| Daniel Gutiérrez
History Department, Harvard University Robinson Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 <<insert biography here>>
|
The 1820s were the "apogee of urban mass participation in politics" when elite factions competed for the allegiance of the populace both at the ballot box and in the street.(1) The adoption of universal male suffrage throughout Mexico beginning in 1824, the economic dislocation triggered by the destructive wars for independence, and the political rivalry between competing elite factions, insured that the populace was drawn into the political struggles of the day.(2) The role of "the masses," "the popular sector," or "the people" in the political struggles of the post-independence years have often been noted. It is known that a mob proclaimed for Iturbide, the people voted for the yorkinos, and the masses rioted at the Parián.(3) Yet vital questions have only recently begun to receive serious attention: Who exactly were the people? How were the people organized? What did the people want? The political battles of Mexico in the tumultuous decade after independence cannot be properly analyzed without attempting to answer these questions. Yet reconstructing the political history of Mexico City from the "bottom up" is difficult due to the lack of primary sources with which to analyze the thoughts and actions of the populace.
Still, it is highly likely that it was artisans who represented the most politically active sector of the population. Indeed, the two major issues of the immediate post-independence period - the tariff and the Spanish expulsion - were of utmost importance to artisans in need of protection from foreign manufactures and hostile towards the power of foreign capital. But artisans were also important politically, not only as a result of their agitation around particular issues, but also because of their unique status in a pre-industrial society. A privileged sector of the working population, yet conscious of their precarious economic situation, artisans were most easily instigated into political action. Studies on the social stratification of Mexico City during the early nineteenth century have illustrated the privileged and unique status of artisans, especially higher-skilled and shop-owning artisans.(4) And Torcuato S. Di Tella, in his pioneering study of social stratification and populist politics in early independent Mexico, has theorized that it was a middle class of shop owning artisans who acted as interlocutors between the elite and the general populace.
The great mass of Mexico City's poor were indistinguishable in the eyes of elite observers. Yet there existed great differences between shop owning artisans, journeymen, apprentices, street vendors, and the mass of casually employed or unemployed people. To the elite, they were all leperos. But for the successful artisan, downward mobility from owning a shop to peddling on the street - represented a "fall from purgatory into hell."(5)
According to Di Tella the popular politics of the post-independence era were characterized by an unstable alliance between artisans and entrepreneurial Mexican industrialists, both of whom desired a protected market.(6) To an extent, this was the case in early post-independence Peru. There the demands of Lima's artisans coincided with the protectionist tendencies of the elite, creating a broad front of social sectors committed to a protected market. Artisans were able to influence tariff policy, but only because their demands were not a threat to the interests of the elite. The artisans of Lima were primarily engaged in the production of luxury goods geared for an elite market. They demanded protection from foreign luxury products, while arguing for free trade in necessary production inputs.(7) The Peruvian case is remarkably similar to Mexico. The artisan class of Mexico City was also primarily engaged in the production of luxury finished goods for the administrative capital of the nation. They represented the sector of the population most visible to the elite, and were most successful in insuring that their specific protectionist demands were met.
The alliance between artisans and an industrializing elite in the textile industry is, however, more characteristic of the 1830s, when the Banco de Avio was founded, and the first proactive plans for industrialization were implemented.(8) During the 1820s there was no consensus on the need to promote industrialization. Concerns about tariff policy had more to do with the pecuniary needs of a financially strapped government. The protectionist demands of the mass of artisans producing articles of common-consumption, such as weavers of manta or plain cotton fabric, could not be reconciled with the budgetary needs of increasingly insolvent administrations. Thus, the cotton textile workers who were most in need of a protected market and who suffered the most as a result of new foreign imports consistently failed to secure elite backing for protectionist measures. In contrast, the luxury finished-goods sector demanded protection that was much less threatening to elite needs, and received it. The effectiveness with which artisans pursued their goals depended on the types of goods they produced (luxury goods as opposed to articles of common consumption) and on the strength of their guild heritage.
