LITMIR.BIZ

      Shadow Economics

      The Baratillo has existed since time immemorial…. It is clearly and manifestly in the common good.

      JOSEPH RAMÍREZ, Diego Rufino and others to Corregidor Nuño Núñez de Villavicencio, October 16, 1706

      ON JANUARY 13, 1724, JUAN DE DIOS ANZURES, a lawyer writing on behalf of a group of shopkeepers in the Plaza Mayor, complained to the viceroy of New Spain that baratilleros and ambulatory vendors were wreaking havoc on their businesses. The vendors peddled items such as imported British linen and silver plate, goods that Dios Anzures claimed only Mexico City’s exclusive merchant guild—the Consulado—had the authority to trade. He reminded the viceroy that royal decrees from the previous century had banned the Baratillo, and in any case, it was supposed to be the marketplace for second-hand clothing, not new products from Castile and China. Worse still, the baratilleros engaged in outright fraud, “selling one thing for another.” They peddled less expensive maná, or plant oil, for olive oil, and the cheaper Guayaquil cacao for one of the superior varieties from Maracaibo or Caracas. In this manner, “they adulterate everything in order to increase their ill-gotten gain.” Dios Anzures pleaded with the viceroy to end those abuses once and for all. His efforts, like others that targeted the Baratillo in the late colonial era, gained little traction.¹

      This chapter moves from the elite debates about urban public space that the previous chapter analyzed to an examination of the quotidian transactions that unfolded in the Baratillo. The Baratillo was the hub of Mexico City’s shadow economy, where circuits of second-hand, stolen, counterfeit, and contraband goods converged and, on occasion, became visible to authorities. This trade undermined established players in the local economy, especially middling shopkeepers and artisans. But it also created unlikely bedfellows, linking baratilleros to overseas traders and government officials. Although observers frequently depicted the Baratillo as the exclusive domain of the underclass, the market in fact served a range of actors—from the most humble to the most privileged. Elites, working people, and members of the city’s often-overlooked middle sectors made their living or provisioned their households in the Baratillo.²

      The baratilleros turned the market’s broad appeal to their advantage. Employing the political vernacular of the day, they defended the Baratillo’s relevance to urban society and the local economy and asserted their right to practice their trade on the city’s streets and plazas. Their actions show that the Baratillo was not just a vital economic institution in eighteenth-century Mexico City; it was also a key site for political expression and negotiation. The Baratillo survived the colonial era because it offered material benefits to many residents of the capital and because its vendors conveyed that fact to authorities.

      In reconstructing the circuits of exchange that intersected in the Baratillo, this chapter challenges some of the binaries that scholars have employed to understand urban economies. In the Baratillo, distinctions between legal and illegal commerce blurred. Products that modern-day social scientists might classify as “informal” because they were untaxed or evaded regulation mixed indiscriminately with stolen and other illicit merchandise. If the boundaries between legal and illegal commerce were ambiguous, government officials helped make them so. Although the Baratillo was technically prohibited in the eighteenth century since no one had rescinded the seventeenth-century decrees that had banned the market, local officials continued to collect rents from its vendors and adjudicate disputes among them. Thus, despite widespread fears that crime in late-colonial Mexico City was on the rise, state agents played a key role in sustaining the black market.

      THE BARATILLO IN THE ECONOMY OF LATE-COLONIAL MEXICO CITY

      The Baratillo occupied one of the bottom rungs of colonial Mexico City’s commercial hierarchy. At the top of the pyramid were the import merchants with membership in the Consulado. These were Spaniards who often arrived in Mexico with little money but managed to ascend through the merchant ranks by first working in, and then ultimately acquiring, an import warehouse (almacén). The almacenes contained goods from Europe and Asia, shipped to Mexico via Spain or the Philippines, and the businesses were generally worth between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos each. From these warehouses, the importers provisioned retail merchants in the capital as well as provincial traders. The principal retailers of fine imported goods in the capital were the merchants who rented stores, or cajones, in the Parián marketplace and in the arcades that lined the southern and western sides of the Plaza Mayor. Most of these men possessed only one or two cajones, each worth roughly 30,000 to 70,000 pesos. In total, some two hundred stores in the capital offered imported goods in the eighteenth century.³ Beneath the cajo­neros were the owners of tiendas mestizas and slightly smaller neighborhood grocery stores, alternatively called pulperías or cacahuaterías. These stores’ values ranged from less than 1,000 pesos to over 25,000 pesos.⁴ Their owners were often recent immigrants from Spain who would be considered lower middle class, or near the top of the working class.⁵ At the bottom of the mercantile hierarchy were Mexico City’s street vendors—men and women who operated small stands or tables in the city’s public plazas and ambulatory vendors known as buhoneros or mercachifles. Spanish elites derided those individuals, associating the profession with Indians and castas, though in reality many vendors, particularly in the Baratillo, were Spanish.⁶

      Women participated at every level of colonial commerce except the highest, and they were most visible in the humbler establishments.⁷ The Baratillo, however, was an exception to this rule. Although women appeared on virtually every list of vendors in the Baratillo throughout the late colonial and early national periods, they always constituted a small fraction of the total. Female vendors were far more common in the markets for foodstuffs. The discrepancy probably stems from the Baratillo’s close relationship with artisanal trades in which men predominated.⁸

      People of every racial background sold in the Baratillo. Despite frequent assertions by the Baratillo’s detractors that the market was a haven for castas, many, if not most, baratilleros were Spanish. A search of marriage records in the eighteenth century, for example, revealed twenty-seven men with the profession of “baratillero” whose race the file identified. Among those men were eighteen Spaniards, three mestizos, three castizos, one indio chino, one morisco, and one mulatto.⁹ The relatively high proportion of Spaniards and the absence of Indians in the sample is likely to stem from the ethnic makeup of the trades from which many vendors hailed, namely, metalwork, garment making, and carpentry. Spaniards predominated in all of those professions.¹⁰

      The Baratillo’s businesses were also diverse in scale. Cajones inside the Baratillo Grande were expensive: they generally rented for 200 pesos per year during the second half of the eighteenth century—the same price as stores located in the

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