VanYoung Islands in Storm Quiet Cities

The Past and Present Society
Islands in the Storm: Quiet Cities and Violent Countrysides in the Mexican Independence
Era
Author(s): Eric Van Young
Source: Past & Present, No. 118 (Feb., 1988), pp. 130-155
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650833
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ISLANDS IN THE STORM:
QUIET CITIES AND VIOLENT
COUNTRYSIDES IN THE MEXICAN
INDEPENDENCE ERA
In Mexico conspiracies have almost always been brewed in

and serious rebellions in the countryside. One is hard put
exceptions to this rule, which might be extended more ge
Latin America as a whole. Surely for this reason incidents
upheaval in cities, such as the riots of 1624 and 1692 in M
the "Tragic Week" of 1919 in Buenos Aires and the "Bo
1948 in Colombia, infrequent as they have been and enjoyin
social etiologies, jump to the observer's attention as anoma
blips in a continual sea of rural riot and rebellion. The
cities is especially remarkable in periods of generalized and
rural insurrection, such as the one which gripped Me
years 1810 to 1816 and which eventuated in the countr
independence from Spain in 1821. Indeed the rurality of t
which broke out in 1810 - that is, that armed violence
exclusively carried out by rural people from small villages
and towns all over New Spain (as the colony was then
one of its most notable characteristics. The absence of
urban uprising is still more striking if one recalls its
contemporary European social upheavals. The French R
for example, though it encompassed a significant rural co
both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, was of cou
in Paris and developed there, supported largely by the urb
classes.1 Popular direct action in the form of riots of varyi
of seriousness gave the English in the eighteenth and
centuries, and particularly Londoners, a reputation for
throughout Europe.2 Why, then, as insurrection engul
1 See, among the vast literature on Revolutionary Paris, George Rud

in the French Revolution (London, 1959); Albert Soboul, Les sans-culott
l'an II: mouvement populaire et gouvernement revolutionnaire, 1793-179
Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-
1970).
2 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), p.
62.
ISLANDS IN THE STORM 131
rural Mexico, did the cities of the realm remain so quie

Outlining an answer to this question can provide insigh
larger issues. The study of why a major segment of t
population did not rebel can provide some useful indica
why yet others did so. Furthermore a close look at the
this late colonial urban passivity can tell us much about th
cities and their development in colonial Mexico and, more
about the evolution of colonial society as a whole.
The major hypotheses that have guided my present resea
question are as follows. First, it appears that the mass of inh
the Mexican cities did not take up arms against Spanish
because there was no issue to mobilize them in 1810 or thereafter.
There is very little if any evidence to indicate that the programmatic
elements espoused by the creole directorate of the independence
movement and its allies, in the early phase of the insurrection up to
1815 or so, had any attraction for the urban masses, and they certainly
appear to have had little for the overwhelmingly Indian rural masses
of the colony.3 These issues included the contradictions brought forth
by the Bourbon reforms of the late colonial decades, longings for
some sort of local political autonomy on the part of New Spain's
white elite and the breakdown of imperial legitimacy connected with
events in Napoleonic Europe. One would think that if such ideological
elements had had the power to mobilize the popular classes at all, it
would have been in the cities of the realm, sharing, as they did at
least to some degree, many of the characteristics of late pre-industrial
cities in Europe: greater population densities, higher literacy rates,
extensive poverty, easier communications, and so forth; but such was
not the case. Secondly, even if the mass of the urban population had
been inclined to rebel in the name of such issues, it would have been
incapable of doing so because the social and economic conditions of
most late colonial Mexican cities militated against concerted forms of
popular political action. Finally, conditions prevailed in Mexican
cities which tended to eliminate mass armed uprising as a possible
3 See Eric Van Young, "Moving toward Revolt: Agrarian Origins of the Hidalgo
Rebellion in the. Guadalajara Region", in Friedrich Katz (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and
Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, forthcoming); Eric Van Young,
"Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?: Symbols and Popular Ideology in the
Mexican Wars of Independence", in Proceedings of the 1984 Meeting of the Rocky
Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2 vols. (Las Cruces, 1984), i, pp. 18-35;
Eric Van Young, "Millennium on the Northern Marches: The Mad Messiah of
Durango and Popular Rebellion in Mexico, 1800-1815", Comp. Studies in Soc. and
Hist., xxviii (1986), pp. 385-413.
132 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 118
course of action, and which were both conjunctural (that is, recent
and circumstantial) and structural (long-term and developmental) in
nature.
* * *
Before conc
environment
of the chara
found itself
result of Nap
waves across
the parish pr
standard of
sacked a num
capital and o
about two m
climactic batt
in early 181
executed. Th
priest and fo
by rival fact
leadership a
captured an
these first f
sometimes s
tions, more
between re
uprisings in
well as activi
of bandits. T
but died ou
largely pacif
ance continu
next few ye
digging in of
Then in 182
military off
of a liberal c
tionary forc
colony, an ir
4 Competent g
"The Economic
1800-1824", Ibe
(cont.
Certainly violent collective action by rural people again

tuted authority was not new or unusual in colonial Mexico,
it to disappear during the century between 1810 and the ou
the revolution of 1910. Unusual, however, were the scale of
nineteenth-century uprisings and their preternatural v
terms of the numbers of people involved, the geographical
that involvement and the duration of the popular participa
had been nothing like the independence period in previo
history and there would be nothing on a similar scale for a
after it. Consisting largely of peasants and other rural
dalgo's army came to number as many as 100,000 men b
1811, and even after the mass mobilization phase of the
had crested with the defeat and dispersion of that fo
contingents of several thousand men fighting over periods
months were quite common right up until 1821.5 The si
armies clearly dwarfed anything which might be called
rebellion during the preceding colonial period. Furthe
sustained character of the movement was unusual. While it is true
that insurgent armies and guerrilla bands shared a certain evanescent
quality, and while it is also true that the royalist government suc-
ceeded in pacifying virtually all of New Spain by 1816, one may still
speak of a certain degree of continuity in the rebellion as a peasant
movement. This generalization certainly extends to regions which
(n. 4 cont.)
Florescano, "Antecedents of the Mexican Independence Movement: Social Instability
and Political Discord", in Robert Detweiler and Ram6n E. Ruiz (eds.), Liberation in
the Americas: Comparative Aspects of the Independence Movements in Mexico and the
United States (San Diego, 1978), pp. 69-86. Interesting attempts to delineate some
social aspects of the rebellion itself are Torcuato S. DiTella, "Las clases peligrosas en
la independencia de Mexico", in Tulio Halperin-Donghi (ed.), El ocaso del 6rden
colonial en Hispanoamerica (Buenos Aires, 1978), pp. 201-47; William B. Taylor,
"Rural Unrest in Central Jalisco, 1790-1816", in Katz (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and
Revolution; Christon I. Archer, "Banditry and Revolution in New Spain, 1790-1821",
Bibliotheca Americana, i (1982), pp. 59-88. A stimulating global interpretation is to be
found in John M. Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of
Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton, 1986), esp. chs. 2-5; but still indispensable
is Hugh M. Hamill, The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (Gainesville,
1966). Useful for putting the Mexican independence struggle into a comparative
context are Richard Graham, Independence in Latin America (New York, 1972); Jorge
I. Dominguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire
(Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
5 Archivo General de la Naci6n, Mexico City (hereafter A.G.N.), Operaciones de
Guerra (hereafter O.G.), clxxi, fo. 88r, Calleja to Venegas, 17 Jan. 1811. For a full
discussion of the controversy surrounding the estimates of Hidalgo's army, see Alma
Rosa Barcenas Diaz, "Puente de Calder6n: reconstrucci6n hist6rica-geografica de una
batalla (1811)" (Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, tesis de licenciatura en
historia, 1980), pp. 58-64; Hamill, Hidalgo Revolt, pp. 149-50, 197-8.
endured as focuses of sustained rebellion, and even to individuals