Little work has been done on the political activity of artisans engaged in the production of luxury goods in Mexico City. Although the Mexican artisan has become the focus of renewed attention, little is known in particular about how the majority of Mexico City's artisans reacted to the political changes initiated by independence. Traditionally, the dominant concern of most literature on artisans has been an analysis of the evolution of the guilds (gremios).(9) New work on Mexico City's artisans has sought to understand how the guilds of the colonial era survived the legal restrictions imposed on them during the late colonial period and how artisan's guild heritage allowed for the creation of new forms of collective association that developed in the mid-nineteenth century. The origins of the Junta de Fomento de Artesanos, mutual aid societies,
and even the Gran Circulo de Obreros de Mexico of 1872, have been traced back to the corporate structure of the guilds. The old guild traditions were re-focused on new issues, and allowed for the formation of a new forms of collective identity.(10) This literature ignores important divisions amongst various guilds, and so fails to offer many insights into the actual political struggles of the immediate years after independence. The political struggles of the 1820s usually receive little notice, save for a passing remark on artisan discontent over tariff policy.
Yet even when reference is made to artisan agitation over the establishment of tariff policy, it inevitably refers exclusively to textile artisans. Little attention has been placed on the divisions amongst artisans producing goods of common consumption and those engaged in the luxury goods sector, and how each group was affected differently by the tariff legislation adopted in the decade after independence. More importantly, artisans have yet to be placed within the broader political context. For although artisans were affected by tariff policy, artisan participation in politics extended beyond a narrow concern for protected markets. In Lima, artisan guilds "offered a prop to a weak regime, and performed civic services such as tax collection, militia duty, anti-smuggling campaigns." (11)
Did artisans in Mexico perform similar functions? Within the yorkino party it was artisans who probably played the important role of middle-level political activists, rallying popular support for the party. And after independence, artisans probably played an important role in municipal government.
From the late colonial period until 1842 there are no adequate sources that permit an analysis of the population of Mexico City. However, by comparing the municipal census of 1842 with Viceroy Revillagigedo's census of 1793, Sonia Perez Toledo has been able to approximate some of the basic characteristics of Mexico City's population in the first half of the nineteenth century. The City's population, aged by periodic epidemics yet replenished by continual migration from the countryside, remained between 120,000 and 130,000 people. There were a little over 11,000 artisans, representing 9.2% of the population and 28% of the working population. In 1842 there were 4,004 textile workers, 2,252 artisans in leather goods, and 1,416 woodworkers. In addition, there were a smaller number of painters, metal workers, wax workers, printers, watchmakers and barbers. The category of leather goods is primarily composed of shoemakers; woodworkers were mainly carpenters. Unfortunately, Perez Toledo incorrectly lumps together under the category of textiles tailors as well as spinners and weavers.(12) Thus, we have no quantitative data on the percentage of actual textile workers and tailors.
Within the working population artisans were a privileged sector. Economically they were better off, and socially they had a stronger organizational heritage. By comparing rent payments as a way of gauging - albeit roughly - economic status, Frederick J. Shaw found that artisans were wealthier than their unskilled counterparts. Amongst artisans, tailors and carpenters ranked in the top ten highest rent categories. Shoemakers ranked seventeenth, weavers nineteenth, and masons twenty-fourth.(13) Despite their unique status, artisans in post-independence Mexico were in a precarious position. Notwithstanding their relative prosperity vis-à-vis the rest of the lower class population, the majority of artisans were still part of the great mass of urban poor. A typical artisan could barely afford to support a family without ancillary income generated by his wife.(14) Unemployment and underemployment were rampant. Throughout the mid-1800s only fifty percent of the working population could find steady work and many oficiales (journeymen) found themselves working for several masters in an increasingly depressed economy.(15)
To be unemployed was to become a lepero, a latent political threat disdained and feared by the elite.(16) After 1828, the unemployed were subject to persecution by the Vagrancy Tribunal (Tribunal de Vagos). Indicative of the plight of many artisans, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, two-thirds of all the people who appeared before the Vagrancy Tribunal were unemployed artisans.(17) Alejandra Moreno Toscano has written that "in conditions of great unemployment . . . access to work becomes a privilege that is reinforced by the political ties it implies."(18) Moreno Toscano has shown how even as simple a job as that of the water vendors involved a complex series of patron-client relations that bound the lowliest worker to the established authorities. To have employment meant to be part of a vast chain of informal relationships.(19) As will be demonstrated below, during the colonial era, artisan guilds had a direct connection to the municipal authorities.(20)
Throughout the colonial era artisans were legally organized into guilds. The guilds maintained a strict hierarchy between master artisans (maestros), journeymen (oficiales) and apprentices (aprendices). A child from a poor family could begin working as an apprentice as
early as the age of eight. The apprentice would be entrusted to the care of the master artisan who would assume responsibility of caring for the boy while he learned his craft. An apprenticeship could last over eight years, although there was no general rule. The master artisan had a vested interest in lengthening the apprenticeship as much as possible, since he benefited from the apprentice's unpaid labor. After completing an apprenticeship, a man would rise to the position of journeyman. A journeyman worked either for a salary of was paid for piece work. After about three years a journeyman could qualify to take an examination to become a certified master artisan. His examination would have to be approved by a commission of master artisans, veedores, and alcaldes. Additionally, he would have to prove "purity of blood," and have enough money and capital to finance a celebration in honor of his successful completion of the exam and to open his own shop.
