Abstract
During the late colonial period, numerous Novohispanic cities embarked on an unprecedented number of projects aimed at reshaping their urban spaces and improving infrastructures, including new facilities for grain storage and supply. The construction of alhóndigas (public granaries), along with other public works and infrastructures, was further propelled by the implementation of Bourbon reforms in Spanish America and the 1780s reorganization of the colonies into intendencias (provinces), as part of the monarchy’s efforts to improve the colonial administration and economy and centralize royal power. The newly appointed royal officials (intendentes) were instrumental in the implementation of these reforms, overseeing tax collection, promoting economic growth and agricultural production, improving mining, and developing a program of public works to embellish and modernize the urban environments and ameliorate the living conditions of their residents in sanitation, public health, water infrastructure, and food supply. This essay explores the projected alhóndigas for two late colonial Mexican cities and how they engaged with contemporary discussions about the efficacy of public works, the circulation of ideals promoted by enlightened reformers on good governance and civic order, issues of artistic and architectural production, and the transmission of a reformist aesthetic agenda from the center to the provinces of New Spain.
Highlights
The 1681 Recopilación de Leyes de las Indias explicitly instructed the colonial administration to follow the model of Mexico City and that “all the main cities and towns of the provinces of the Indies, where it is convenient to found alhóndigas for the supply of the republic and to remedy the inconveniences that result from there being in them speculators [regatones] and resellers of wheat, flour, and other grains, they be founded for the common good” (Recopilación 1681, vol 2, fol. 109v)
New or renovated alhóndigas were projected in other large administrative centers or provincial were two of the most prosperous agricultural regions in colonial Mexico, turned into economic hubs closely linked to the Northern Novohispanic mining districts, which contributed to the development of some large and densely populated urban centers such as Guadalajara, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Celaya, and San Luis Potosí (Figure 2)
In a letter sent to viceroy José de Iturrigaray on 6 February 1805, the professors of the Mexican Academy reiterated the need to propagate “the good taste in the arts and avoid the abuse of them done especially in the cities and towns away from the capital, where painting, sculpture and architectural works are freely carried by incompetent people, and this freedom has already caused the saddest consequences” (Báez Macías 1972, p. 15). Their careers unfolded in the margins of the late colonial academic setting, Ciprés and other local alarifes and master masons were paramount for the development of a public works and infrastructure agenda in Bourbon New Spain, often traveling to and attending to building projects in several regional centers
Summary
By the middle eighteenth century, granaries already had a long history in colonial. Mexico and throughout the early modern Spanish empire (Gordo Peláez 2010, pp. 432–58). As historian Gabriel Paquette has demonstrated, the notion of public good and happiness permeated the ideological discourse of the late Bourbon Spanish empire in relation to the role of the state These ideas, inspired by Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s writings, circulated in New Spain and are key to understanding the reformist agenda the officials of the colonial administration and local governments aimed to implement New or renovated alhóndigas were projected in other large administrative centers or provincial were two of the most prosperous agricultural regions in colonial Mexico, turned into economic hubs closely linked to the Northern Novohispanic mining districts, which contributed to the development of some large and densely populated urban centers such as Guadalajara, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Celaya, and San Luis Potosí (Figure 2).
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