Order, Progress, and the Black Market

This chapter examines the Baratillo’s relationship with Porfirian Mexico City, when the country’s autocratic president Porfirio Díaz sought to modernize the nation and its capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the events that led to the Baratillo’s relocation to the neighborhood of Tepito, in 1902. Facing the threat of the market’s closure, baratilleros bargained with the municipal government, reaching a compromise to move to Tepito—a location the vendors proposed themselves. The chapter contributes to recent scholarship that revises earlier depictions of the Porfiriato as a monolithic dictatorship, emphasizing instead the multiple ways that Mexico’s government and citizens maintained a tense and unequal peace for more than thirty years.

Free Trading in the Restored Republic

This chapter focuses on an 1872 court case that divided vendors in the Baratillo and pitted them against the Mexico City Ayuntamiento. The case drew the attention of some of Mexico’s most prominent citizens, including Vicente García Torres, publisher of El Monitor Republicano, the leading newspaper of the era, and reached Mexico’s Supreme Court, sparking a constitutional crisis. The case shows the improbable range of actors in Mexico City who had stakes in the Baratillo and the degree to which the market’s vendors succeeded in turning a debate over its future into a national conversation about individual rights and the rule of law.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the argument and principal contributions of the book. It argues that the Baratillo and the larger shadow economy in Mexico City have been essential to the economic and political life of the city since the late colonial period. The introduction explains how the study contributes to existing scholarship on the informal economy, the state, urban politics, and urban public space in Mexico and Latin America. It includes a discussion of the study’s sources and methods and brief chapter descriptions.

The Baratillo and the Enlightened City

This chapter examines the Baratillo’s role in Enlightenment-era reforms to Mexico City’s public administration and built environment. While New Spain’s Bourbon rulers took a number of steps to transform the physical and social worlds of Mexico City’s poor, the government never targeted the Baratillo—a site that was synonymous with crime, license, and plebeian sociability. To understand this apparent contradiction, the chapter examines the politics of urban reform in eighteenth-century Mexico City, which saw royal, viceregal, and local authorities jostle for control over urban public spaces.

A Pernicious Commerce

This chapter examines the efforts of New Spain’s last Habsburg viceroys to eliminate the Baratillo in the late 1680s and 1690s, focusing on the 1692 riot that ravaged the Plaza Mayor. Following the riot, Spanish authorities sought to re-engineer the Plaza Mayor, forcing the Baratillo out and replacing it with a masonry alcaicería—later known as the Parían—a structure designed for the capital’s elite import merchants. The chapter explores why colonial authorities found the Baratillo so troubling, how they sought to eliminate it, and why that effort ultimately failed.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly traces the intertwined histories of the Baratillo and the neighborhood of Tepito in the twentieth century. Like many other decisions regarding the Baratillo, its move to Tepito was supposed to be temporary. Yet the market remained, and over the decades it grew into a sprawling marketplace for second hand, stolen, contraband, and pirated goods that consumed the neighborhood. By the middle of the century, Mexico City newspapers rarely referred to the Baratillo by name; instead, they used the same disparaging language that observers had traditionally employed to describe the Baratillo for the neighborhood itself. Today, Tepito is the most famous barrio in Mexico, with a distinctive oppositional identity that is inextricably tied to its role as the epicenter of Mexico City’s black market.

The Dictator, the Ayuntamiento, and the Baratillo

This chapter takes readers into the national period with a focus on a largely-forgotten urban renewal campaign that the nineteenth-century strongman Antonio López de Santa Anna and the Mexico City Ayuntamiento undertook in the early 1840s. Removing the Baratillo was central to Santa Anna’s ambitious, if short-lived, reform agenda. But he encountered resistance from baratilleros who pushed back by writing petitions and airing their grievances in the Mexico City press—decades before historians have found popular actors engaging in Mexico’s public sphere. The episode shows how the laws and the rhetoric of republicanism gave vendors new tools to defend their businesses against government policies that threatened them.

Shadow Economics

This chapter moves from an analysis of elite debates over urban renewal to an examination of the quotidian transactions of the Baratillo in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The shadow economy linked baratilleros to some of Mexico’s elite overseas merchants while pitting them against the capital’s artisan guilds and shopkeepers, who saw them as disloyal competition. In reconstructing these relationships, the chapter reveals the centrality of the Baratillo’s commerce to the late-colonial urban economy. It also illustrates the ways that economics and politics intertwined in the market, as vendors pursued multiple strategies to protect their businesses from outside threats.