The guild's highest authority was a veedor, a municipally appointed master artisan who insured that the guild's decrees (ordenanzas) were obeyed. The guild's principal function was to insure a protected internal market for artisans. The market was protected by limiting the number of journeymen allowed to rise to the status of master artisans, and by limiting the number of shops an artisan could operate.(21)
Beginning in the late colonial era, the guilds had come under increasing attack. The intellectual assaults against the power of the guilds dated back to the reign of Charles III and the writings of influential liberal theorists, such as Bernardo Ward. Beginning in the 1780s the guilds were increasingly weakened and critiqued by the authorities of New Spain. Viceroy Revillagigedo had criticized the high costs of artisan guild fiestas. Revillagigedo had also directly attacked certain guilds, decreeing the abolition of the guilds for the pork sellers, sail makers, and the
confectioners. On September 2, 1784, illegitimacy as an impediment to becoming a master artisan was abolished. Early in the nineteenth century, Viceroy Iturrigary abolished the guild for the barrel makers, while the ayuntamiento had abolished the guilds of the iron workers and the weavers.(22) And on June 18, 1813 the liberal Cortes de Cadiz decreed the freedom to work without subjecting oneself to the authority of a guild.(23)
But even before the legislative assault on their authority, the guilds were weakened by the acts of artisans themselves. Journeymen working clandestinely - known as rinconeros - had fought the guild's authority to prevent them from working.(24) For example, in 1796 five non-guild textile artisans in Mexico City were discovered owning up to fourteen looms each, at a time when guild restrictions limited master artisans to owning no more than five looms.(25) Insofar as the guilds limited the ability of journeymen to rise to master artisan status, many artisans must have welcomed their gradual extinction. According to the procurador del ayuntamiento in 1818, the weakening of the gremios was followed by a rise in the number of shops in the City.(26) Perez Toledo has challenged this assertion, noting that there was no significant numerical difference in the total number of shops indicated by the censuses of 1793 and 1842.(27) Yet this apparent statistical stability no doubt masks a great deal of economic turmoil, as some artisans succeeded in the new economic order while others fell by the wayside. Of course, although legal mechanisms preventing people from working as shop owning artisans no longer existed, strong economic impediments remained. Few journeymen had the necessary resources to open a shop. Political instability, the contraction of the internal market, and foreign competition were all impediments to upward mobility.(28)
Much of the recent literature on the artisans of the early nineteenth century has focused on the survival of the guilds after the liberal legislative assault on their powers. Certainly, the guild's power to control the labor market was weakened. As municipal bodies with the power to control labor, they were substantially undermined.(29) But the real abolition of the guilds as corporate entities did not occur until La Reforma. It wasn't until then, for example, that the property owned by many of the wealthier guilds was confiscated.(30)
Recently historians have also emphasized the importance of the guild heritage in bequeathing to artisans a collective identity that allowed for the creation of new forms of association in the mid-nineteenth century.(31) No doubt the guilds represented a form of corporate identity, and many artisans surely must have had a "fierce sense of pride in their skilled craft."(32) But it is not correct to infer, as Perez Toledo does, that artisans had a collective identity owing to their status as workers.(33) Artisans certainly did not conceive of themselves in these terms. A tailor, a spinner and a barber most likely did not feel a sense of class cohesion. Rather than speaking in general terms about the survival of artisan guilds and their transmutation into new forms of association, it is important to take notice of the serious differences amongst guilds. Most of the historians working on artisans treat them as one homogenous mass, and write about their guilds in the same over-generalized terms.
