Black Market Capital - Andrew Konove

Скачать книгу

paid 15 pesos per month and provided with uniforms of blue wool, black collars, and white buttons. The Reglamento specified, for the first time, the responsibilities of the plaza judge, which had previously been dictated by custom and the desires and abilities of the officeholder.55 The regulations were also printed, adding another layer of formality and permanence.

      Revillagigedo’s Reglamento also banned the practice of the traspaso—the transfer of a cajón from one merchant to another. This institution had existed for as long as there were markets in the Plaza Mayor and involved traders paying guantes (fees) to merchants to obtain the right to their space in the plaza, and gratificaciones to municipal market officials to facilitate those exchanges.56 Revillagigedo sought to formalize this process by forcing merchants to go through official channels to transfer their stands to other vendors, leaving the occupant with a license issued by the Ayuntamiento—a written record.57 The viceroy also sought to make the process of obtaining market stalls fairer, declaring that the spaces occupied by movable stands would now be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.58 Revillagigedo probably objected to the traspaso because it was done off the books, making it more difficult for the government to oversee, and because gratificaciones lined the pockets of individual officials while depriving the government of fees.

      The Ayuntamiento sought to enforce the traspaso ban soon after it went into effect but ran into fierce resistance from the Consulado, the exclusive guild of overseas merchants. The Consulado argued that the prohibition conflicted with the government’s stated goal of promoting free trade (comercio libre), as the system of guantes and gratificaciones helped smooth the cumbersome process of legally transferring rights to a market stall.59 The merchants appear to have prevailed in the long run, as the practice resurfaces in documents from the early nineteenth century.60 Indeed, many of Revillagigedo’s innovations would prove difficult to implement or sustain because they encountered entrenched opposition from various quarters.

      THE BARATILLO MOVES TO THE PLAZA DEL FACTOR

      The Baratillo survived the sweeping transformation of the Plaza Mayor because of the combined efforts of municipal officials and the market’s vendors. Revillagigedo made no mention of the Baratillo in his initial plans for the redesign of the Plaza Mayor—a surprising omission, given that the market embodied many of the attributes he found most detestable about the space. The construction, however, must have displaced the Baratillo Chico when the government cleared all of the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in late 1789. That market all but vanishes from the historical record until the summer of 1792, when a document reveals that it had moved to the Plaza de las Vizcaínas, located in the far southwestern corner of the city.61 It remained there only temporarily; a year later a plan surfaced to relocate the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor, located a few blocks northwest of the Plaza Mayor, in the present-day site of Mexico City’s legislative assembly.

Konove

      The Ayuntamiento’s desire for revenue led it to relocate the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor. The original plan for that plaza, which emerged in May 1791, was to build a stone marketplace in the square as part of an ongoing effort to create neighborhood food markets in peripheral areas of the city.62 By August 1792, however, the Ayuntamiento had run out of money for the project and decided to sell the stones from the half-built structure in order to help pay for wooden stands instead. The proceeds still left the city short of the funds it needed to finish the now more modest project and it was only able to complete it after receiving an 8,000-peso loan from a local convent.63 Municipal market officials and Mexico City’s corregidor, Bernardo Bonavía, decided that moving the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor was a better financial decision for the city than putting a food market there. Bonavía ordered “that the Baratillo be transferred to the [Plaza del Factor] in order to populate it … [as] the movement of the Baratillo will attract with it the transfer of other puestos [and] I do not doubt that greater rents will be achieved in the Plaza del Factor.”64 The superintendent of propios and arbitrios and the viceroy agreed, and the move was authorized in August 1793.65 Local and royal officials thus saw the Baratillo not as an intolerable nuisance but as an important source of revenue, even a driver of neighborhood economic development.

      By this point, only the occupants of the former Baratillo Chico had moved to the Plaza del Factor. After reorganizing the Plaza Mayor, Viceroy Revillagigedo initially allowed the vendors of the Baratillo Grande to remain in the central patio of the Parián. But then, in March 1794, the viceroy announced a new project to rebuild that space.66 Officials relocated the occupants of the Baratillo Grande to the Plazuela de Jesús and the catty-cornered Plazuela de la Paja, a few blocks south of the Plaza Mayor. But vendors disliked the location, so, in August 1794, a group of fourteen men who sold in the Plaza del Factor wrote to the superintendent of propios and arbitrios asking that the authorities amend the “distance and disunion” between their Baratillo and the one located across town. Appealing to “both Majesties,” temporal and spiritual, the baratilleros offered a sophisticated and compelling case that merging the two markets served the best interests of the public. The superintendent consented to the baratilleros’ request and by 1796 the Baratillo was once again a single institution, now located in the Plaza del Factor.67 It was the first of several times that the vendors of the Baratillo would play a role in determining where their market would be located.

      By the mid-1790s the Plaza Mayor had become the clean, orderly, and, above all, respectable commercial center of Mexico City that colonial officials had sought to create for over one hundred years (see figure 6). No used clothing or iron vendors, nor any of the fruit and vegetable, prepared food, or pulque stands that used to clutter the city’s main square were in sight. It had become a plaza de armas—a vast open space where the army, stationed in New Spain since the 1760s, could offer public displays of the king’s power for his subjects. Religious officials in the capital were ecstatic about the changes the viceroy had brought: “In fewer than four years, the policing of the city was perfected such that even the most sophisticated cities of Europe do not surpass it,” they wrote.68 The viceroy’s improvements, however, did not sit as well with the Creole elites who controlled the Mexico City Ayuntamiento.

Konove

      THE AYUNTAMIENTO TAKES THE VICEROY TO COURT

      Members of the Ayuntamiento were furious about the viceroy’s meddling in local affairs. They complained that the municipal government was responsible for paying for and executing the viceroy’s projects but had no say in their design.69 The cost, scope, and, above all, the unilateral nature of Revillagigedo’s reforms so angered Ayuntamiento members that they brought a formal complaint against him in January 1795, shortly after he had left office. The juicio de residencia, as the proceeding was called, raised dozens of grievances against the viceroy for undertaking public works projects and enacting fiscal reforms that placed a great financial strain on the city and went against the interests of its residents. The ideas were poorly conceived, the Ayuntamiento argued, and money did not go toward solving the most pressing needs.70

      No project riled municipal officials more than the renovation of the Plaza Mayor and the relocation of the city’s principal marketplace. Indeed, the Ayuntamiento’s first accusation in the juicio was that the construction of the new market in the Plaza del Volador “has deprived the City of those fat profits that it earned

Скачать книгу