who fought over the course of several years, sometimes obtaining one
royal pardon after another.
Finally, the violence perpetrated in individual incidents of village
riots and paramilitary rebel activity was markedly different in tone
from that which generally characterized interpersonal and village
violence before 1810.6 An illustrative incident was a riot by Indian
peasants in the small town of Atlacomulco, near Toluca just to the
west of Mexico City, which broke out on All Saints' Day (1 November)
1810. A mob of several hundred Indian villagers launched a furious
assault on the house and shop of a European-born Spanish merchant
of the town, sacked the house thoroughly and killed the owner with
stones, knives and clubs. The man was so mutilated as to be virtually
unrecognizable, testified his wife, and was left by his assassins "a
misery, covered with stones". One of the alleged Indian assailants
remarked ingenuously that the victim "had a very hard head, that he
had hit him with a club and with stones and he still hadn't died".
Nor was this incident particularly unusual for the period.7 While it
is true that large numbers of European Spaniards were killed by the
rebels in the cities they captured in late 1810 and early 1811, even at
their worst these mass executions look like brutal but clinical excisions
of scapegoats or social enemies rather than ritualistic, sacrificial
killings in which not just the death but the annihilation of the victim
was the goal, and in which the acting-out of the aggressive affect itself
was as important as the elimination of its object.8
6 On peasant violence at the interpersonal and village level, see William B. Taylor,
Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, 1979); Eric
Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy
of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820 (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 140, 265, 319-21, 340-1;
Eric Van Young, "Conflict and Solidarity in Indian Village Life: The Guadalajara
Region in the Late Colonial Period", Hispanic American Hist. Rev., Ixiv (1984), pp.
55-79.
7 A.G.N., Criminal, ccxxix, fos. 263r-413v, 1810; ccxxxi, exped. 1, fos. lr-59r, 1811;
this incident is treated in greater detail in Van Young, "Who Was That Masked Man,
Anyway?", pp. 18-19; Van Young, "Millennium on the Northern Marches", pp. 404-
5. For some other examples of thisfureurpaysanne - the phrase is Roland Mousnier's:
Fureurs paysannes (Paris, 1967) - in riots, see the cases of Amecameca: A.G.N.,
Criminal, clvi, fos. 20r-167v, 175r-416v, 521r-30v, 1810; Cuernavaca: A.G.N., Criminal,
cxlvii, exped. 15, fos. 443r-574v, 1810; and Jilotepec: A.G.N., Criminal, xxvi, exped.
9, no pagination, 1818.
8 On the cathartic effects of such violence in anti-colonial wars, see the suggestive
comments of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1966). As to the
psycho-social etiology of this type of violence, which was largely directed at European-
born Spaniards as opposed to whites in general, I have elsewhere developed a
scheme which attempts to take into account long-term social, economic and cultural
(cont. on p. 135)
On the other hand, several characteristics of rural rebelli

and after which are of a piece with smaller-scale, localiz
before that time include the jacquerie-like nature of many l
ments ostensibly linked to national leadership; the feuda
the movement for independence as a whole; the pre-politic
of popular ideology; and hints of anti-urban sentiment wh
up in rebel attacks on cities. Most often, rather than form
for a definitive mobilization for rebellion on a long-ter
such uprisings quickly faded. The feudalization of the mov
general - that is, its tendency to breed factional struggle w
rebel leadership, to be organized on extremely localized
dominated by local clans or strong men, its effective fa
under Hidalgo and Morelos to coalesce militarily, and so
acknowledged by most investigators.9 The pre-political
popular ideology - that is to say, peasant, but not e
Indian, rebel ideology - is evident in its almost total lack o
programmatic elements, its tendency to be cast in terms of
of distorted legitimism and the intriguing messianic and m
beliefs that show up in it from time to time. Among these
belief that the ferociously reactionary deposed King Fer
of Spain was actually present in Mexico in 1810 and 1811
as a masked man and co-operating with the rebels thems
Finally, there are hints in revolts and conspiracies in the
period, and rather clearer though still largely inferential sig
and after, of a sentiment of anti-urbanism on the par
rebels. For example, in 1797 a not altogether unfounded ru
circulating in the provincial city of Celaya that a local Indi
named Agustin de la Rosa, alias "Tachuela", had hatche
(n. 8 cont.)
developments in colonial Mexico, and which utilizes elements of psychoanalytic and

object-relations theory: see Van Young, "Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?";
Van Young, "Millennium on the Northern Marches". The worst of the mass executions
of European-born Spaniards, amounting to several hundred victims at least, appears
to have been in Guadalajara during December 1810. On these massacres, see Jose
Ramirez Flores, El gobierno insurgente en Guadalajara, 1810-1811 (Guadalajara, 1969),
pp. 95-110.
9 See, for example, the article by Archer, "Banditry and Revolution in New Spain".
10 For details on this and other aspects of popular ideology, see Van Young, "Who
Was That Masked Man, Anyway?"; Van Young, "Millennium on the Northern
Marches". The term "pre-political" is used here in the sense of symbolic rather than
explicit, ad hoc and oral rather than formalized and written, popular rather than elite,
"conservative" rather than proto-liberal, religious rather than secularized, and so
forth. This usage of the term corresponds more or less to that of Eric Hobsbawm in
his Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th
Centuries (New York, 1963).
spiracy to raise the Indian population of the city itself and the
surrounding pueblos in a rebellion "against the city" with the object
of having himself crowned king of an unspecified political entity.1l
The lurid descriptions left by eyewitnesses to the capture and sack
of Guanajuato in 1810, and the famous slaughter of some three
hundred Spaniards in the city's fortified granary, are echoed in
accounts of the rebel capture of the major provincial city of Valladolid
in the same year, in which the rebels were given, according to one
accused, "one hour of pillage and one hour of fornication".12 While
it is difficult to tease out elements of anti-urban feeling from those of
the natural frenzy of riot or Indian-white racial tensions, they are
almost certainly there. Nor were small towns exempt from such
treatment. Describing the rebel capture and its aftermath in the
modest town of Jocotitlan in March 1812, a local priest likened the
town to "Babylonia, crying at the edge of the river for its past sins,
with its houses still smoking and its plazas and streets nothing but
sepulchres, bloodied even the walls of the church . . . since soldiers
both enemy and friend seem to have agreed to reduce it to ashes and
both to make of it their victim".13
While periodic mass mobilizations, revolts, riots and lynchings
racked the countryside of New Spain, the major cities of the realm
remained relatively quiet and, except for Guanajuato and one or two
others, experienced no uprisings from within. It would be most
illuminating to analyse the case of Guanajuato and the other rebellious
towns of the Bajio region of which it formed the centre, but this
would take me beyond the scope of the present article. Some of the
elements at play there were an unusually complex regional economy,
an ethnically heterogeneous population, a well-developed urban hier-
1 A.G.N., Historia, d, expeds. 3-4, fos. 168r-216r, 1797.

12 The most famous account of the Alh6ndiga massacre is by Lucas Alaman, an
eyewitness as a young man of eighteen to the capture of Guanajuato: Lucas Alaman,
Historia de Mojico, 5 vols. (Mexico City, 1968), i, pp. 274 ff.; and see also Hamill,
Hidalgo Revolt, pp. 138-41. For a general feeling of the prevailing somewhat frenzied
atmosphere in Guanajuato while the rebels held it, see the detailed account of the trial
and execution of Crescencio Farias and Juan Jose Losoya, two captured rebels who
had participated in the pillage of the city: A.G.N., Infidencias, xxiv, exped. 2, fos.
45r-117r, 1811; and on Valladolid, see the statement of captured rebel Esteban Vidal:
A.G.N., Criminal, ccxli, fos. 173r-82r, 1810.
13 Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Archivo Hist6rico, Mexico City
(hereafter I.N.A.H., A.H.), Colecci6n Antigua (hereafter Col. Ant.), cccxxxiv, exped.
14, fos. 38r-63r, 1812; A.G.N., Criminal, cxxiii, exped. 35, fos. 460r-7v, 1812; and for
a detailed account of the rebel capture and sack of another provincial town, that of
Cuautitlan in September 1811, see A.G.N., Infidencias, xxiv, exped. 14, fos. 255r-
304v, 1811.
archy and certain marked signs of economic downturn