Not all guilds possessed the same resources. While some were quite poor, others - such as the shoemakers, for example - owned large amounts of property.(34) Weak gremios, such as those representing weavers, had already disappeared, or had been abolished, before the 1813 decree. Indicative of most guilds' weakness, when in anticipation of the 1813 decree the Mexico City ayuntamiento debated the fate of the City's guilds, no guild - with the notable exception of the tailors - lodged a protest with the ayuntamiento.(35) It was artisans representing the luxury goods sector who had the greatest sense of group pride, the best organizational skills, and the strongest and wealthiest gremios. They were probably also wracked less by internal divisions. More research must be done, but most likely the problem of rinconeros was limited to artisans producing goods of common consumption, especially cotton spinners and weavers.(36) It is very important to be attuned to differences between artisans representing different occupations. Some artisans had a greater sense of group cohesion and stronger organizational skills. It was the better organized artisans of the luxury-goods sector who were most politically active and successful in the post-independence years.
Most commentary on the political role of artisans in the 1820s has focused on cotton spinners and weavers. Indeed, in Mexico City textiles were the most important handicraft industry. It was Puebla, with over 11,000 looms in the late colonial era, that was the dominant textile production center. Mexico City, along with Oaxaca, trailed behind with approximately 5,000 to 6,000 looms.(37) In is unclear how many looms were in operation by the 1820s, although
contemporary observers attested to the destruction of Mexico's textile production.(38) Textile artisans protested against growing foreign competition in textiles.(39) Very little is known about the political activity of other sectors of the artisan class. H.G. Ward, besides commenting briefly on the "rude industry of the natives," made no mention of the City's artisan base.(40) Joel R. Poinsett, more observant than Ward, did make note of the artisans of the City, commenting on the production of playing cards, coarse cottons, hats ("of the best quality") and a vibrant leather goods sector (demonstrating "excellent workmanship").(41) "In all towns," he observed, "hats, shoes and saddlery are manufactured."(42) His observations were made in the fall of 1822, so he provides no clues as to how this luxury-goods manufacturing sector responded to the changes precipitated by independence. Not even Lorenzo de Zavala, so proud of the popular support enjoyed by the yorkinos, provides any substantial insight into the nature and extent of this support. Indeed, Zavala tends to convey the impression that the mass of Mexico City's population was motivated to support the yorkinos solely by Enlightenment ideals of liberty.(43)
An analysis of the major tariff legislation of the 1820s indicates that it was the luxury-goods artisans, with the strongest guild heritage - especially the tailors and shoemakers - who were the most successful in insuring a protected market for their goods. The tariff law of December 15, 1821 adopted by the Soberana Junta Provisional established Mexico's first post-independence liberal trade regime. Few items were prohibited outright, with the exception of raw cotton. Although cotton yarn up to weight number 60 was also prohibited, this did little to protect the domestic textile industry since the importation of cotton cloth was still allowed.(44) After Iturbide's ascension to the throne and his dissolution of the Constituent Congress, his hand picked legislative body, the Junta Nacional Instituyente, voted to exclude all foreign textiles. This prohibitionist measure was repealed once Iturbide was overthrown and the Constituent Congress was reinstalled.(45)
The tide towards greater protection and away from uninhibited free trade began in 1824 when Finance Minister Francisco Arillaga proposed a series of tough new restrictions on the importation of foreign goods. Arillaga's proposals were accepted by the Constituent Congress of 1824, and a total of 116 prohibitions went into effect. All leather goods and finished clothing products were now prohibited. However, once again, the importation of cotton textiles was not prohibited. Arillaga justified the prohibitions on the grounds that it was necessary to prohibit the import of anything that could be produced locally. But, he noted, since the cotton textile workers of Mexico could not produce in sufficient quantity or satisfactory quality and price, they did not deserve protection. Only until they had improved their efficiency, he stated, would they deserve protection.(46) It was the "tailoring professions" who were protected. By 1823 cotton textile imports represented thirty percent of the value of all imports. To have prohibited their importation would have exasperated an already grim fiscal problem. (47)
