Bakers and Basques: A Social History of Bread in Mexico

1: “Zelo y desvelo”: The Bread Monopoly and Late Colonial Market Reforms

11 Chapter One “Zelo y desvelo” The Bread Monopoly and Late Colonial Market Reforms ; / A black slave, owned by Hernán Cortés, allegedly planted Mexico’s first wheat after he found three grains at the bottom of a rice sack. A single grain yielded 180; soon, wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Francisco López de Gómara, “there was infinite wheat.” Cortés established the Santo Domingo Mill on the banks of the Tacubaya River on the outskirts of Mexico City, the capital of what the Spaniards called New Spain, not far from where another conquistador, Antonio Nuño de Guzmán, had erected the first flour mill.1 Streams flowing down the mountains that surrounded the city pushed the millstones as the water irrigated the newly planted wheat fields. BreadwaspartoftheSpaniards’missiontocivilizetheNativeAmericans. FriarBernardinodeSahagúnurgedtheIndiansto“eatthatwhichtheCastilian people eat” in order to become “the same as them, strong and pure and wise.”2 Bread soon became central to the diet of urban residents, although Mexicans (and many Spaniards) continued to subsist on maize, and wheat was a rarity in the countryside. By the eighteenth century, bread was so important that Alexander von Humboldt, during his tour of Spanish America, estimated that Mexico City consumed as much wheat as many European cities. He assumed Chapter One 12 that the Spaniards and their Mexican-born descendants consumed the bulk, but this would have been practically impossible. In reality, the majority of the city’s population ate bread either as a base or as a complement.3 Privately owned panaderías made all of the city’s bread. However, since bread fulfilled what consumers and the Spanish Crown considered to be a public function of nurturing residents, it was subject to close supervision by authorities. This supervision was based on the assumption that the Crown and its colonial representatives were the only forces capable of protecting consumers from the intrinsic tendency toward fraud among producers and merchants. Without government restraint, they feared, entrepreneurs would form oligopolies, or business cartels, that could wield disproportionate influence over the everyday life of the city at great cost to both consumers and civil officials. The Crown elaborated a complex series of regulations that aimed to assert royal authority, repress the private sector’s tendency toward abuse, and create a stable, static marketplace that reliably produced bread of predicable quality and weight.4 These laws addressed virtually every detail of the business, and generally , bread was of reasonable quality and price. Yet for all their thoroughness they did not prevent the formation of entrenched elite groups who defrauded the public and the royal treasury. A powerful cartel—organized within an owners’ guild, or gremio—dominated the related wheat, flour, and bread businesses from the early eighteenth century, and probably earlier, until the end of the colonial era. The gremio emerged both despite and because of colonial laws. This chapter explores this contradiction as well as the even more marked contrastthatexistedbetweenofficialpolicyandactualpractice.Thesetensions came to a breaking point during the deep crisis within the Spanish empire in the early nineteenth century. Under the threat of an insurgency, authorities abandoned the model of a static, regulated marketplace in favor of the “absolute liberty” of commerce. They hoped that free-market reforms would encourage competition and bring an abundance of cheap, quality foods to the city. They were partially successful, but the same vicissitudes that sparked the free-market reforms also ended colonial rule. Markets and Colonial Paternalism The Crown enacted laws governing the grain and bread trades after a horrific decade of pestilence and hunger, from 1575 to 1585, ravaged much of Mexico and convinced authorities of the need for close supervision of the urban food supply.5 The Fiel Ejecutoría—the Office of the Faithful Executor—was in “Zelo y desvelo” 13 charge of enforcing these and other regulations related to the production and sale of consumer goods. Bread regulations specified who could purchase how much wheat or flour of what type, from whom, where, and when. They also limited what types of bread bakers could make, and they set prices. Bakers could not sell before seven in the morning, and they had to offer their goods only in certain plazas and streets or in licensed stores. Vending sites were distributed around the city, such that each one would supply a certain neighborhood .6 In theory, since all panaderías provided bread at the same price and complied...