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six Porfirian Paradoxes Profit versus Regulation, Capital versus Welfare The Pearl of Saint Catherine. The Ideal of Art. The Rose of the Sea. Shower of Gold. In her memoir of her stay in Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century, Mrs. Tweedie characterized these colorful pawnshop names, along with others for pulquerías, grocery stores, and butcher and barber shops, as ‘‘funny and extremely inappropriate.’’∞ As for appropriateness , perhaps the last name was closest to the mark. Indeed, the reign of President Porfirio Díaz witnessed a boom for pawning businesses. This period of political peace and economic development was also one of legislation and vigilance over private pawnshops, with laws in 1881, 1886, 1890, and 1895. The positivist political economy had an uneven impact on households in the city. One consequence of this was a continued demand for collateral credit. The Porfirian years were also a time in which the services of the Monte de Piedad were expanded further into new neighborhoods of the city, as it and other parts of the welfare system were reorganized and bureaucratized. It was the opinion of American traveler Frederick Ober that ‘‘the amount of good that [the Monte de Piedad] has done in the century and more of its existence is incalculable,’’ while newspaper editors often expressed the idea that the Porfirian Monte was poorly run by ostentatious bureaucrats.≤ By the end of the Porfiriato the Monte de Piedad had become a more ‘‘private charity,’’ and brokers publicly defied regulation of their private business practices. As the daily exercise of taking household goods to pawnshops for quick cash remained central to everyday life for many working- and middle-class residents of Mexico City, relations between brokers and these clients became increasingly acrimonious, and brokers squeezed more profits out of 190 Porfirian Paradoxes their clientele at the end of the century. Relations between the state and brokers also went downhill, as the petitioning stance of earlier years did not always bear fruit, and organized brokers turned to more disruptive tactics to defend what they saw as their rights as businessmen. As the newspaper El Partido Liberal put it, in the Porfirian era two ‘‘antagonistic interests’’ clashed: the public interest and the empeñeros’ interest.≥ Profile of the Porfirian Pawnbroker Pawnbrokers, corner storekeepers, and bar owners occupied the lower strata within the emergent middle class, though clearly some pawnbrokers made a better living. Right up until the Mexican Revolution of 1910, in complaints to state o≈cials, customers refer to pawnbrokers and storekeepers as ‘‘españoles,’’ or less kindly as ‘‘gachupines,’’ suggesting that this sector of the middle class was or was perceived to be largely white and immigrant.∂ When brokers tried to circumvent 1886 regulations by converting to consignment business (discussed below), some residents called for application of Article 33 of the Federal Constitution in order to expel o√ending foreign-born brokers.∑ Despite earlier attempts at expelling Spaniards and a sustained antigachup ín strain in popular culture, Spaniards dominated the foreign population in the city, with more Spaniards at the end of the Porfiriato than all other nationalities combined. The numbers of Spanish immigrants living in the city increased over the years of Díaz rule, with around two thousand in the city in 1876 and over twelve thousand by 1910. Coming from throughout the Iberian peninsula, perhaps the largest contingent in the Porfirian years were the Catalans, who formed a subcolony and developed institutions separate from the colony at large. Concentrated in retail, baking , the cantina business, and banking, the Spanish colony remained a group apart, with its own social clubs such as the Casino Español, its own theater companies, its own charitable organizations such as the Sociedad Beneficencia Española, which provided health care to members of the colony, and even its own cemetery. The Spanish community also published its own newspapers, such as La Colonia Española, El Pabellón Español, La Voz de España, and El Correo Español, keeping up with events in Europe as well as local issues. Spanish journalists also wrote for Mexican papers.∏ Certainly part of the Spaniards’ poor reputation had to do with their dominance of retail. Spanish immigrants preferred this business sector, as it required only a small investment and the industrious could secure at least a modest success. To expand successful businesses depended on clerks [13.58.112.1] Project MUSE...

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