Black Market Capital: Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City by Andrew Konove (review)

From Jesuit missions that established capitalist agriculture in the Americas to maquiladoras on the contemporary US-Mexico border, the relationships between economic actors and state entities have long been porous, negotiated, and important in civic life. Andrew Konove’s history of the Baratillo, Mexico City’s black market where used, stolen, and counterfeit goods have been traded since early colonial times, exemplifies the complex nature of these relationships and the ways that people, goods, and processes often thought to be outside of state control or counter to state interests use the mechanisms of the state to reify their place in society. The shadow economy, Konove deftly argues as he traces the history of the Baratillo from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, is anything but a shadow.

In many ways, the book is a straightforward chronological history of the Baratillo, beginning with a colorful account of a 1692 riot that caused colonial authorities to close down bars and public spaces in the newly established Plaza Mayor, which included the Baratillo at the time. What is interesting to Konove is not that the riot occurred, or that the viceroyalty attempted to shutter the market as a result, but that the riot exposed rifts between local authorities in the Ayuntamiento (Mexico City’s municipal government) and the viceroyalty that vendors from the Baratillo were able to exploit as they pled their case for remaining on the square. Throughout centuries, revolutions, independence, and several relocations at the hands of authorities, the Baratillo and its vendors survived and thrived, serving not only Mexico City’s poor and outcast, but also in many cases its elites, who often came to its aid in times of duress. By the time the market was relocated to its current home in Tepito in 1902, it is clear that the question was no longer about the existence of the market (its continuation was undeniable), but about the ways it best intersected with evolving visions for Mexico City as a microcosm of Mexico itself.

Konove’s thesis, that the Baratillo is a “key site of political and economic exchange [that] offers a new perspective on the history of public space in Mexico City” (178) is well supported throughout the book as he draws on a wide array of archival resources, from newspapers to letters to government documents of various kinds. He makes a convincing case for understanding the state as an amalgam of actors often at odds with one another and shaped as much by local circumstances as by greater ideologies or empires. Focusing that argument on a particular economic and social space of exchange such as the Baratillo demonstrates, to good effect, the power of this kind of local history.

Where the book is less strong, however, is in its treatment of those larger economic ideologies, especially as they become conflated with social realities. In his chapter on liberalism in the Restored Republic era it is difficult to discern precisely how Konove understands the slippage between ideas of economic freedom and authoritarianism as Mexicans debated the rights of ambulatory vendors in a context of modernization. As Mexico City continued to develop and change, it is also unclear how ideas of urbanization and an increasingly marginalized rural class affected the market and policies meant to support and contain it.

Those quibbles aside, this book is a well-researched, well-written exemplar of socioeconomic history that opens useful conversations about public space, gentrification, economic regulation, and state complexity. Readers come away with a nuanced, even caring, understanding of the Baratillo and those who continue to labor there—no longer easily reduced to pirates, thieves, and scoundrels, but rather shown to be important actors in Mexican society and key architects of Mexico City’s public space and communal life.