Interestingly, when a Congressional committee convened in 1826 to discuss reforming the 1824 tariff law, it proposed eliminating practically all prohibitions, including those on leather
goods and finished clothing products. The free trade spirit was still strong. However, by the time the Chamber of Deputies had finished debating the annulment of each individual prohibition, the list of prohibited items had only been reduced to fifty six. More importantly, the structure of the 1824 law remained intact. Importation of cotton cloth was still permitted, and the tailoring professions continued to benefit from a prohibition of finished clothing products and leather goods.(48)
In May 1829, after coming to power on a wave of popular support, Vicente Guerrero prohibited the importation of all cotton textiles.(49) Foreigners were also prohibited from all retail merchandising.(50) Considering Lorenzo de Zavala - Guerrero's closest advisor - was an avowed economic liberal, Guerrero's prohibitionist policy must have been intended solely to shore up his base of popular support. Guerrero's attack on the "spurious application of liberal economic principles and the thoughtless freedom given to foreign commerce" had won him the loyalty of artisans.(51) Artisans were probably key participants in the Acordada rebellion that brought Guerrero to power, as well as an important segment of the mob that looted the Parián market in the wake of the Acordada victory.(52) For financial reasons Guerrero was never able to enforce his prohibitionist decree before he was overthrown in December, 1829. The textile artisans never gained the protection from foreign competition they desired. Iturbide and Guerrero were the only leaders to have decreed an import ban on cotton textiles. Both men had come to power with strong popular support, but were in a precarious position as they struggled to maintain their grip on power and to strengthen their base of support. Only during these two times of political crisis
were textile artisans rewarded with decrees aimed at protecting them from foreign competition. The better organized artisans of Mexico City's luxury goods sector, on the other hand, were consistently protected from foreign imports.
Popular support for Guerrero was, no doubt, largely a result of his protectionist stance. But the popularity enjoyed by the yorkinos cannot be explained by their positions on tariff policy. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the yorkinos had a unified position on the tariff. Zavala, one the most prominent yorkinos, was against prohibitive legislation. Political divisions between escoceses and yorkinos bore no relation to differences of opinion regarding economic policy.(53) The issue that really united the yorkinos and allowed them to win popular support, was their agitation for the expulsion of the Spaniards.(54) Amongst the Creole elite the desire for the expulsion of the Spaniards sprang not only from a post-colonial sense of nationalism, but also from mercantile rivalry and a desire to gain access to the public offices of the Spaniards, a privilege denied them by the Bourbon colonial administration.(55) Creole desires to supplant the Spaniards dovetailed with a deep current of hatred for the Spaniards amongst the lower classes. Artisans, in particular, were resentful of the power of merchant capital, and resented the Spaniards as importers of foreign goods.(56) This was especially true of textile artisans, who had a much closer connection with Spanish merchants.
The yorkino agitation for Spanish expulsion was largely responsible for their electoral success in 1826.(57) In 1827 the anti-Spanish agitation climaxed, as violent rebellions - the
so-called "armed petitions" - demanding the expulsion of Spaniards spread throughout the nation. Fueled by the Arenas conspiracy, in which a deranged cleric had been caught conspiring to restore Spanish rule, anti-Spanish hysteria permeated all levels of society. In May, Congress approved the Public Employees Law, which decreed that Spaniards could no longer hold federal public offices. And in December, Congress approved the first National Expulsion bill. The Congress had become a target of the "armed petitions," as armed revolts spread around the federal district in 1827.(58) The Spanish expulsion issue was, of course, of concern not only to artisans. The yorkinos could use their anti-Spanish rhetoric to rally support from a broad range of the population, from artisans to lowly street vendors. Artisans were, however, particularly agitated by the presence and power of Spanish merchants.
