Vendors' Capitalism: A Political Economy of Public Markets in Mexico City

Abstract

Public markets in Mexico City have everything to satisfy human wants. Vendors hawk essential food items alongside everyday necessities. Ingrid Bleynat's Vendors' Capitalism takes the reader beyond this impressive range of goods to explore the historical significance of such markets and, most importantly, of their workers to Mexico's capitalist development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The self-employed workers (trabajadores por cuenta propia) in these markets, as the author maintains, were neither wage workers nor capitalists; with minimal capital, they managed to acquire goods offered inside and outside public markets. Myriad studies have shown that old and new forms of production coexisted in nineteenth-century Latin America and that historical actors variously resisted and embraced capitalist labor norms. Opposition and accommodation notwithstanding, scholarship in this field demonstrates a general consensus that capitalism bulldozed previous work arrangements, at least in most urban centers across the subcontinent. Bleynat's poignant study of Mexico City challenges this received opinion, persuasively demonstrating how these vendors—in interaction with other social actors—forged unique labor and political practices that endure to this day.Vendors' Capitalism is a fascinating window on the economic, social, and political world of a large segment of Mexican laborers. It begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when Mexico administered doses of economic liberalism, and ends in the 1960s, at the apogee of the developmental state. Bleynat elucidates Mexico's broad transformations through the eyes and experiences of street sellers, proprietor vendors, politicians, and policymakers. Based on extensive archival research and comprehensive analysis of the printing press, this book captures the public debate over the functioning of markets. It also emphasizes vendors' relevance to Mexico City's supply system and consumers—although the links between purveyors and vendors would have warranted further examination.Bleynat's study evokes discussions about what social scientists once called the informal sector. As other authors have asserted, the subsistence strategies of these laborers demanded a great deal of negotiation, political engagement, and permanent working arrangements. Yet vendors carved out precarious spaces in the labor market and the political system. Firstly, the disputes between the city and the federal authority left, on occasion, gaps as to who oversaw what. Although vendors could use these fissures to their advantage, different layers of public administration sought to regulate public spaces, control access to stalls, and increase tax collection. The extent to which government officials enforced such policies shaped vendors' livelihoods to the point that they lived under perpetual make-or-break conditions. Secondly, vendors never constituted a homogeneous group. Rich sellers rented out stalls (puestos), less affluent merchants ran these puestos, and viento vendors occupied booths outside the markets; they all had competing interests.Bleynat weaves well-crafted political and economic summaries into each chapter, describing how, over a century, the concerns of vendors collided and converged with the polity du jour. In 1860s Mexico, Catholic ethics provided philosophical sustenance to sellers' arguments, in part because their survival was predicated on charity. But as street vendors multiplied at the turn of the century, the city government became less sympathetic to their plight. Certain parties came to see peddlers as remnants of a bygone era, incompatible with Porfirian modernization. The elite framed them as traffic impediments and sanitary nuisances; other vendors labeled them unfit competitors. The 1910 revolution was still running its course when vendors reshaped their discourse. They used words like “labor” and “capital” in their petitions and recast the “bad government” in new terms. For most vendors, however, real gains rested more on their ability to renegotiate their precarious position within the new system than on structural economic changes. In the 1930s, they joined vendor organizations, taking up the revolutionary mantle of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana. But some of vendors' most basic demands—working on Sundays, for instance—were at odds with the traditional working-class agenda.Ingrid Bleynat masterfully takes the reader through similar conflicts over 100 years of Mexican history. One of the book's vital themes is how state intervention in favor of the traditional workforce or established sellers often clashed with peddlers' interests. From the early years of liberalism to the era of developmentalism, urban renewal and market building delivered some benefits to organized vendors. Street sellers, however, continued to suffer repression outside the markets and remained at the margins of economic and political systems. Yet they were in plain sight. In Bleynat's work, they also embody the limitations of Mexico's capitalism. As such, the argument that Vendors' Capitalism presents is of tremendous value to scholars of Mexico and Latin America and to any observer of global capitalism in the era of the gig economy.