of the colonial period following upon several decades o
expansion.14 This is not to say that large cities elsewher
unscathed by ten years of intermittent violence or that th
enced no signs of internal unrest, but only that such distu
occurred tended to take forms other than mass collective action. In
the initial year or two of the insurrection, when the rebels captured
major cities such as Guanajuato, Valladolid and Guadalajara, there
are some indications that local inhabitants took part in handing over
the defended cities to invading rebel forces, in sacking and in acts of
violence. The clearest case of this was in Guanajuato, the famous
silver-mining centre captured by Hidalgo's army at the end of Septem-
ber 1810. Lucas Alaman, an eyewitness to these events, made a clear
distinction between the rural Indians who came to the city with
Hidalgo and provided the major force for the storming of the
Alh6ndiga (granary), and the city's "plebe" or lower class which
joined in the subsequent two days of pillage and lower-level violence,
as did the lower class of Valladolid in the sack of that city in
1810.15 In any case, Guanajuato and other mining centres displayed a
somewhat unusual social structure in comparison to other major cities
in New Spain, a point to which I shall return shortly. It is also
important to note that the capture and occupation by the rebels for
considerable periods of time of other major provincial capitals, such
as Guadalajara and Oaxaca, did not eventuate in the kind of pillage
that occurred in Guanajuato.
Apart from internal mass violence and pillage in conjunction with
rebel invasion, the cities of New Spain experienced several types
of disruption. One general category of such unrest may be called
secondary, in that it seems to have been an accompanying or sympto-
matic effect of the generally unsettled conditions of the country over
a prolonged period of time. Criminality was generally acknowledged
to have increased with the difficult economic circumstances and the
14 On the nature of the Bajio and the origins of the rebellion there, see Eric Wolf,
"The Mexican Bajio in the Eighteenth Century", Middle American Research Inst.
Pubns., xvii (1955), pp. 177-200; Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico.
The case made in both these excellent studies for the unique nature of the Bajio as the
regional progenitor of large-scale rural insurrection is not altogether convincing.
15 On Guanajuato, see Alaman, Historia de Mejico, i, p. 281; Hamill, Hidalgo Revolt,
pp. 140-1; DiTella, "Clases peligrosas", p. 221; and the trial records of the Guanajuato
"plebeians" Farias and Losoya, cited above, both of whom were eventually executed.
On Valladolid, see Jesis Amaya, Hidalgo en alisco: ensayo bio-historiografico (Guadala-
jara, 1954), pp. 31 ff.; Christon I. Archer, "The Royalist Army in New Spain: Civil-
Military Relationships", Jl. Latin American Studies, xiii (1981), pp. 57-82.
periodic influx into the cities of the realm of rural migrants seeking
safety and relief. The presence of unusually large groups of soldiers
in the cities bred strains between them and the civilian population,
of which frequent name-calling, small riots and physical violence
were signs. Fairly typical of this sort of thing was an encounter
between a group of soldiers and civilian night-watchmen in Mexico
City in June 1815; the soldiers called the watchmen a "bunch of
bastards" and, when asked what they were doing out of their barracks
after hours, replied provocatively that they were "screwing people".16
More directly related to possible sympathies for insurgency itself on
the part of city-dwellers, and certainly to the fears of authorities about
such sympathies, were the numerous cases of sedition reported and
investigated in the viceregal capital and elsewhere, which antedated
the actual outbreak of the 1810 rebellion and continued until 1821.
Loose talk in public or even in the privacy of one's own home;
"suspicious" behaviour; a chance word let slip under the influence
of alcohol -all of these acts and a multitude of others constituted
putative evidence of sedition in the eyes of one's fellow citizens and
the authorities. For example, during 1809 one respectable citizen of
Mexico City was reported to have stopped frequenting coffee-houses
and private salons or attending plays having to do with politics, and
was therefore denounced to the authorities by his acquaintances.
Another man about the same time, reputed to be of French birth,
was denounced because he was said to smile when news favouring
the French arrived in the city and frown when news favouring the
Spanish loyalist government arrived.17
Pro-insurrectionary conspiracies, both apocryphal and real, kept
the civil and military authorities constantly nervous for much of these
ten years or more. There had been a number of these in major cities
before the outbreak of Hidalgo's rebellion, dating as far back as the
early 1790s, and indeed Hidalgo's movement, except for its outcome,
was itself nothing more than a salon conspiracy of this type.18 These
16 A.G.N., Criminal, cxlvi, fos. 177r-279r, 1815 (the same document contains
accounts of other similar incidents during the same month). For other such incidents
in the capital, see A.G.N., Criminal, dv, no pagination, 1814; O.G., xxxii, fos. 191r-
5r, 20 Oct. 1813. On the port city of Veracruz, see A.G.N., O.G., xxx, fos. 172r-5r,
4 July 1812.
17 A.G.N., Infidencias, vi, expeds. 13, 14, no pagination, 1809; and for other
representative sedition cases, A.G.N., Infidencias, vi, exped. 9, no pagination, 1809;
v, exped. 7, no pagination, 1810.
18 For the pro-independence conspiracy in Mexico City in 1793, see Raul Cardiel
Reyes, La primera conspiraci6n por la independencia de Mexico (Mexico City, 1982); on
the 1808-10 period, Timothy E. Anna, The Fall of the Royal Government in Mexico
(cont. on p. 139)
conspiracies were generally hatched by creoles of elite st

in composition to Hidalgo's coterie of plotters. Parallel to
a handful of plots developed by Indian caciques, or no
high village officials, none of which seems effectively to
any mass following.19 Rumours of impending massacr
by European-born Spaniards and their sanguinary arm
all over New Spain in 1810 and 1811, and bear a resem
grande peur type described for the French Revolution
phase. For their part, royalist civil and military authorit
repeated fears of popular insurrection by the lower classes
cities, among them the mining centre of Zacatecas, thoug
most part these mutinies or uprisings failed to materiali
* * *
Despite occas
(n. 18 cont.)
City (Lincoln,
Hidalgo Revolt,
1810 (Mexico C
independence u
and the main li
of such plots a
225v; in Mexic
Collection (her
5.515; Anna, Fa
A.G.N., O.G.,
Patzcuaro, 181
Lagos, 1820: A.
to Apodaca, 4
to Apodaca, 4 O
the authorities
gran ciudad (M
19 See, for ex
Infidencias, v,
autonomous di
20 For an anon
in late 1810, s
western Mexic
Zacatecas, see t
Mexico, in his
fos. 125r-6v, C
1815 (mentioni
fos. 285r-6r, C
Feb. 1821. On t
the perenniall
xxx, fo. 63r-V,
Historia, cxi,
grande peur of
Panic in Revolu
noia on the part of the central authorities, the royalists would not
have been surprised by the failure of urban uprising to materialize.
In fact it is abundantly clear that the royalist government expected
the greatest danger to the regime to come in the form of rural-based
insurrection, rather than from within the cities. Timothy Anna has
put this succinctly in his book on Mexico City during the revolution-
ary era: "From 1810 until 1815, the royal regime in New Spain
was threatened chiefly by armed insurrection in the countryside".21
Perhaps the clearest and most famous example of the failure of the
rebellion to draw forth a sympathetic response from a major urban
population in the central part of the country is that of Hidalgo's
advance on Mexico City at the end of October and beginning of
November 1810. The passivity of the capital city's lower classes was
echoed by that of the surrounding villages in the Valley of Mexico,
which generally refused to aid the insurgents or to contribute men to
their cause. Explanations for Hidalgo's failure to attack the city as it
lay vulnerable before him have varied, but the fact is that no urban
uprising was forthcoming, and this painful reality probably weighed
heavily in Hidalgo's decision to retreat.22
The reason for this non-rebelliousness, at least in part, was the
conjunctural situation - that is, the immediate circumstances prevail-
ing in the cities of the realm from late 1810 onwards. Even had large
segments of the urban population been inclined to take up arms, the
apparatus of repression and social control would have created at least
some obstacles. Pro-royalist, anti-rebel propaganda was thickest in
the cities, and was accessible through hearsay and word of mouth
even to the illiterate urban masses. The church, which by and
large opposed the insurrection vigorously despite the prominence
of Hidalgo, Morelos and scores of other parish priests among the
leadership of the rebels, undertook to preach against the rebellion.
Such an active stance on the part of the church was considered a key
element in assuring popular loyalty to the colonial regime, as much
discussion by the authorities attests.23 The bishop of Guadalajara, in
21 Anna, Fall of the Royal Government, p. 64. For similar general assessments of the
state of the rebellion in New Spain by two of the most talented royalist commanders,
see A.G.N., O.G., clxi, fos. 312r-13r, Cruz to Calleja, 22 Mar. 1815; U.T., H.D.,
2.707, no pagination, Calleja to Ministro de Guerra (Spain), 6 Sept. 1816.
22 Anna, Fall of the Royal Government, p. 72; Hamill, Hidalgo Revolt, pp. 177-9;
Amaya, Hidalgo en Jalisco, passim.
23 On the importance of loyal priests in the pacification of rural areas, see, for
example, the report on the Huasteca region in 1813: A.G.N., O.G., iv, fos. 163r-7r,
Aug. 1813.
fact, ordered missions to be established in pacified paris

