LITMIR.BIZ

      A Pernicious Commerce

      The Baratillo shall be eradicated, banished, and exterminated so that there is not a single baratillero left, under penalty of death.

      JUAN ORTEGA Y MONTAÑÉZ,

       Viceroy of New Spain, March 30, 1696

      ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 8, 1692, a line formed outside of Mexico City’s municipal granary. Hundreds of people had gathered there in hopes of buying corn, but there was not nearly enough. After a poor harvest, the city was suffering from an acute grain shortage. Tempers began to flare, so officials allowed some of those waiting outside to enter the granary to verify that it was empty. Inside, an Indian woman fell to the ground after she fainted or, according to other accounts, an official struck her. Members of the crowd, comprised mainly of Indians but also castas—people of mixed race—and some Spaniards, picked the woman up and carried her on their shoulders through the city’s Plaza Mayor. Claiming she had died from her injuries (a fact elite observers later disputed), they went to the home of the city’s co­­rregidor, or local magistrate, demanding justice, and then on to the other seats of authority that ringed the plaza. They walked to the home of the archbishop, who refused to see them, and then to the royal palace, where, finding the viceroy not at home, they began pelting the building with stones and chanting “Death to the viceroy and the corregidor!”

      According to the most famous account of the riot, by the Creole intellectual Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the crowd then carried the woman through the Baratillo, the sprawling market for second-hand goods located in the middle of the plaza. They did so, according to Sigüenza y Góngora, “in order to incite the zaramullos”—the scoundrels who congregated there—and draw them into the fight. With help from the zaramullos, the protest devolved into a full-fledged riot as more than ten thousand people, by Sigüenza y Góngora’s estimation, filled the square. Soon the rioters were carting matting from the reed-roofed market stalls to set ablaze in front of the palace door. As the flames spread through the building, the rioters set fire to the Ayuntamiento, the seat of municipal government, and then the markets and shops located in and around the plaza. Looters, led by people from the Baratillo, broke the locks on the stores and took whatever merchandise they could get their hands on before the fire consumed them. By the time it was all over, the riot had taken the lives of at least fifty people and caused more than three million pesos in damage.¹

      The riot, one of only two major uprisings in Mexico City during the colonial era, reverberated through the government. Officials responded with a broad crackdown. They executed fifteen people for their participation in the riot—an extraordinary use of capital punishment in a society where authorities preferred more utilitarian punishments.² They shuttered the city’s pulquerias (taverns that served pulque, a Mesoamerican alcoholic beverage); ordered Indians living in the city center to return to the barrios, the peripheral neighborhoods designated for native residences; and prohibited Indians from wearing Spanish clothing.³ And they banned the Baratillo. Officials had long complained that the market’s maze of improvised stalls provided cover to criminals. Now, officials worried, those spaces were fomenting acts of subversion—a threat to Spanish rule itself.

      In the weeks following the riot, officials with the Spanish Crown and Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento began to formulate plans to dramatically reengineer the Plaza Mayor, a design, they hoped, that would prevent a repeat of the events of June 8.⁴ Removing the Baratillo was central to authorities’ vision of the redesigned plaza. The Baratillo’s role in the explosion of violence that June evening lent a new sense of urgency to the government’s efforts to stamp out the trade, which authorities had banned at least three times even before the riot. Indeed, when Spain’s King Charles II approved plans for a new merchant exchange in the Plaza Mayor, he did so in hopes that “with the greater concourse of merchants, the excesses … of the zaramullos of the Baratillo will be reined in.”⁵ Merchants would replace vendors, and respectable subjects would supplant thieves.

      The project represented the Crown’s first concerted attempt to alter the physical design and social composition of Mexico City’s main square since the 1520s, when the Spanish began construction of a new city atop the ruins of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. That undertaking, like the other measures the colonial government adopted immediately after the riot, enjoyed limited and fleeting success. Spanish authorities failed to prevent the Baratillo from returning to the plaza, where it would remain until the end of the eighteenth century. And the markets of the Plaza Mayor continued to attract vendors and consumers of all stripes—from the humblest to the most privileged. Their plan failed because Mexico City elites were not of one mind about the Baratillo, or the Plaza Mayor markets in general. This chapter examines the events leading up to and following the 1692 riot, revealing the fissures that divided agents working at different levels of government in the viceregal capital. Those tensions benefited the vendors of the Baratillo, helping them to weather an effort by Spain’s highest authorities to banish their commerce.

      THE PLAZA MAYOR AND ITS MARKETS

      After the Spanish and their indigenous allies conquered Tenochtitlán in 1521, Hernán Cortés ordered a Spanish plaza constructed in the footprint of the city’s ceremonial center. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Spanish gradually replaced the indigenous structures that ringed the square with their own. On the east side of the plaza, Cortés built his residence, Las Casas Nuevas, on the ruins of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma’s palace. The Crown later purchased that property from Cortés’s son Martín and converted the building into the viceregal palace. In 1532, the Spanish constructed the Ayuntamiento on the south side of the plaza behind the main canal leading out of the city.⁶ On the northern edge of the plaza, Cortés ordered the city’s cathedral raised on the site where the Great Temple of the Mexica (the ethnic group that ruled Tenochtitlán and dominated the Aztec Empire) had stood.⁷

      Although the Mexica ceremonial center, with its temples, palaces, and rectilinear shape, provided the template for the Spaniards’ Plaza Mayor, it lacked one element that became central to the Spanish plaza: a marketplace. Tenochtitlán, like its sister city Tlatelolco, possessed a large and vibrant marketplace. However, that market was located on the southwestern side of the city, not in the ceremonial center.⁸ In Spain, however, a town’s central plaza had long doubled as administrative center and marketplace.⁹ Situating the marketplace within eyesight of local authorities made it easier to oversee.¹⁰ The placement also offered fiscal benefits: the Spanish plaza was a municipal space, owned by the local government, where the ayuntamiento would charge rent to market vendors and shopkeepers and use that revenue to fund its basic functions. With this purpose in mind, in 1527 Spain’s King Charles I gave six solares (house lots) to the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City, established five years earlier, so that it could build a consistory, jail, meat market, and shops. The Ayuntamiento subsequently took control of the portales (archways) in front of the houses that lined the west side of the plaza in order to build shops there as well, again for the purpose of generating tax revenue.¹¹ This space came to be known as the Portal de Mercaderes and housed many

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