Black Market Capital

Tepito, a barrio bravo in the heart of Mexico City, has been characterized as one of the most dangerous marketplaces in the world. It spreads over dozens of square blocks a short distance from the Zócalo. Tepito has a long and complex past, and Andrew Konove's Black Market Capital tells a complicated history of the street market that preceded Tepito in the plaza and surrounding areas until it was moved to its current location. In this engaging and important book, Konove analyzes and historicizes the significance of the Baratillo, a street marketplace whose history spans back to the pre-Columbian past. In studying this “notorious” secondhand and thieves' market, he shows how a relatively small physical space in which working people traded new, used, and stolen goods had a 300-year history. Beginning in the 1700s, Konove provides an important historical analysis of change over time for a market that Mexican residents demanded and defended. He tells a rich and complex history about the vendors, the church, the state, and the consumers.To understand the Baratillo, Konove sought evidence in a rich paper trail within multiple archives in Mexico City. The trove of sources includes government correspondence, vendor petitions, censuses, and newspaper accounts. When these materials are pieced together, a picture of a 300-year-old shadow market emerges. He also included reproductions of maps, paintings, and pictures of the market as it evolved over three centuries. The maps demonstrate how the crown and the Mexican government sought to move the Baratillo and its various locations. While the ruling elite despised the market for its filth and ongoing vendor unrest, Mexico City dwellers of all socioeconomic backgrounds shopped there. The market included fixed stalls of skilled craftsmen along with ambulatory vendors. The baratilleros sold an array of items, from furniture and hardware to food and beverages. The market vendors had their own stratified society within the shadow economy. When municipality leaders moved the markets and vendors, those relocations had adverse effects on the city's finances because stalls were left empty. The ayuntamiento (town council) could not collect rents from empty stalls, a key source of its income. Moreover, the forced relocations caused strife between baratilleros because ambulatory sellers could easily return or remain in a space once stalls were physically destroyed or removed.Konove acknowledges that quantitative data is almost nonexistent for the market. He found some census data, but he never found price lists, for example. The lack or difficulty of tax collection is evident in those documentary silences that Konove uncovered. Yet he pieced together the lives of the vendors. For example, he acknowledges that women worked as food vendors in the market. Unlike today, women were a significant but small minority of the vendors but did not sell used products. Examining wills, Konove explores the class differences among the vendors. For example, Petra Villar, a co-owner of an iron stand, owned besides this only her clothing. Rafael Manzanedo, a furniture business owner, had among his assets a hacienda, olives trees, and a country estate.Having wealthy, and perhaps literate, businessmen among the vendors ensured that the sellers in the market had the ability to voice their opinions regarding their treatment. Konove demonstrates vendors' ability to engage to their side liberal defenders who sat on the city council or took up their causes in their newspapers. During the turbulent period of Mexican history between the 1850s and the 1870s—which included the Restored Republic, the Reforma, the French-backed monarchy of Austrian Emperor Maximilian, and the return of liberalism—Konove argues that the Baratillo remained a site of popular resistance. In that market, citizens tested the stability of Mexico's institutions.Throughout the text, Konove demonstrates how integral the shadow economy was to the development of Mexican politics, economy, and society. For the ayuntamiento, the markets remained prized assets and profit generators. Their stalls created public gathering spaces to pass the time or engage in political debate. Baratilleros used newspapers to advocate for their livelihoods and to challenge political elites. They resisted for centuries being marginalized to distant neighborhoods until 1902, when the ayuntamiento initiated major public works projects and relocated the Baratillo to the poor neighborhood of Tepito, where it remains.Andrew Konove's Black Market Capital is a significant and creative contribution to the growing historiography on crime in Mexico. While historians engage the importance of place, Konove makes the public market, a few side streets, and its stalls central to modern Mexican political, social, and economic history

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