that major provincial capital, as well as in the city its
missions were apparently a kind of ecclesiastical workshop
strong sermons were the key element. One held in the cath
Guadalajara was so well attended that the ample buildi
contained the crowd, though one suspects that the priests m
instance already have been preaching to the converted.24
A certain rudimentary level of social services was main
the viceregal capital and in other large cities despite the st
put on public coffers and private sources of charity. The M
poor-house continued to function at about its normal capac
the years of the rebellion, it appears, aiding some 1,500
people a year, equally divided between men and women, tho
lack of funds it had to shift some time in 1812 to a subscript
sustained by the prominent and wealthy citizens. Admissio
Royal Indian Hospital in the capital went up some 40 p
over previous average years in 1809 and 1810, though th
precipitously thereafter.25 Given the massive temporary mi
rural people, most of them poor, into the viceregal and
capitals especially during the first two or three years of the
the efforts of these and other hospitals and public relie
would have been a drop in the bucket, but they must have
some degree to provide support for the most disadvanta
urban populace, and their efforts were certainly visible. Ci
ments also maintained their efforts to ensure a constant supp
foodstuffs, primarily meat and grain, through the time-hon
familiar meat monopolies and public granaries which existe
small provincial cities. Then, too, urban wages for day-
seem to have risen after 1810 and apparently enjoyed a con
edge over the money wages of rural peons, although the qu
complex and the evidence fragmentary.26
24 A.G.N., O.G., cxlix, fo. 54v, 18 Mar. 1813.

25 On the Hospicio de Pobres, something of its history and its continu
woes, see A.G.N., Historia, cdxli, 1803-12. Similar institutions existed
basis in other major cities as circumstances required; see Sherburne F
Hunger Hospital in Guadalajara: An Experiment in Medical Relief', Bull. Hist.
Medicine, viii (1940), pp. 533-45; Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-
Century Mexico, p. 101, for that in Guadalajara in the famine years 1785-6. The Royal
Indian Hospital is discussed in detail in David A. Howard, The Royal Indian Hospital
of Mexico City (Tempe, 1980).
26 On the urban supply system in Guadalajara in general, and its problems during
the years of the rebellion in particular, see Van Young, Hacienda and Market in
Eighteenth-Century Mexico, pp. 41-104; and on Mexico City, Enrique Florescano,
(cont. on p. 142)
142 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 11 8
One contributory factor to the quiet of the cities, of course, was

the thick layer of security measures laid down over the normal police
structure. There were permanent garrisons of royalist troops and
militia maintained in every major city and town in the colony, and
this armed presence must have done something to discourage urban
uprising. Over and above this military measure were instituted elabor-
ate systems of police surveillance, passports, judicial bodies, and so
forth. Mexico City had a system of passports, armed police posts and
heavily guarded city gates until 1821. Official vigilance with regard to
inns, open-air markets, wine shops, public spectacles, unauthorized
gatherings, gambling, vagrancy, begging, and so forth, became well-
nigh obsessive and provoked some public and even official concern
about civil rights. At times the atmosphere in the capital city and
elsewhere was highly charged with fears of sedition, mass uprising
and/or invasion from the countryside. Illustrative of the nervousness
which could result was an incident in which mysterious shots at one
of the city gates were discovered to have been fired by a jumpy
sentinel who had hailed a shadowy figure in the dark and, receiving
no reply from it, had fired his rifle. In the morning it was discovered
that the young soldier had killed a burro.27
Such circumstances and policy measures alone, however, did not
keep the cities quiet, nor could they have. At least some of these
conjunctural circumstances prevailed in many rural areas and small
towns that did rebel. Furthermore the most obvious repressive meas-
(n. 26 cont.)
Precios del maiz y crisis agricolas en Mexico, 1708-1810 (Mexico City, 1969). A very
rough estimate would put urban wages at about twice rural wages in 1810 and the
years immediately following, though of course this would vary considerably among
different parts of the country. For representative data, see A.G.N., Carceles y Pres-
idios, xvi, fos. 108r-41v, 1814; Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century
Mexico, pp. 251-2; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the
Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, 1964), p. 251. Costs of living
would almost certainly have been higher in the cities and the possibilities for sup-
plementing wage labour with subsistence farming concomitantly less.
27 On the establishment of a commission (junta) of security, public order and defence
in Oaxaca in late 1811, see A.G.N., Infidencias, xxiv, exped. 6, fos. 157r-92r, 1811;
on four police courts in Puebla, A.G.N., Infidencias, v, exped. 3, no pagination, 1810;
and on passports in Guadalajara, Biblioteca Piblica del Estado, Fondos Especiales,
Guadalajara (hereafter B.P.E.), Criminal, legajo 6, exped. 21, no pagination, 1812.
On the passport system, see A.G.N., Historia, cdliv, fos. 72r-83r, 1811; cdlviii, fos.
119r-25', 1812; Anna, Fall of the Royal Government, pp. 80-3. On the city's police
posts, see A.G.N., Historia, cdliv, fos. 61r- (1811), 72r-83r; and on public order, flea
markets, inns and wine shops, A.G.N., Historia, cdxliii, exped. 12, 1810; cdlix, fos.
27r-30v, 1815; cdlvii, fos. 47r-50r, 1812; cdlix, fo. 64r-, Sept. 1815. The civil-rights
issue, in the context of false arrest, is raised in A.G.N., Historia, cdlv, fos. 40r-2r, 17
Sept. 1811. The burro's execution is related in A.G.N., Historia, cdliv, fo. 147r-v, 9
Oct. 1811.
ure mentioned, but not discussed at length - the

presence in the form of permanent garrisons in th
fact not as formidable as one might think, because ro
was continually overstretched in combating what
protracted guerrilla war in the countryside of New Sp
was there no general uprising of urban population
why did the major cities of Mexico not have the eq
Italian popolo minuto, the French menu peuple and sans
English rioters and protesters of the early modern
nineteenth century? There are several reasons that fal
gory of what I have called structural characteristics: th
term development and traits of Mexican cities - ec
and physical.
To begin with, Mexican cities for the most part lack
of rebellion and riot, or at least during the three centu
rule they had experienced nothing even approachin
riotousness of European cities.28 Certainly there were
ances, but they were few and far between. Among th
of these had been riots in Mexico City in 1624 and 169
by all accounts involved several thousand people eac
deaths and extensive property damage and looting. Bot
can fairly be characterized as grain riots overlaid w
racial tension and political discontent. The quadru
prices following upon unseasonable weather and bad ha
the initiating conditions for both riots, and in bot
incompetent administrative authority provided the op
action through its own inaction. In the 1624 riot th
escaped with his life by dressing as a servant, yelling w
"Kill the viceroy!" and joining in the sack of his ow
character out of La Pericole.29 Although many other su
occurred during the colonial period, urban rioting was
response to them, as it was in Europe in what Eri
E. P. Thompson and George Rude have respectively
"automatic and inevitable reactions" to unfavourable situations of
28 Admittedly the use of "tradition" as an explanation here simply begs the question
by pushing it back further in time, but for reasons of space it must be accepted as a
given.
29 For a summary but interesting treatment of both riots, see Chester L. Guthrie,
"Riots in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City: A Study of Social and Economic Con-
ditions", in Greater America: Essays in Honor of Herbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley,
1945), pp. 243-58; and for a detailed discussion of the 1624 episode, J. I. Israel, Race,
Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 135-60.
prices and unemployment; spontaneous "consumer" riots; and "tax-

