal and municipal authorities help explain the Baratillo’s persistence during a period of ambitious urban renewal projects. Members of the Ayuntamiento resisted royal efforts to limit the body’s autonomy and curtail the income that their positions afforded them, which sometimes led them to defend institutions as unsavory as the Baratillo. Furthermore, because the market produced significant revenues for the city, the Spanish Crown may not have been eager to do away with it, either, as it wanted to ensure that its most important American city was a fiscally sound one. Even if some reformers sought to dramatically reengineer Mexico City society in the eighteenth century, not every colonial official, and especially not the members of the Ayuntamiento, was on board with those plans. Tensions between local and royal authorities continued to rise before coming to a head under New Spain’s most ambitious Bourbon viceroy, the Second Count of Revillagigedo.

      REVILLAGIGEDO II AND THE APOGEE OF REFORM

      More than any other viceroy of New Spain, Revillagigedo II, who governed from 1789 to 1794, was determined to transform the seat of his jurisdiction into a model of Enlightened urban planning.⁴⁷ Soon after arriving in the capital, he set in motion a series of administrative changes and public works projects. The scope of Revillagigedo’s reforms was sweeping. He began extending the ordered grid of the traza to the city’s outlying barrios (see figure 5), minted new coins, and established new regulations on taverns and gambling. He even limited the number of times church bells could ring.⁴⁸ Revillagigedo fixated on the unsanitary conditions of the city’s public thoroughfares and plazas, picking up the paving project that his predecessors had begun decades before and implementing a property tax that provided a faster and more reliable revenue stream to fund it.⁴⁹ Although local elites’ frustrations with royal authorities had been brewing for decades, Revillagigedo’s term brought a significant escalation of those tensions. The viceroy made unilateral decisions that the Mexico City Ayuntamiento believed drained local resources and posed an existential threat to its autonomy. The project that most incensed local officials was his transformation of the Plaza Mayor.

FIGURE 5. Ignacio Castera, Plano ichnographico de la Ciudad de Mexico …, 1794. Castera was Mexico City’s chief architect and the mastermind behind many of Revillagigedo’s public works projects. This map, which is oriented toward the east, shows Castera’s plan to extend the traza beyond the traditional city center, integrating indigenous barrios and some of Mexico City’s hinterlands into the urban grid. The text on the left side of the map discusses how the project will lead to the “correction and extirpation of crimes in the Barrios” by opening up alleys and dead-end streets. Library of Congress.

      Upon arriving in Mexico in 1789, the viceroy expressed horror at the state of the plaza that lay in front of his palace. The reforms of previous Bourbon viceroys had failed to turn the Plaza Mayor into a respectable space. The square, in his estimation, was “a confused labyrinth of huts, pigsties, and matted shelters … inside of which evildoers could easily hide themselves, day or night, and commit the most horrible crimes.” In full view of the viceroyalty’s highest authorities were open latrines where both men and women took care of their “corporal needs.” Officials routinely removed drunkards who had passed out in the street so stagecoaches did not run them over. Worse still, “with too much frequency, under the shadow of darkness, sins of sensuality were witnessed in the doorways, corners, and cemeteries [surrounding the Plaza Mayor], to the extent that the Fathers considered closing off the atrium in order to avoid sacrileges in the doorways of their Church.” In sum, “all of this made the Plaza so disgusting, and a sight so abominable, that no decent person dared enter it without an urgent motive.”⁵⁰

      Within months of his arrival in Mexico, Revillagigedo began a two-pronged effort to modernize the distribution of basic staples in the city and transform the Plaza Mayor. To accomplish those goals, he ordered that the city’s main food market move from the Plaza Mayor into the adjacent Plaza del Volador. The only market that would remain in the central square was the Parián. The remainder of the plaza would be cleared of all its tables and stands and left for a more dignified public to stroll through at its leisure. The formal process of relocating the food market began on December 14, 1789, when the Ayuntamiento signed a contract to rent the Plaza del Volador from its owner, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca (the descendants of Hernán Cortés) for five years at a cost of 2,500 pesos per year.⁵¹ This was a steep increase in spending for the municipal government, which owned the Plaza Mayor and thus did not have to pay rent to operate a market there. Over the next two years, the Ayuntamiento, under orders from the viceroy, spent nearly 44,000 pesos paving the Plaza del Volador with cobblestones and building fountains, cajones, puestos, and portable stands. In January 1792, the new marketplace began operation.⁵²

      Revillagigedo sought to make the Plaza del Volador marketplace the kind of clean, organized, and efficient market that authorities had tried in vain to create in the Plaza Mayor since the 1690s. To that end, he ordered the drafting of an expansive new set of regulations for the city’s public markets in 1791. These were as significant as the construction projects themselves because they continued to be in force decades after Revillagigedo’s term as viceroy had ended—indeed, long after Mexico’s independence from Spain.⁵³ The rules specified that the Volador market contain rows separated according to the type of product sold and banned all forms of cooking. They also created additional levels of oversight for both the main market and the satellite markets in the outlying barrios that had been under construction intermittently since the 1770s.⁵⁴ The plaza judge would continue to oversee the daily operations of the main market and arbitrate disputes that arose within it. Beneath him would be an administrador, or rent collector, who would earn 1,200 pesos per year. Finally, the

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