Black Market Capital - Andrew Konove

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rent of as much as twelve thousand pesos.”71 Revillagigedo had also raised rents for the cajones and puestos of the new market, provoking an outcry from vendors in 1792, and, the Ayuntamiento argued, ultimately increasing costs for the city’s consumers.72 The complainants also objected to the viceroy’s stipulation that the puestos could never return to the plaza, foreclosing the possibility that the city could raise additional revenue in the future from that space. The Ayuntamiento argued that the entire Plaza Mayor project was pointless, since the puestos that were constructed in the Volador were exactly the same as the original ones in the Plaza Mayor, except that they now had roofs made of tejamanil (wooden shingles) instead of blankets, ultimately leaving the new market just as vulnerable to fire as its predecessor. Indeed, one had already broken out in May 1794.73

      The viceroy’s public works projects brought the long-simmering tensions between local and peninsular authorities to a boil. In the years immediately preceding Revillagigedo’s term, the Crown had stepped up its efforts to chip away at the autonomy of local institutions in the Americas and subject their finances to greater scrutiny by royal authorities. The 1786 establishment of intendancies, in particular, eroded local control by creating a new layer of royal administration throughout New Spain. In the same year, the Crown established the Junta Superior de Real Hacienda, yet another royal body charged with overseeing municipal finances in New Spain.74 With the creation of that entity, the Council of the Indies ordered that all of the viceroyalty’s ayuntamientos submit budgets to royal authorities for review. The Mexico City Ayuntamiento refused. It took a decree from the king himself in 1797 for the Ayuntamiento to comply.75

      For members of the Ayuntamiento, Revillagigedo’s reforms, particularly the public works projects, were a step too far. What most frustrated local elites was that Revillagigedo refused to let the city participate in the decision-making process. Rather than consult with the Ayuntamiento, Revillagigedo relied on outside experts (peritos) in planning the projects. There was no transparency in the bidding or construction process; the viceroy gave orders verbally rather than in writing, an “extrajudicial” process, the Ayuntamiento claimed, and nobody knew how much the projects would cost until the money was already spent.76 Furthermore, the viceroy had intervened in the city’s most proprietary sphere of influence and the source of a large part of its annual income: its public markets.77 Ever since 1609, when the Crown deeded the Plaza Mayor to the Ayuntamiento so it could establish a market there, that space had played a central role in how the Ayuntamiento managed the city.

      In its case against the viceroy, the Ayuntamiento pitched itself as the body that had the interests of the broader public in mind. Some projects, the juicio claimed, were “useless and not at all necessary for the public; others were, on the contrary, quite detrimental.” Throughout the juicio de residencia, the Ayuntamiento argued that Revillagigedo’s reforms were harmful for Mexico City’s general population, especially its poorest members, and questioned the “public utility” of projects like sidewalks and curbs—employing the same Enlightenment vocabulary Bourbon reformers used to justify their public works projects.78 Members of the Ayuntamiento objected to Revillagigedo’s description of the Plaza as a “latrine,” countering that “the Plaza was not in such decadence as he wants it to appear, and every class of people moved comfortably about it.”79 The heterogeneity of the Plaza Mayor markets, according to this argument, was one of the greatest assets of the space. It offered something for everyone.80 In the juicio de residencia, Mexico City’s Creole elites expressed their resentment for peninsular interference in local affairs, and for the entire Europeanizing project that Revillagigedo and other Spanish viceroys sought to realize in Mexico City.81 They disputed the notion that their city could or should become a laboratory for Enlightenment ideas, asking: “Because things have been done in Spain and other cities in Europe … should the same be done in the Americas?” Their answer to this rhetorical question was a resounding no: “The practice[s] that [are] observed in Madrid and in other capitals of Europe are not adaptable to Mexico.”82

      CONCLUSION

      Revillagigedo’s reforms left a significant imprint on Mexico City. Above all, he transformed the city’s main plaza from a site that had hosted a diverse commerce in foodstuffs and new and used goods into the kind of orderly, dignified space that the Spanish Crown had sought to create since the end of the seventeenth century. The removal of the Baratillo and the food markets from the Plaza Mayor marked the first time in Mexico City’s history that the retail activities of the rich and poor were physically separated from one another. By 1795, the main square housed only the commerce of the Parián—without the disreputable Baratillo Grande in its center patio—and the shops in the archways that lined its southern and western sides. Merchants who sold goods that lay beyond the reach of the vast majority of Mexico City’s population occupied those spaces. Food vendors now had their own market in the adjacent Plaza del Volador while the market for second-hand goods was relegated to the periphery of the old traza. The process of creating a refashioned, respectable public space at the heart of the viceregal capital did not begin with Revillagigedo or even the Bourbon dynasty. The effort to transform the Plaza Mayor into a safer, more beautiful, and more lucrative commercial space for the local government began in the wake of the 1692 riot with the decision to eradicate the Baratillo and construct the alcaicería, and continued in fits and starts throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, Revillagigedo’s efforts were more ambitious than those of his predecessors, and their impact on the urban geography was significant.

      Like the urban renewal projects that previous viceroys had spearheaded, however, Revillagigedo failed to accomplish all, or even most, of what he set out to do. By the end of his term, the paving project, begun decades earlier, was still not finished, and the straightening of city streets beyond the traza had barely begun. His attempts to reform the city’s market administration were not much more successful. The masonry market in the Plaza del Factor was never built. A fire had broken out in the Plaza del Volador market even before Revillagigedo left office, and the owner of the plaza, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca, was so dissatisfied with its arrangement with the city that the family threatened not to renew the Ayuntamiento’s lease on the land in 1807, nearly forcing the government to relocate the city’s principal food market.83 Although Revillagigedo had successfully cleared the Plaza Mayor of its ramshackle wooden stalls, some vendors continued to defy the ban on selling there. In 1794, officials complained that shoe sellers and other vendors were peddling their wares in the plaza at night, after the doors to the Parián had closed for the evening.84 Moving the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor produced a litany of complaints from neighbors and vendors alike, as officials struggled to suppress a troublesome nighttime market on the streets surrounding the plaza.85 Nor did the reorganization of the city’s markets seem to have the desired effect on municipal revenues: Revillagigedo’s successor, the viceroy Marquis of Branciforte, worried in a letter from September 1795 that “most of the cajones of the Parián have been abandoned” due to the disappearance of the “crowd of people that for so many years that site attracted.”86

      The Bourbon Reforms, like those of their Habsburg predecessors, failed to realize their objective of reengineering Mexico City’s principal public spaces in the eighteenth century because they encountered opposition from various quarters—not only from popular groups but also other elites, who, for reasons both personal and political, took issue with those projects. The fault lines in those struggles often formed between peninsular and local authorities who had very different prerogatives when it came to urban governance. There were also significant conflicts within those groups: while the Crown ultimately supported Revillagigedo in his juicio de residencia, which concluded only after his death, it had opposed many of his initiatives during his time as viceroy due to their high cost.87 In Mexico City, Bourbon reforms to public administration and the built environment did not represent a coherent program that elites imposed upon the poor; rather, they constituted a diverse set of policy prescriptions and projects that were as controversial among elites as they were among the popular classes.

      Those tensions played out in the Baratillo and on the streets of the eighteenth-century city, where both the governing elite’s ambivalence about the market and the vendors’ strategies for resisting policies that adversely affected them come into

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