ation populaire".30 The crime rate rather than the incidence of grain
riot tended to be a more sensitive indicator in Mexican cities of
economic difficulties and popular discontent, and quite predictably
rose and fell with maize prices. One recent researcher, Gabriel Haslip,
has suggested that at least by the eighteenth century, urban criminality
"channelled personal dissatisfaction into illegal, highly individual-
istic, non-political forms of rebellion aimed at achieving immediate
and highly personalised goals".31 This formulation has the satisfying
click of all functionalist analysis, and while we may readily admit its
substantial truth, it is still not clear why poverty and discontent
sought this channel unless they were already running that way to
start with; nor is it clear why the European urban poor resorted to
crime and collective action both, a point to which I shall return below.
In so far as the conspicuous absence of the classical city grain riot is
concerned, it should be noted that the municipal governments of
New Spain were remarkably effective in ensuring basic food supplies
for urban markets over long periods of time, though whether they
were more effective than European governments seems problem-
atic.32
Another motive for collective protest that sometimes emerged in
Europe during the early modern period was the defence of communal
integrity and autonomy, and corporate privilege, in cities against the
encroachments of the developing state. Recent works by Samuel
Cohn and Dale and F. W. Kent on Renaissance Florence strongly
30 Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, pp. 110-11; Thompson, Making of the English

Working Class, pp. 62 ff.; George Rude, The Crowd in History, 1730-1848 (New York,
1964).
31 On crime in Mexico City and its relationship to economic conditions, see Gabriel
J. Haslip, "Crime and the Administration of Justice in Colonial Mexico City, 1696-
1810" (Columbia Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1980), fig. 8, p. 110; Michael C. Scardaville,
"Crime and the Urban Poor: Mexico City in the Late Colonial Period" (Univ. of
Florida Ph.D. thesis, 1977); Teresa Lozano Armendares, "La criminalidad en la
ciudad de Mexico, 1800-1812" (Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, tesis de
licenciatura en historia, 1983); and for a useful review of Latin American colonial
urban history in general, Fred Bronner, "Urban Society in Colonial Spanish America:
Research Trends", Latin American Research Rev., xxi (1986), pp. 7-72, esp. p. 8. The
quotation is from Haslip, "Crime and the Administration of Justice", p. 276. Fanon,
whom Haslip cites (p. 276), has much of interest to say on this deflection phenomenon
in a colonial context: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 35-106.
32 My own work on the urban market of a substantial provincial capital, Guadalajara,
in the late colonial period, led me to conclude that within the constraints of technology
and prevailing productive arrangements the urban supply system functioned relatively
well in keeping the city fed at most times: Van Young, Hacienda and Market in
Eighteenth-Century Mexico, pp. 58, 74, 111-13.
imply that this was a factor in urban disturbances

resistance certainly played a part in the sixteenth-cen
the Comuneros in Spain.33 But this kind of strain wou
been absent in New Spain, both because the popula
were left out of the charmed circle of urban polit
because the cities, as entities, were not really very po
with. Cities in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America,
ex nihilo during and after the conquest, and were inte
weak by the Castilian crown in line with its burgeo
Thus in Europe the cities were generally anteceden
while in Latin America the state was antecedent to the cities.
More important than the absence of a tradition of direct collective
action in keeping Mexican cities passive during the independence
period was the presence of certain fundamental characteristics in their
demographic, social and economic make-up, of which three may be
singled out as particularly important. First, by the end of the colonial
period New Spain demonstrated a high degree of nonlognormality in
the ranking of its cities in an urban hierarchy - that is to say, Mexico
City was (and remains today) a primate city par excellence.34 However,
the country also demonstrated a very low degree of inter-regional
economic integration, so that each of several regions tended to have
its own primate city, and the regions did not export much to each
other. Taking the Guadalajara region as a case in point of a more
general phenomenon, these characteristics are precisely what one sees
there around 1800. With regard to Guadalajara such a conclusion is
particularly significant, because this area of New Spain, along with
those of the Bajio and Michoacan, is typically cited as being one of
the most economically dynamic of the late colonial period. Exports
as a percentage of the Guadalajara region's "gross regional product"
amounted to 2 per cent or less in 1800. This indicates a weak
horizontal or spatial integration of New Spain as a whole, and suggests
a striking implication. With limited opportunities existing for market
development, economies of scale or real economic growth, the weak
33 Samuel K. Cohn, The Labouring Classes in Renaissance Florence (New York,

1980); D. V. and F. W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence:
The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century (Locust Valley, New York, 1982);
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Spain and Portugal, 2 vols. (Madison, 1973), i, pp.
180-5.
34 John Wibel and Jesse de la Cruz, "Mexico", in Richard M. Morse (ed.), The
Urban Development of Latin America, 1750-1920 (Stanford, 1971), pp. 94-103; William
P. McGreevey, "A Statistical Analysis of Primacy and Lognormality in the Size
Distribution of Latin American Cities, 1750-1960", ibid., pp. 116-29.
regional integration allowed only a low degree of social division of

labour and therefore a weak class structure and vertical, or socio-
political, articulation. The blame for this situation cannot be ascribed
entirely to Spanish colonial policies, as is often asserted in recent
scholarship, but certainly the Spanish state must bear its burden of
responsibility.35 Recent research on Mexico City suggests that a class
struggle among two or more groups clearly differentiated from each
other on the basis of ownership of the means of production was
impossible because of the absence of such groupings; and furthermore
that the capital (and presumably other cities as well) had a highly
segmented or "cellular" type of urban social structure.36 The one
significant exception to this generalization, it appears, was the region
of the Bajio, which possessed something approaching a true urban
network at the end of the colonial period, characterized by a lognormal
size distribution of its cities and a better-developed class structure than
the rest of the country. Around 1800 the intendancy of Guanajuato
(roughly coterminous with the Bajio) had about half its entire popu-
lation living in towns of 5,000 or more, and nearly half the economi-
cally active population was engaged in non-agricultural activities.37
35 Eric Van Young, "Doing Regional History: Methodological and Theoretical
Considerations" (seventh conference of Mexican and United States historians, Oaxaca,
Oct. 1985), pp. 13-15, in Roberto Moreno de los Arcos and Eric Van Young (eds.),
The City, the Country and the Frontier in Mexican History (Mexico City, forthcoming).
The calculations are based upon an 1803 report by the intendant of Guadalajara, Jose
Fernando de Abascal, "Provincia de Guadalajara: estado que demuestra los frutos",
in Descripciones economicas regionales de Nueva Espafa: provincias del centro, sureste, y
sur, 1766-1827, ed. Enrique Florescano and Isabel Gil Sanchez (Mexico City, 1976),
pp. 108-32. The relationship hypothesized here between intra-regional urban primacy
and weak intra-regional class differentiation is not, of course, a totally unproblematic
one. The theoretical basis for much of the present treatment of regions is found in
Carol A. Smith (ed.), Regional Analysis, 2 vols. (New York, 1976), especially in
Smith's article "Regional Economic Structures: Linking Geographical Models and
Socioeconomic Problems", i, pp. 3-63.
36 See the interesting book on the economic structure of Mexico City at the end of
the colonial period by Jorge Gonzalez Angulo Aguirre, Artesanado y ciudad a finales
del siglo xviii (Mexico City, 1983), esp. pp. 227 ff. Stimulating for comparative purposes
is Peter Laslett's analysis of pre-industrial English society, The World We Have Lost:
England before the Industrial Age (New York, 1965), esp. ch. 2.
37 Richard M. Morse, "Patrones de la urbanizaci6n latinoamericana: aproxim-
aciones y generalizaciones tentativas", in Richard M. Morse (ed.), Las ciudades
latinoamericanas, 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1973), ii, p. 23. On the urban network and
regional economy of the Bajio, see also Wibel and de la Cruz, "Mexico", p. 98;
Alejandra Moreno Toscano, "Regional Economy and Urbanization: Three Examples
of the Relationship between Cities and Regions in New Spain at the End of the
Eighteenth Century", in Richard P. Schaedel, Jorge F. Hardoy and Nora Scott Kinzer
(eds.), Urbanization in the Americas from its Beginnings to the Present (The Hague,
1978), esp. pp. 413 ff.; DiTella, "Clases peligrosas"; Wolf, "Mexican Bajio in the
Eighteenth Century".
And it was precisely in this region that the rebellion brok