The agitation over the Spanish expulsion helps illuminate not only how the political elite rallied popular support, but also suggests how artisans served as interlocutors between the elite and the masses. It was probably artisans who were the mid-level political activists, helping to rally support for the yorkinos amongst the general populace. Men such as Lucas Balderas and Jose Ignacio Paz were typical mid-level political activists who played key leadership roles.
Jose Ignacio Paz, a puppeteer and schoolteacher, played a valuable role as a yorkino agitator. In 1826 he was elected regidor. And in 1828, he participated in the Acordada rebellion. Paz is most well known for his anti-Spanish agitation.(59) Balderas was a tailor and a militiaman. He began his political career as a loyal supporter of Iturbide. After the fall of the Emperor, he became a yorkino activist. He alternated "between his tailor shop and his position in the militia"
where he rose to the rank of captain in 1827. When the yorkinos swept the elections of 1826, Balderas was elected regidor. In 1828 he lead a armed group at the Acordada rebellion.(60)
Balderas and Paz are the only two names of actual artisan leaders that appear in the secondary literature. More research must be done on the composition of the municipal councils and militias in the post-independence period. In all likelihood, the experiences of Balderas and Paz were the norm. Artisans, because of their unique status, were probably very active in state and municipal militias. And just like Paz and Balderas were elected to the municipal government in 1826, other successful artisans also probably served as alcaldes or regidores on the City's ayuntamiento. From their positions as militiamen or as members of the municipal government, artisans mobilized the people of Mexico City. The artisan was the middleman in a process that linked the elite with the general populace.
The luxury goods artisans (mainly tailors, shoemakers,
and cabinet makers) of Mexico City played a crucial role in the urban politics
of the 1820s. Although they appeared indistinguishable from the greater
mass of urban poor, the artisans of Mexico City were distinct, both in
their skill level and in their organizational heritage. An artisan producing
luxury-goods was, in a sense, the aristocracy of the City's labor. They
were the best organized and the most influential segment of the general
population. Any further research into the urban politics of Mexico City
in the early nineteenth century must focus on the role of artisans as middle-level
political activists and leaders. Mexico City's highly skilled artisans
were also the sector of the artisan class that was most successful in gaining
protection from competition from foreign goods. They had the strongest
organizational heritage, the most wealth, more prestige, and closer connections
with the elite. Their role in the politics of early independent Mexico,
although mostly ignored, must be researched more if we are to understand
the social-political history of Mexico City in the early nineteenth century.
1. Richard Andrew Warren, "Vagrants and Citizens: Politics and the Poor in Mexico City, 1803 - 1836," diss., University of Chicago, 1994, 97.
2. Warren 1. Silvia M. Arrom, "Popular Politics in Mexico City: The Parián Riot, 1828," Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (1988): 245-268.
3. Lucas Alamán, Historia de Mexico: Desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su Independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la epoca presente Tomo V (1852; Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1985). Warren. Stanley C. Green, The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823-1832 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). Michael P. Costeloe, La primera republica federal de Mexico (1824-1835) (Un estudio de los partidos políticos en el Mexico independiente) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1975).
4. Alejandra Moreno Toscano, "Los Trabajadores y el Proyecto de Industrializacion, 1810-1867," De La Colonia al Imperio, La Clase Obrera en la Historia de Mexico (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno). Juan Felipe Leal and Jose Woldenberg, Del estado liberal a los inicios de la dictadura Porfirista, 4a ed. La Clase Obrera en la Historia de Mexico (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986). Frederick J. Shaw, "The Artisan in Mexico City (1824-1853)," El Trabajo y los Trabajadores en la historia de Mexico, comps. Elsa Cecilia Frost, Michael C. Meyer, and Josefina Zoraida Vazquez (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979). Sonia Perez Toledo, Los Hijos del Trabajo: Los artesanos de la ciudad de México, 1780-1853, (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1996).
5. Torcuato S. Di Tella, National Popular Politics in Early Independent Mexico, 1820-1847, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996) 10.
6. Di Tella 15-16, 74. Di Tella's analysis focuses implicitly on artisans engaged in textile production.
7. Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 9, 49-51. Gootenberg, "The Social Origins of Protectionism and Free Trade in Nineteenth-Century Lima," Journal of Latin American Studies 14 (1982): 339-340.
