St. James at the Fair: Religious Ceremony, Civic Boosterism, and Commercial Development on the Colonial Mexican Frontier

Every year a fair is held in the last days of September at which not only the inhabitants of Saltillo provision themselves for the entire year, but also those of the Kingdom of Nuevo León, Coahuila, Texas, and a great part of the colony of Santander as well. They come to sell wool, deer skins, salt, mules, and some other products that those places produce, and return with clothes, tanned hides, soap, saddles, and a variety of foodstuffs that come from Michoacán and Nueva Galicia, such as rice, sugar, chickpeas, and other commodities harvested in those lands. As a result, Saltillo has become a sort of warehouse, where the neighboring provinces provision themselves not only at fair time, but where they come between-times to stock themselves of those articles that they lack, which are considerable because of the impossibility of preserving them in such hot places. ¹

So wrote Dr. Gaspar González Candamo, governor of the diocese of Monterrey, in 1791. Although he focused on its economic importance, he might well have added that the fair attracted people from a large region to its religious functions, bullfights, and other entertainments. By the late eighteenth century the Saltillo Fair had become a well established institution, bringing together the residents of remote hinterlands in religious, secular, political, and economic activities that asserted their place in the Spanish empire.

As a crossroads of frontier agricultural, commercial, and settlement activities, Saltillo provided fertile ground for the development of a merchant elite capable of wresting leadership away from the landed families that had dominated the town since its founding in the late sixteenth century. For these merchant city fathers the fair, with its religious and entertainment attractions, offered considerable wholesale and retail trade opportunities. They found a niche for their trade fair within New Spain's network of fairs ² as they promoted its religious and secular pageantry to increase attendance from an expanding hinterland. In pursuing their economic goals, the merchant elite also fostered a model for Spanish society that reflected their own backgrounds and interests. Through their boosterism, particularly through the mechanism of the fair, Saltillo's elites successfully developed the town as the most important urban center in northeastern New Spain and promoted it as the center of Spanish life in the region.

The Saltillo Fair in a World of Fairs

Fairs are ancient and universal mechanisms for regional and even international interactions. Many fairs originated in religious events that required the provisioning of large numbers of people for extended periods of time. The Parisian fairs of Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent, for instance, began as medieval pilgrimage sites at which monks rented booths to local merchants and allowed entertainments to take place. William A. Christian, in his study of local religion in early modern Spain, quotes a history of a Benedictine shrine to this effect: "all of these villages come in procession the Wednesday of Litanies, the day before Ascension, and a great fair is held in this place attended by merchants of silk and woolen cloth, goldsmiths and silversmiths, vendors of dry goods and numerous artisans of all kinds because of the multitude of people who come from so many places." ³

Whether they had their origins in religious functions or not, fairs were extraordinary, if regular, events. Fairs were distinguished from markets by frequency: the latter occurred on a regular basis, from daily or weekly to monthly, while the former occurred periodically, normally on an annual or semi-annual basis. Markets were commonly a gathering of local producers, both agricultural and artisanal, petty merchants, and local consumers. Fairs brought local producers and consumers together with long-range merchants and manufacturers. Chartered fairs, that is, those authorized by the crown or other competent...