and in which urban uprising as a component of it was mos
Secondly, there is considerable evidence that rates of
urban migration in many parts of New Spain were quite h
end of the colonial period. Such migration undermined the
of the urban popular groups to engage in collective action o
including riot, armed uprising or political mobilization
the social atomization it induced in the urban environment. The
inter-related concepts of social marginality and anomy have, in fact,
been applied widely to explain the political and other behaviour
of the poor in the rapidly growing urban areas of modern Latin
America.38
Any assessment of the impact of urban migration obviously de-
pends on developing a reliable picture of urban growth, and then
analysing that growth into its component variables. On the whole,
urban population statistics for the end of the colonial period are not
very exact or trustworthy, but some general statements may be made.
The capital of New Spain probably had a population of about 140,000
in 1800, followed by Puebla at 50,000, and a group of other provincial
capitals (Guanajuato, Guadalajara, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Valladolid)
ranging between 20,000 and 40,000.39 In the case of Mexico City,
which may or may not have been anomalous in the urban experience
of the country (at this stage of research it is simply too early to tell),
overall growth seems to have been about 4 per cent a year in the first
38 A contrary current in the social-science literature disputes the general applicability

of this formulation, however, and points to the adaptability and readiness for voluntary
association and organization on the part of the urban poor. For this latter view, see,
for example, Bryan R. Roberts, Organizing Strangers: Poor Families in Guatemala
City (Austin, 1973); Bryan R. Roberts, Cities of Peasants: The Political Economy of
Urbanization in the Third World (Beverly Hills, 1978), pp. 139 ff. Inasmuch as I am
here looking at a historical situation in which ethnographic field-work is impossible
and the documentation exiguous, marginality is obviously being inferred from the
characteristics of the migrants and the cities, and from the failure of urban populations
to engage in certain types of behaviour.
39 For the population of the major Mexican cities in 1793, see Van Young, Hacienda
and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, p. 35; Richard E. Boyer and Keith A.
Davies, Urbanization in 1 9th-Century Latin America: Statistics and Sources (Los Angeles,
1973); Alejandra Moreno Toscano, "Desarrollo de los sistemas urbanos en ocho paises
latinoamericanos, 1750-1920: Mexico", in Morse (ed.), Ciudades latinoamericanas, ii,
pp. 172-96. Specifically on Mexico City, see Boyer and Davies, Urbanization, pp. 41-
2; John E. Kicza, "Migration to Late Colonial Mexico City: Reasons and Patterns"
(seventh conference of Mexican and United States historians, Oaxaca, Oct. 1985), in
Moreno de los Arcos and Van Young (eds.), City, the Country and the Frontier; and
Haslip, "Crime and the Administration of Justice", pp. 33, 37, who believes the city's
population was about 150,000 in the late 1790s.
decade of the nineteenth century, and nearly 2 per cent a year over
the longer period from 1790 to 1810.40 What part of this growth can
be ascribed to natural increase and what part to immigration? It seems
probable on the basis of available figures that the city was just able
to maintain itself demographically, so that any increase must have
been due to permanent or long-term in-migration. Of the 4 per cent
average annual growth in the decade 1800-10, a half to three-quarters
must have been due to immigration.41 In other cities of New Spain
with higher growth rates than Mexico City, population increase was
even more unequivocally due to in-migration. Looked at from the
point of view of census figures rather than vital rates, the evidence
on the importance of rural-to-urban migration is even clearer. The
1811 census of Mexico City indicated that nearly 40 per cent of the
population consisted of migrants, though this was inflated, obviously,
by the wartime conditions. Guadalajara, from a baseline at which
such temporary inflation could be expected to have abated, had an
immigrant population of about 35 per cent. Significantly, the cities
of the Bajio at the end of the eighteenth century showed considerably
lower percentages of non-local born in their populations: 22 per cent
in Guanajuato, 17 per cent in Queretaro, and so forth.42
40 Moreno Toscano, "Desarrollo de los sistemas urbanos", pp. 174-5. Humboldt

gathered figures showing a crude birth rate in Mexico City just slightly in excess of
the crude death rate, whereas he felt rural crude birth rates were far in excess of death
rates: Alexander von Humboldt, Ensayo politico sobre el Reino de la Nueva Espana, ed.
Juan A. Ortega y Medina (Mexico City, 1966), pp. 130-1. Woodrow W. Borah and
Sherburne F. Cook, "The Urban Center as a Focus of Migration in the Colonial
Period: New Spain", in Schaedel, Hardoy and Kinzer (eds.), Urbanization in the
Americas, pp. 383-97, point to the large proportion of population in the 0-15 age group
in both Antequera (Oaxaca) and Mexico City in the 1790s as indicative of population
maintenance or slight increase (p. 396).
41 These calculations are based on an examination and totalling of baptism and
burial figures for the dozen parishes of Mexico City, 1800-25, as set forth in Celia L.
Maldonado, Estadisticas vitales de la Ciudad de Mexico (siglo XIX) (Mexico City, 1976).
The estimate agrees reasonably well with that of Scardaville, "Crime and the Urban
Poor", p. 53, who asserts that a half to two-thirds of Mexico City's population increase
in the period 1750-1810 was attributable to immigration.
42 On Mexico City, see Kicza, "Migration to Mexico City", p. 15; on Guadalajara,
see Sherburne F. Cook, "Las migraciones en la historia de la poblaci6n mexicana:
datos modelo del occidente del centro de Mexico", in Bernardo Garcia Martinez (ed.),
Historia y sociedad en el mundo de habla espanola: homenaje a Jose Miranda (Mexico
City, 1970), pp. 355-78; Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century
Mexico, pp. 35-6; Rodney D. Anderson, Guadalajara a la consumaci6n de la Independen-
cia: estudio de su poblaci6n segun los padrones de 1821-1822 (Guadalajara, 1983), pp. 56-
7 and passim, who thinks Cook's figures should be seen as a lower limit. On the Bajio
cities, see Borah and Cook, "Urban Center as a Focus of Migration", pp. 390-
4; Moreno Toscano, "Regional Economy", passim. David A. Ringrose (personal
communication) has found that the proportion of those born outside Madrid about
(cont. on p. 149)
Since our comparative reference-point for urban collective p

