Black Market Capital - Andrew Konove

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Spain) and the viceroy. In Mexico City, a physical segregation accompanied the legal distinction between the Spanish and Indian republics. The Crown stipulated that the Spanish population concentrate in a thirteen-square-block area surrounding the Plaza Mayor, called the traza, while the indigenous population would reside in barrios outside the traza, administered by semiautonomous Indian governments.26 This segregation proved impossible to enforce, however, since Spanish businesses and households depended on indigenous labor and often required their employees to live in their places of work. Some Spaniards also chose to live in the barrios.27

      Miscegenation created additional problems. To address the rapidly growing population of mixed-race offspring of Indians, Spaniards, and Africans, the Crown developed the sistema de castas, a hierarchical ordering of colonial subjects according to their proportion of Spanish blood. At its height, the system identified over forty racial categories, though in practice only eight or so of these saw widespread use: español (Spaniard), indio (Indian), mestizo (offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian), castizo (Spaniard-mestizo), negro (of African descent), mulato (Spaniard-African), morisco (mulatto-Spaniard), and chino (Asian).28 Yet the word sistema—system—overstates the coherence of those efforts, and recent scholarship has emphasized just how fluid those categories were and how inconsistently colonial authorities applied them.29 The criteria for belonging to these groups were subjective: dress, occupation, and behavior could be as significant as skin color or lineage in determining who fell into which category. While the Inquisition often looked to parish records to determine the race of an accused subject, local priests tended to rely on the self-declarations of parents when composing birth registries.30 Over time, miscegenation only made distinguishing between the different groups more difficult. Even if these racial categories were porous and negotiable, however, they nonetheless represented an ideal that Spanish authorities clung to: a society in which they could recognize, and appropriately categorize, all of their subjects.

      The Plaza Mayor markets, which brought wealthy Spanish overseas merchants, indigenous food vendors, and baratilleros of every background into the same space, defied that vision. Along with the Baratillo, a nighttime market in the plaza known as the tianguillo aroused particular concern among local authorities. In 1680, the Mexico City corregidor worried about the dangerous mix of people that was meeting in this nocturnal marketplace, which “brought together runaway slaves, mestizos, Indians, and even Spaniards into a concourse with women … and in many cases it was not possible to tell whether they were single or married.” The Plaza Mayor markets were supposed to close at eight in the evening, but this one routinely went until ten or eleven, providing cover for many “offenses against God.” There were “regular meetings of scandalous women and men carrying weapons.”31 The Baratillo attracted a similarly varied group of people. In virtually every judicial proceeding involving the market, the subjects involved included Indians, Spaniards, and people of mixed race. Authorities frequently referenced the market’s diverse composition, describing the “gente de todas calidades” (people of all qualities) that gathered there as evidence of the threat it posed to the social peace.32

      Although the mixing of races and genders in the Plaza Mayor markets unnerved Spanish authorities in Mexico City, for most of the colonial era, they made little effort to stop it. The local economy was too reliant on cross-cultural exchanges—with non-Spaniards involved in virtually all aspects of commerce and production—for officials to keep those groups separate from one another. In the wake of the 1692 riot, however, that is precisely what Spanish officials sought to do.

      THE BARATILLO AND THE 1692 RIOT

      In the months following the riot, Spanish officials, led by Viceroy Galve, conducted an exhaustive investigation into its causes. Galve believed the root problem lay with the comingling of Indians with Spaniards, Africans, and people of mixed race in the traza.33 Several weeks after the riot, Galve formed a committee of parish priests, which also included Sigüenza y Góngora, to analyze “the difficulties that result from Indians living in the center of the city.” The report found that the practice “has impeded the order of the city and the governance of its natives.” The priests wrote that, “hidden in back patios and recesses of these houses, where it is not easy to find them, these Indians live in the company of mestizos and vagabonds, secretly scheming such savage iniquities as those that have been recently carried out.” In the words of one parish priest, the “bad customs and idleness” of the mestizos, mulattos, and Africans had rubbed off on Mexico City’s Indians by living in close proximity to them. The priests wanted to be able to identify their indigenous parishioners to ensure that they fulfilled their obligations to the Church.34 For Galve and the colonial government, however, distinguishing between colonial subjects of different racial backgrounds was important in its own right. It was essential for the proper policing of the city. Galve gave Mexico City’s Indians twenty days to return to their barrios and threatened any resident of the traza who let Indians into his home with a hefty 100-peso fine and two years of exile from the city.35

      Galve’s committee believed that the ethnically heterogeneous Baratillo had provided the spark for the riot. Both Sigüenza y Góngora and another, anonymous, witness suggested that the crowd of Indians that had gathered in the Plaza Mayor only became violent after it passed through the Baratillo. Under interrogation, the witness described how the “contemptible people of the Baratillo—mulattos, mestizos, and other zaramullos” joined forces with the Indians carrying the purportedly dead woman on their shoulders.36 In his letter to Admiral Pez, Sigüenza y Góngora stated, on more than one occasion, that it was the people in the Baratillo who initiated the looting of the Plaza Mayor shops that night: “I have said that the zaramullos of the Baratillo accompanied [the Indians] from the moment they passed through the market with the india who pretended to be dead.” “While the Indians set the fire,” he continued, the zaramullos “began breaking down the doors and roofs [of the shops], which were very flimsy, and carrying away the cash and merchandise they found there.”37 The baratilleros had taken advantage of the protest to make away with what was not theirs.

      Trial records offer further, albeit circumstantial, evidence that baratilleros were participants in the riot. The majority of those convicted for their involvement were artisans. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mexico City’s artisans simultaneously battled the Baratillo and sustained it, as the market provided an illegal outlet for selling manufactured goods in which both guild members and unaffiliated individuals participated. Indeed, one of the individuals colonial authorities identified as a leader of the riot, an Indian man named Joseph, was a hat maker whom other witnesses had seen selling in the Baratillo. In all, four tailors, seven or eight hat makers, and ten shoemakers were implicated in the riot. These were all professions with a significant presence in the Baratillo.38

      The multiethnic composition of the riot, which Indians led but involved men and women of every caste, motivated colonial officials to realize the urban plan that Cortés had sought to impose on the ruins of Tenochtitlán nearly two centuries earlier. Galve ordered the city’s Indians “back” to their barrios, where many probably had never lived, and enforced sumptuary laws regulating Indians’ clothing that residents had similarly ignored for generations. His actions exemplified what Inga Clendinnen called the “chronic utopianism of Spanish colonial legislation”—Spaniards’ belief that they could shape American society through laws they had little ability to enforce.39 That the viceroy felt the need to delineate the boundaries of the traza, street-by-street, in his July 10, 1692, decree ordering Indians to relocate to the barrios suggests how little meaning that designation held for residents of Mexico City at the end of the seventeenth century.40 The impracticality of these measures did little to deter Galve; indeed, beyond enforcing imaginary boundaries, he sought to dramatically redesign the Plaza Mayor in order to limit the kinds of dangerous interactions that he believed had led to the uprising.

      While the riot and the resulting fire caused extensive damage to the Plaza Mayor markets and the surrounding buildings, they also provided the government with a clean slate—an opportunity to re-create the plaza from scratch. A little more than a week after the riot, Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento, charged with carrying out the reconstruction, outlined a plan

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