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one Hocking the Private in Public Credit Policy, Housekeeping, and Status, 1750–1840 In a downtown neighborhood of Mexico City in 1811, Ygnacia Ruiz pawned a cotton jacket for six reales at the pulpería (corner grocery store) a block and a half from her house near the Parque del Conde. A fifty-year-old Creole widow, Ygnacia lived in the household headed by her son licenciado Don Francisco Alvarez, with her other adult children (two daughters and another son) and an indigenous woman who was a live-in servant. Her young Creole neighbor María Rosales, whose husband, José Trinidad Paz, was unemployed, had enaguas and a rebozo in hock for one peso three reales with the same storekeeper, Don Miguel Domínguez. These two Creole women might have encountered fellow Domínguez customers who were servants in middling and elite homes, such as Ygnacia Excorcia, a twenty-seven-year-old Indian widow, or Doña María Gertrudis, a fortyyear -old Creole widow. Ygnacia Excorcia worked as a servant in the household of an immigrant merchant from Rioja and his Creole wife and had a petticoat in hock for four reales, or half a peso. Doña María Gertrúdis and her five-year-old daughter lived with the extended family of a Creole attorney , for whom she worked as a domestic servant. She pawned a rebozo with Domínguez for four reales.∞ Women such as these—wives, widows, and servants of Creole, indigenous, and mixed-race heritage—regularly pawned personal and household goods, especially cloth, for very small cash loans with grocers. Corner-store owners, the most well-known personages in city neighborhoods, had many ‘‘very personal’’ relationships with neighborhood residents.≤ Women with more valuable material goods to convert into cash turned to the Monte de Piedad, which gave cash loans of at least two pesos for silver jewelry and table service and for silk skirts, linen petticoats, and other luxurious cloth goods. 18 Hocking the Private in Public This chapter explores the neighborhood experience of women and men in households such as those run by Ignacia Ruiz and María Gertrúdis, assessing the policies of colonial governors that a√ected household economies and the financial practices of household managers from the middle of the eighteenth century into the decades after Mexican Independence. Urban housekeeping patterns included the pawning strategies women used in managing budgets along a spectrum from subsistence levels to conspicuous consumption. Housekeeping work entailed the reproduction of people and of status, the production and preparation of food and clothing for household consumption, and the creation of culture. Three sets of evidence shape this discussion. First, in concert with other social legislation, Bourbon-era laws regulated pawning practices in corner stores and the Monte de Piedad. The gendered dimensions of the impact of regulatory and institutional policies on urban households illustrate how intersections of social class and ethnicity shaped material life. Second, census data o√er a demographic picture of the largely white neighborhoods in the city center , where at least a third of the households were headed by women. Third, pawnshop inventories, court records, and colonial literature reveal what city residents actually pawned in the Monte de Piedad and retail pawnshops —mostly cloth and silver that women owned personally or used in housekeeping—and what those goods tell us about the daily lives of their owners. Larger contexts for this discussion include the intersections of race, class, and gender in the formation of discourses about honor, respectability , and patriarchy, as well as the development of Enlightenment ideas and liberalism in reshaping political economy and culture in Mexico City in ways that challenged the livelihoods of city residents.≥ There was a tension in discourse regarding the behavior of honorable women: They were to maintain virtue by restricting activities outside the home while at the same time being responsible for provisioning the home, which took them into the streets and public business arenas. Enlightenment and emerging liberal ideologies about motherhood and women generally incorporated an older ideological complex of honor while expanding some female roles and rights and restricting others. Policies that regulated public urban spaces such as pawnshops and policed ostensibly private urban spaces such as homes incorporated gendered understandings of honor. In the colonial setting of New Spain, eighteenth-century economic and political reforms underscored the importance of ‘‘whiteness’’ for the achievement or maintenance of status and power. When metropolitan charitable institutions such [3.145.166.7] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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