is a European one, and since readers are more likely to be
with the urban history of that continent, some explicit comp
with growth in a contemporary European city will prove inst
Let us take Paris as an example. The great French capital
population of some 550,000 in 1801, approximately four tim
of Mexico City. However, the rate of Parisian growth before th
nineteenth century was apparently not only slower than that
Mexican capital, but also due more to natural increase th
migration. Even when, under the empire most notably, Paris
to experience a "population explosion" (in the words of Louis C
lier) due in large measure to a growing stream of city-bound m
the rate of overall increase was less than that of Mexico City
years 1800-10, and about equal to that of the Mexican capital f
entire period 1790-1810. The most rapid Parisian growth was a
3 per cent a year between 1807 and 1817, which then drop
per cent or so until mid-century.43
Whether such large contingents of immigrants represented
gain for the cities - that is, whether they were permane
temporary migrants - is an open question at this point.
whole, the idea that Mexico City and other cities in New
possessed a dualistic structure, with a core population cons
elite-group members, bureaucrats, merchants, some artisans,
forth, surrounded by a fluctuating "envelope" of immigrants
ebbed and flowed over time, as in many European cities,
appealing one but cannot be proved definitively at this po
Mexican investigators, Moreno Toscano and Aguirre Anay
suggested that the area round the capital, in the Valley of
may have represented a kind of permanent penumbra in whic
habitually moved back and forth to the city as economic a
cycle circumstances dictated. Within this relatively undiffere
picture it is not clear what route city-bound people typically f
Were they returnees to the city, migrants from smaller town
cities or raw country folk? Recent research tends to indic
where an urban network is marked by a strong degree of pri
migration is more likely to be direct from countryside o
than by step- or stage-migration. If this were true for the st
(n. 42 cont.)
1850 may have been as high as 60 per cent, so that the figures cited her
colonial Mexican cities, if accurate, may have been low by European stan
43 Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during
Half of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981), pp. 178-9, 181, 183, 221
macrocephalic Mexican regions in the late colonial period, then

step-migration was relatively unimportant, so that the immigrants'
previous exposure to urban life would have been minimal.44
Related directly to the complex issue of rural-to-urban migration
is that of the comparative living standards as between country and
city. Put simply, the question is: if the urban masses did not rebel,
was it because they were too prosperous or too immiserated? At
present the data do not permit a precise answer, but we may make
some tentative statements. The as yet fragmentary evidence regarding
urban wages indicates an edge for urban unskilled and semi-skilled
labourers over their rural counterparts of as much as 40 per cent in
money wages around 1800.45 But the cost of living was higher in the
cities than in the countryside for the working poor, probably not so
much because of prices as such, but owing to the structure of the
urban wage. This was more likely to be paid in cash, without the
component of rations that rural workers received, and could less
easily be supplemented with non-cash income from subsistence farm-
ing than in the case of rural people. On the other hand, the regulated
urban grain trade probably had the effect of subsidizing poor urban
consumers; the institutions of public charity may have served to
provide a "safety-net" for some poor groups of city-dwellers, es-
pecially in bad times; and the urban environment offered certain
amenities on which it would be impossible to put a cash value.46 On
44 On the "envelope" model, see Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800

(London, 1984), pp. 182 ff. On Mexican migration, see Alejandra Moreno Toscano
and Carlos Aguirre Anaya, "Migrations to Mexico City in the Nineteenth Century:
Research Approaches", Jl. Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, xvii (1975), pp.
27-42 (their sample of migrants is too small to be completely convincing); Haslip,
"Crime and the Administration of Justice", p. 51, who implies the same thing. And
on urban primacy and migration patterns, see Roberts, Cities of Peasants, p. 102;
Jorge Balan, Harley L. Browning and Elizabeth Jelin, Men in a Developing Society:
Geographic and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico (Austin, 1973), who found step-
migration to be relatively unimportant in rural population transfer to contemporary
Monterrey, in the Mexican north.
45 For the wages of urban construction-workers in Guadalajara as compared to rural
labourers, see Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, pp.
251-2; for Mexico City, see Haslip, "Crime and the Administration of Justice", pp.
57-63.
46 A description of urban living standards and conditions for the working and non-
working poor of Mexico City at the end of the colonial era is to be found in Haslip,
"Crime and the Administration of Justice", pp. 10-74. On the urban grain trade in
the viceregal capital, see Florescano, Precios del maiz; and on that of Guadalajara, Van
Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, pp. 59-104. Price trends
for agricultural products in the late colonial period are discussed in the excellent article
of Richard L. Garner, "Price Trends in Eighteenth-Century Mexico", Hispanic
American Hist. Rev., lxv (1985), pp. 279-325.
the whole, then, it is likely that in terms of living standard

no significant advantage to living in the late colonial city a
countryside, and possibly even a loss. What, then, drew ru
to cities in this period? The most credible answer is tha
urban migration was a result of push factors in the cou
primarily demographic pressure and the spread of commer
culture - rather than pull factors from the city. If this is
poorer city-dwellers most likely failed to rebel not out of
of privilege or advantage, but for entirely other reasons h
with the inherent nature of late colonial urban life.47
Thirdly, when migrants arrived in the cities of New Spain, as-
suming they stayed for any length of time, they were injected into a
peculiarly fluid but status-conscious urban world in which forms of
association were limited and group boundaries somewhat blurry.
Admittedly, certain forms of reciprocity, kinship networks and fictive
kinship (compadrazgo) among recent migrants and the poor may have
acted to counteract the social atomization said to be characteristic of
urban life, as they do today in Latin American cities. But such forms
of association are often dyadic only, and at best limited in social
scope.48 Though a large proportion of the urban population all
over New Spain was involved in what could be called industrial
production, the scale of that production was small. The average
industrial establishment in Mexico City, for example, where up to
half of the economically active population was involved in some kind
of industrial production, was a workshop with about three people in
it, and the same could be said of Guadalajara, of Puebla or of a
number of other cities as well.49 By contrast, contemporary spinning-
mills in England employed an average of about two hundred hands
each, though larger establishments were common.50 Furthermore in
47 Reference-group theory as related to urban migration and social mobility in

modern Monterrey, Mexico, is discussed in Balan, Browning and Jelin, Men in a
Developing Society.
48 On reciprocity, kinship and compadrazgo among modern migrants and city-
dwellers in Mexico City and Monterrey, respectively, see Larissa Adler Lomnitz,
Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown (New York, 1977), chs. 5-7;
Balan, Browning and Jelin, Men in a Developing Society, pp. 149 ff., 159-60, 168-9.
49 Gonzalez Angulo Aguirre, Artesanadoy ciudad, pp. 11, 12 ff., 50 ff.; for Guadala-
jara, see Anderson, Guadalajara a la consumacion de la Independencia, pp. 100-1, 123;
for Puebla, Brian R. Hamnett, "Puebla: City and Province during the Independence
Period, 1800-1824" (seventh conference of Mexican and United States historians,
Oaxaca, Oct. 1985), in Moreno de los Arcos and Van Young (eds.), City, the Country
and the Frontier.
50 John H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1930-
2), as excerpted in The Industrial Revolution in Britain: Triumph or Disaster?, ed. Philip
(cont. on p. 152)
all large cities the guild system had been weakened by economic and
political changes and by the process of massive immigration itself.
Many immigrants found employment only as street vendors and
unskilled service workers - in what we would now call the tertiary
sector of the economy, which is seen to be chronically overdeveloped
in modern Latin America.51 Thus two important potential forms of
association - large industrial establishments and guild organiza-
tions - were extremely attenuated or absent in the large cities of the
realm. Again, the cities of the Bajio region offer something of a
contrast here, since they had an atypically high number of large-scale
industrial enterprises. Queretaro, for example, had in 1793 some
twenty textile factories (obrajes) with an average of over eighty workers
each, and silver-mines employed hundreds or even thousands of
workers apiece.52
The vast majority of the urban population, of course, whether
immigrant or city-born, was relegated to the group of the urban
working and non-working poor, which constituted something like
two-thirds to three-quarters of the population in Mexico City, Oaxaca
and Guadalajara. Very few owned any real property - less than 2
per cent in the Mexico City of 1800, it has been estimated. The cities,
especially the viceregal capital, were home to very large and visible
groups of non-working poor, the destitute and criminals - as many
as 20,000 or 30,000 in Mexico City at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.53 Yet with such a highly and visibly skewed distribution of
(n. 50 cont.)
A. M. Taylor (Boston, 1958), pp. 21-2. Clapham's figure conforms closely to that for
Britain around 1800 given in Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 281.
The size of the average factory work-force in early nineteenth-century France was
smaller: John H. Clapham, Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914
(Cambridge, 1963), p. 71.
51 On the guilds, see especially Gonzalez Angulo Aguirre, Artesanado y ciudad,
passim; Wolf, "Mexican Bajio", p. 192; Rodney Anderson, "Race, Class and Capital-
ism in Early Republican Mexico" (Annual Meeting of the Latin American Studies
Association, Boston, Oct. 1986); Kicza, "Migration to Mexico City", p. 16; and on
the tertiary sector, ibid., p. 17.
52 The economic structure of the Bajio is discussed in DiTella, "Clases peligrosas",
p. 210; Wolf, "Mexican Bajio", pp. 183, 189; Celia Wu, "The Population of Queretaro
in 1791", Jl. Latin American Studies, xvi (1984), pp. 277-307.
53 On the size of social groupings, see Anderson, Guadalajara a la consumaci6n de
la Independencia, pp. 132 ff.; on Oaxaca, John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial
Oaxaca (Stanford, 1978), cited ibid., p. 132; on Mexico City, Guthrie, "Riots in
Seventeenth-Century Mexico City", p. 250; Patricia P. Seed, "Parents versus Chil-
dren: Marriage Oppositions in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1779" (Univ. of Wisconsin
Ph.D. thesis, 1980), p. 14, who estimates the urban lower group ("laborers and
Indians") at 55 8 per cent in 1793. On property ownership, see Anna, Fall of the Royal
Government, p. 13; and on the homeless, floating population in the viceregal capital,
ibid., p. 22; Haslip, "Crime and the Administration of Justice", pp. 34-6; Francisco
(cont. on p. 153)
property, spatial segregation between rich and poor wa

