On the Cheap: The Baratillo Marketplace and the Shadow Economy of Eighteenth-Century Mexico City

Upon leaving office in 1716, the Duke of Linares, the viceroy of New Spain, warned his successor of a particularly vexing issue: the question of what to do about Mexico City’s Baratillo marketplace. “There is in the Plaza of Mexico,” he wrote, “a traffic prohibited by law or decree that is so problematic that ending it has been a great challenge for me, being that what is stolen [in the city] is sold there, only disguised.”¹ Hipólito Villarroel, writing his treatise about the decadence of Mexico City more than a half-century later, was no more sparing in his description of the market. He referred to it as the “cave or depository for the thieving committed by artisans, maids, and servants, and, in sum, all the plebeians—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas—that are permitted to inhabit this city.”² The market was even the subject of a book-length satirical manuscript, written in 1754. Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache’s unpublished “Ordenanzas del Baratillo” is a legal code for a world turned upside down, where the mixed-race castas reigned and Spaniards were ostracized, and where “four thousand vagabonds” congregated every day to be instructed by “doctors in the faculty of trickery.”³

The Baratillo was Mexico City’s principal emporium for secondhand, stolen, and otherwise illicit goods. Until the last decade of the eighteenth century, this market, whose name stems from the Spanish word barato, or cheap, was located in the city’s Plaza Mayor, the commercial and administrative hub of New Spain. Though its origins are unknown, the Baratillo was already the city’s most infamous thieves’ market in 1635—the year it was first banned by the royal government—and it has operated more or less continuously ever since. Today, the Baratillo is known simply as Tepito, the neighborhood to which it moved in 1902 and helped transform into a district famous throughout Mexico as much for the trade it hosts in pirated, untaxed, and other illicit goods as for its vibrant oppositional culture.⁴ Prior to the twentieth century, the Baratillo provoked personal interventions from King Charles II, several Spanish viceroys, and the nineteenth-century caudillo Antonio López de Santa Anna. These and other officials banned the market on a number of occasions and relocated it to sites farther and farther from the city center. Yet, despite such powerful opposition, the Baratillo persevered.

A closer look at the Baratillo’s history in the eighteenth century—a period when the market’s documentary trail is particularly rich—suggests why it proved so resilient. While its fiercest opponents painted the Baratillo as a threat to the very foundations of colonial society, New Spain’s highest authorities were more likely to be ambivalent. The Duke of Linares made his own uncertainty explicit, writing to his successor: “I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it.”⁵ The Baratillo may have been a depository for stolen and fraudulent merchandise, but it was also where the “immense number of needy” in the city could “remedy their misery” by selling “little jewels and cheap trinkets,” as one official noted in 1693.⁶ Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, authorities’ disdain for the Baratillo was tempered by their recognition that the market played an important social function in the capital.

In fact, Mexico City elites were anything but unified in their opposition to the Baratillo. Whether it was their “customary tolerance” for the downtrodden or because the Baratillo somehow benefited them financially, members of the Mexico City elite came to the defense of the capital’s most infamous thieves market on countless occasions.⁷ The Baratillo offered an outlet for the import merchants of the Mexico City Consulado—the exclusive merchant guild—to sell damaged or subpar goods, and members of the elite themselves bought and sold clothing and household furnishings in the Baratillo.⁸ In addition, rental fees from the market provided the Mexico City ayuntamiento with a relatively consistent revenue stream.⁹ While observers frequently...