On the cheap: The baratillo marketplace and the shadow economy of eighteenth-century Mexico city

摘要: Upon leaving office in 1716, the Duke of Linares, viceroy New Spain, warned his successor a particularly vexing issue: question what to do about Mexico City's Baratillo marketplace. “There is Plaza Mexico,” he wrote, “a traffic prohibited by law or decree that so problematic ending it has been great challenge for me, being stolen [in city] sold there, only disguised.” Hipolito Villarroel, writing treatise decadence City more than half-century later, was no sparing description market. He referred as “cave depository thieving committed artisans, maids, and servants, and, sum, all plebeians—Indians, mulattos, other castas—that are permitted inhabit this city.” The market even subject book-length satirical manuscript, written 1754. Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache's unpublished “Ordenanzas del Baratillo” legal code world turned upside down, where mixed-race castas reigned Spaniards were ostracized, “four thousand vagabonds” congregated every day be instructed “doctors faculty trickery.”