8. Even in the 1830s it is not entirely correct to speak of an "alliance," for although the needs of entrepreneurial industrialists, like Lucas Alamán, for protection coincided with the pleas of textile artisans, the founding of the Banco de Avio does not seem to be the result of popular pressure. See Robert A. Potash, Mexican Government and Industrial Development in the Early Republic: The Banco de Avio, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).
9. For colonial period see Manuel Carrera Stampa, Los Gremios Mexicanos: La organización gremial en Nueva España, (Mexico, D.F: Edicion y Distribucion Ibero Americana Publicaciones, 1954). Felipe Castro Gutierrez, La Extinción de la Artesania Gremial, (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1986). For the national period see Perez Toledo. Carlos Illades, Hacial La República Del Trabajo: La organización artesanal en la ciudad de México, 1853-1876, (México: El Colegio de Mexico, 1996). Illades, Estudios Sobre el Artesano Urbano del Siglo XIX.
10. Illades, Hacia. Illades, Estudios. Perez Toledo. For a similar argument about the artisan guilds of France see William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The language of labor from the old regime to 1848, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
11. Gootenberg, "Social origins," 338.
12. Perez Toledo, 39-49, 133-35, 136. Without a more detailed and systematic study of Mexico City's population, Perez Toledo's approximations are the most reliable estimates available for gauging the social composition of the population in the decade after independence. Perez Toledo emphasizes that a comparison of the 1793 and the 1842 censuses indicates a great deal of stability in the population of Mexico City. The percentage of artisans to the total population and to the working population, as well as the composition of the various occupational categories, all remained stable. But this apparent stability in occupational categories is probably to a great extent the result of the manner by which she categorizes workers. In particular, her erroneous categorization of tailors as textile workers, masks a great deal of instability in the actual textile industry.
15. Illades, Hacia, 59, 39. Moreno Toscano, 312.
16. Moreno Toscano, 328. For a similar fear and loathing of the lower classes by the elite in Victorian England see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society, (1971; London: Penguin Books, 1992).
18. Moreno Toscano, 328. Translation my own.
21. Stampa, 10, 25, 30, 37-9, 47, 51, 57, 112-15.
22. Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, "La abolicion de los gremios," El Trabajo 317-18.
23. Tanck 311. Perez Toledo 98.
29. Jorge Alberto Manrique, commentary on Tanck 336-37.
30. Stampa 271. Perez Toledo 102.
31. Perez Toledo 21-22. Illades, Hacia, 2.
36. It was also cotton spinners and weavers who were most aided by merchant capital, which also had a stake in breaking up the guild's ability to control the market. For role of merchant capital in textile industry see Potash 9-10.
38. H.G. Ward, Mexico, Enl. ed., 2 vols. (London, 1829) 60, 327. Joel R. Poinsett, Notes on Mexico: Made in the Autumn of 1822, (Philadelphia, 1824) 102. Alamán 420.
43. Lorenzo de Zavala, Manifiesto del Gobernador del Estado de Mexico, Ciudadano Lorenzo de Zavala, (Tlalpam: Imprenta Gobierno, 1829).
44. "Arancel Interino del 15 de Diciembre de 1821," in Guillermo Tardiff, ed. Historia General del Comercio Exterior Mexicano (Antecedentes, Documentos, Glosas y Commentarios) 1503-1847, Tomo I. (Mexico: n.p., 1968) 191-92. Potash 13-4. Alamán 418.
46. Francisco de Arillaga, "Memoria sobre reformas del arancel mercantil que presenta el Secretario de Hacienda al Soberano Congreso Consituyente," Tardiff, ed. 216-43. Potash 18-20.
48. Tardiff 312-17. Potash 24-5.
50. Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) 257
53. For incongruity between political labels and economic views see Hale chap. 8.
54. Harold Dana Sims, The Expulsion of Mexico's Spaniards, 1821-1836, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) 7-8.
58. Sims 19-26. Green 142-144.
59. Di Tella 76. Jose Ignacio Paz, Vale de un Real Doloroso Recuerdo de Los Astecas, (Mexico, 1826).