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

3. Collateral Living: Consumption, Anxious Liberals, and Daily Life, 1830-80

three Collateral Living Consumption, Anxious Liberals, and Daily Life, 1830–80 During the first half of 1868, just after Mexican statesmen reclaimed the national government from the Austrian Maximilian, who ruled Mexico for the French, María Robledo repeatedly visited the pawnshop of Don Agapito Cortés in Portal de Cartagena in Tacubaya on the outskirts of Mexico City. In nine visits María secured loans of two or three reales at a time by pawning three used sheets, a ‘‘no. 6’’ iron, a tablecloth, two scarves, a co√ee-colored petticoat, and a woven silk shawl.∞ Residents of Mexico City and Federal District municipalities under early republican and then imperial governments lived with a continued scarcity of cash as a consequence of low salaries and lack of circulating specie. To manage household budgets or small businesses, working- and middle-class residents pawned personal items such as clothing and jewelry or household goods such as sheets, spoons, or irons. With less frequency, they pawned work tools and finished products of their labor. This chapter analyzes household economies and material cultures in the middle of the nineteenth century. Laws that governed pawning and households , portrayals of collateral-credit customers and daily life in contemporary literature, and inventories of collateral in private pawnshops and the Monte de Piedad from the 1860s and 1870s show that people continued to turn to both pawnbrokers and the Monte de Piedad, depending on what they were going to pawn. Identifying clear patterns of governance over the material world of housekeeping, lifeways, and collateral credit is di≈cult in the first fifty years after Independence. During this period in which hombres de bien maintained political hegemony in the new context of republican politics, they apparently had little concern for expanding social- Collateral Living 79 welfare policy to guarantee access to low-cost small collateral loans in Mexico City. Instead, statesmen took more steps to protect the movable property of the well-to-do and the downwardly mobile; they continued and expanded forbidden goods lists and servant vigilance measures. This protection of material goods and reputations of families ‘‘de bien’’ paralleled protection of patriarchal rights as liberal governance evolved following Independence. Seamstresses, female household heads, and others , including working people and thieves, continued to employ pawning as a housekeeping strategy, with less valuable collateral goods pawned in private businesses. Women in middle ranks—mujeres de bien—still made regular visits to the state-supported Monte de Piedad, thus living on family material investments, some inherited, some acquired in better times. The ‘‘stu√ ’’ of daily life continued throughout the nineteenth century to be dominated by cloth and silver, though fashionable presentations of those goods changed. Indeed, a third of the goods in the pawning sample for midcentury are household goods, more than the quarter of the Bourbon sample. Governance and Households Life in nineteenth-century Mexico City often happened amidst a state of emergency, with innumerable conspiracies and foreign occupations that might force businesses to close and make it risky to go about one’s business in the streets. The Monte de Piedad continued to operate almost uninterrupted during American occupation of the city in 1848, though stores did close periodically.≤ While on the face of it politics were volatile, power changed hands back and forth between a relatively small number of men with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. An assessment of laws passed by those men concerning property, pawning, domestic service, and gender relations reveals that postcolonial governance in Mexico followed a general liberalizing trend. Government policy had a direct impact on working - and middle-class households. In short, politicians were anxious about liberalism, worried about sharing power with poorer folks, and concerned about protecting their patrimonies of movable property, all the while readjusting patriarchy to keep wives subordinate but empower the widows next door. There were contradictions within liberalism between ideas of free trade and laissez-faire economies on the one hand and government activism in terms of social reform, regulation of commerce, and the maintenance of public order (including the protection of private property) on the other.≥ 80 Collateral Living Hombres de bien dominated governance in postcolonial Mexico, with government positions limited to either male property owners or males with a certain level of income. Though earlier male su√rage had less stringent requirements, by 1835 the citizenry was defined as men with yearly incomes of at least one hundred pesos. The definition of...