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5 Patrons and Plebeians: Labor as a System of Social Control Very little is known about the laboring classes in colonial Mexican cities. The simplest questions remain unanswered. For instance, how did employers procure labor? How were workers recruited into their jobs? Historians have found copious documentation on formal labor systems , such as the repartimiento, urban guilds, and debt peonage. But too often these records contain legal prescriptions on how the system should have functioned rather than evidence of its actual operation. Even more important is the fact that urban labor markets operated on a largely informal basis. The typical urban worker-the day laborer, the domestic servant, the journeyman artisan-held no license, had only an oral agreement with his employer, received his wages in cash, and could throughout his lifetime move from one job to another without leaving a trace in any records. Even when legally binding agreements did exist, as in the case of master artisans and their apprentices, they were often unwritten. Moreover , legal formulas left large areas of work place relations unregulated, except by custom. What follows, then, will not be a systematic investigation of the Mexico City labor market. Instead, I employ a wide variety of sources to explore the everyday life of laborers, focusing on the fundamental and often complex relationship between employer and employee. Quantitative data are sparse, though they will be presented when available . One ofthe great frustrations ofcolonial historiography is that until the very end of the period, the sources best suited for statistical analysis (such as parish registers) almost never contain data on occupation. However, in the mid-eighteenth century, the Mexico City authorities ordered a census of the traza that did include such information. This 1753 census, about three-fourths complete-has recently been analyzed by Seed.l Although the census date is thirty years beyond the time limits ofthis work, it seems unlikely that the city's division oflabor would have changed radically during the intervening period. In any case, this survey, and Seed's analysis, can serve as the starting point for our discussion of labor patterns. Table 5.1 shows the division of labor by race for adult men (not including slaves) who were employed in the traza in 1753. The occupational 86 Patrons and Plebeians 87 categories are mostly self-evident, but it should be explained that wholesale merchants are included in the "elite" and that master craftsmen who had their own shops are classified as "shop owners" rather than as artisans . There are several points of interest in the table. Note that (as one would expect) casta and Indian workers were concentrated in the "artisan," "laborer," and "servant" categories, nearly splitting the first with the creoles and dominating the other two. As Seed points out, these occupational groups do not constitute separate economic classes; in the terminology of this study, they are all "plebeian." Instead, they represent subdivisions within a single class, based on "significant differences in their role in production."2 In seeking to explain the organizing principle of this division of labor, Seed draws attention to the relationship between parent and intermediate racial groups. The original elements of Mexico City's population had clearly defined economic niches: the conquering Spaniards were landholders and merchants; the Indians, unskilled workers; the blacks, slaves and servants. All three tended to persist in their original roles-even into the eighteenth century-and to transmit them to the racial groups they fathered. Thus, the majority ofcreoles, like the peninsular Spaniards, were merchants and shopkeepers. Although mestizos most commonly worked as artisans, they were also"more often laborers or servants than either creoles or castizos.... In this respect, they resembled their parent population, the Indians, more than any other group."3 In contrast, nearly half of all mulattoes were servants, an employment pattern even more accentuated among blacks. Seed concludes that "the differences in employment between mestizos and mulattoes resulted from the different economic roles of the parent groups, urban slavery on the one hand and rural agricultural labor on the other."4 Obviously, Seed's explanation of Mexico City's labor system is quite compatible with the discussion of race in chapter 4. There we argued that racial labels had a real meaning for plebeians because they delineated social networks. The ethnic affiliation between mestizos and Indians, for example, had a social counterpart: mestizos were more likely than mulattoes , blacks, and Spaniards to marry or otherwise associate with Indians. Ifthe social networks ofmestizos and Indians overlapped...

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