A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico City, 1750-1920

Notes

notes Introduction 1. For the 1802 case see ahnmp, Libros de Empeños, 1802. For the 1902 case see ahcm, Gobierno del Distrito, Empeños, Ventas, num. 162, exp. 9. ‘‘Morena’’ indicates a darkskinned woman. 2. A major contribution of the French Annales journal and school has been the examination of historical processes over the longue dureé. For discussions of slow cultural and economic change, see Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). For the long view on Latin America generally, see Mark D. Szuchman, ed., The Middle Period in Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989). For the Mexican case see William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French, eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington de: Scholarly Resources, 1994). See also Solange Alberro and Serge Gruzinski, Introducción a la historia de las mentalidades (México: Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades y Religión en el México Colonial, inah, 1979). For a recent survey of material culture that preserves traditional period breaks, see Arnold J. Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3. For a discussion of restricted money circulation, see Ruggiero Romano, Monedas, seudomonedas , y circulación monetaria en las economías de México (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 116, 133, 135–37, 148. For pawning practice in the seventeenth century, see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 110–12. 4. This work continues an emerging trend in ‘‘everyday’’ Mexican history, much of it inspired by James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). See Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Richard Boyer, ‘‘Negotiating Calidad: The Everyday Struggle for Status in Mexico ,’’ Historical Archeology 31, no. 1 (1997): 64–72; Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). See also María Odila Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 5. ‘‘El Camino del Curato o Sea La Oca de la Orquesta,’’ reproduced in Artes de Mexico: El Arte de la Suerte 13 (1991): 42. The Juego de la Oca likely came to Mexico with the Spaniards. The origins of the game are disputed. Whether created during the siege of Troy or by the Knights Templars much later in Jerusalem during the Crusades, it was known in medieval Florence. For the modern Mexican version, the board usually has a spiral of sixty-three squares depicting everyday life, with a goose (oca) at regular intervals. When landing on a goose, the player places a wager before rolling the die to determine the next move. Some squares are traps—a well, a labyrinth, the grim reaper (la muerte), a jail—where a player must remain until, freed by another player’s arriving on the square, the player returns to square one. If the roll takes one 338 Notes to Pages 3–5 past square sixty-three, one completes the turn by moving backward. The player who rolls a number that lands him or her exactly on square sixty-three wins the game. 6. D. S. Parker, The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900–1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Recent scholarship has disassembled stereotypes about and elite labels for nonelites—‘‘léperos,’’ ‘‘vagos,’’ ‘‘populacho.’’ Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Robert Bu≈ngton, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); and Silvia Arrom, Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poor House, 1774–1871 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 7. Patricia Seed, ‘‘Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 4 (November 1982): 569–606; and Michael Scardaville, ‘‘Crime and the Urban Poor in the Late Colonial Period’’ (PhD diss., University of Florida, 1977). 8. Timothy Anna, The Fall of the Royal Government in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 22. ‘‘Mestizo’’ refers to Indian and European parentage; ‘‘mulatto’’ refers to African and European parentage. 9. Silvia Arrom, The Women of Mexico...