developed in Mexican cities, and they demonstrated a
social heterogeneity. The poor lived cheek by jowl with
mixed residential neighbourhoods, although there were also
Indian suburbs around most sizeable cities.54 To return to Revol-
utionary Paris, by contrast, residential segregation of comfortable
from poor was quite marked, and continued to increase during the
Restoration and July Monarchy with "bourgeois flight" to the Pari-
sian suburbs despite Haussmann's efforts.55
Finally, urban populations saw a surprising amount of intermar-
riage among what were presumably distinct ethnic groups - whites,
mestizos, blacks and mulattos, and Indians. This very question of
ethnicity, of group boundaries and of the possibilities for social
mobility across such lines is still much debated for colonial Latin
America, but it does appear that in the cities particularly there was
a good deal of fluidity, auto-definition, passing, intermarriage, and
so forth. In fact quite high rates of inter-ethnic marriage have been
found for Oaxaca in the 1790s, amounting to about 45 per cent of
the total unions recorded during that period, and similarly high rates
for Guadalajara and Queretaro. This has been taken to mean that, at
the end of the colonial period in urban Mexico at least, racial criteria
for social status and group boundaries were being replaced by econ-
omic criteria, and that Spanish American cities in general were the
theatre for the breakdown of formal ethnic distinctions and for
cultural amalgamation. The apparently anomalous drop in the num-
bers of people listed in late colonial censuses of some cities as negroes,
mulattos and other groups of African ancestry has been construed to
mean that they were being absorbed by marriage and/or passing into
other groups. Ethnic intermarriage was not random, of course, but
heavily favoured unions between members of ethnically proximate
population groups. It has been correctly pointed out that choice of a
mate in a different ethnic group probably represented not so much
the cause of acculturation or cultural amalgamation in the urban
environment as its effect.56 In short, then, I have described an urban
(n. 53 cont.)
de Solano, "An Introduction to the Study of Provisioning in the Colonial City", in
Schaedel, Hardoy and Kinzer (eds.), Urbanization in the Americas, p. 113.
54 Anderson, writing on Guadalajara, has most carefully investigated the question
of spatial segregation according to wealth and status: for which, see his Guadalajara
a la consumaci6n de la Independencia, pp. 31-2; on Queretaro, see Wu, "Population of
Queretaro in 1791", pp. 301, 303; and on Mexico City, Haslip, "Crime and the
Administration of Justice", p. 21.
55 Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes, pp. 196, 198.
56 Juan Carlos Garavaglia, personal communication.
environment in which sharp differences in wealth and status were

not underwritten by a clear class structure, inviolable ethnic barriers
or spatial segregation; in which associational forms for the majority
of the population were probably quite weak; in which a high degree
of social fluidity existed; and in which much of the population was
reduced to penury and homelessness. This does not sound like a
social situation in which the urban groups so often associated with
mass direct action in the European context - the menu peuple, the
popolo minuto, and so forth - were likely to have arisen, nor in which
other popular groups were likely to have picked up the banner of
collective protest and rebellion.57
I have necessarily given rather short shrift to rural, and particularly
peasant village, social structure, but in conclusion some of its charac-
teristics may usefully be described in contrast to the urban social
structure outlined above. In many rural zones throughout central
Mexico, peasant village communities - and often the surrogate
communities formed on large landed estates - were more stable,
enjoyed more face-to-face interaction of their inhabitants on a daily
basis and were more cohesive socially than larger towns and cities.
The traditional village structure, with its localocentric world-view
and truncated social hierarchy, provided a more propitious environ-
ment for disruptive differentiation than the more atomized and hetero-
geneous urban environment, and therefore the contrasts between the
past and the present as perceived by village-dwelling peasants may
have been more threatening and stressful than those perceived by
city-dwellers and recent urban immigrants. Furthermore in the cities
race demonstrated a much lower degree of congruity with class than
in peasant villages and rural areas in general. In many regions of
New Spain with relatively dense concentrations of Indian peasant
populations, late colonial economic development exerted considerable
pressure on land resources, both from within in the form of demo-
57 On the definitions ofpopolo minuto and menu peuple, which most authors consider
to have embraced wage-earners, artisans, members of menial trades outside the guild
structure, pedlars, unskilled labourers and, in Hobsbawm's words, "the unclassifiable
urban poor", see Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, pp. 113-14; Thompson, Making of the
English Working Class, pp. 192 ff.; Cohn, Labouring Classes in Renaissance Florence,
p. 69 (he equates the popolo minuto generally with the Parisian sans-culottes); Gene A.
Brucker, "The Florentine Popolo Minuto and its Political Role, 1340-1450", in Lauro
Martines (ed.), Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200-1500 (Berkeley,
1972), pp. 155-83. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, p. 113, places considerable emphasis
in his definition of the "little people" on their residence in "certain cohesive and
ancient quarters of the city", such as the Faubourg St. Antoine (Paris), Trastevere
(Rome) and Mercato (Naples).
graphic pressure and increasing social differentiation and f

out in the form of commercial agriculture. Since access to
major productive resource, was guaranteed largely through
the village and membership in its corporate structure, p
land from outside was at the same time an attack on livelihood and
an attack on the locus of cultural identity, and economic struggle was
readily conflated with ethnic struggle.58
To conclude, my brief consideration of the reasons for urban
passivity within the context of widespread rural insurrection in early
nineteenth-century Mexico leads to an important observation, though
hardly an unanticipated one: that the grievances which fuelled popu-
lar rebellion were essentially agrarian in nature, and did not engage
the sympathies of urban people.59 Surprisingly, direct attacks by
rebels on the institutions of landlord rule and commercial agriculture
in the countryside were not as common as one might be led to predict
from this conclusion, and the reasons for the deflection and the nature
of the intervening variables would make for a fascinating study in
and of themselves. But the other term of the equation, embracing
the social characteristics of late colonial Mexican cities, is just as
important. The cities' rapid growth through migration from the
countryside and the peculiarly fluid nature of their class and ethnic
structure made for a situation in which the propensity to collective
violence at the lowest level, and programmatic protest at the highest,
was minimal. Thus the dynamic of mass rebellion was not from the
city out, nor a parallelism of action or sympathy between city and
country, but from the countryside in. From this point of view, the
mass of city-dwellers may have had their complaints, but these were
not the same as those of peasants. Despite the presence of poverty
and powerlessness, then, late colonial Mexican cities were hardly
roiling cauldrons of discontent, nor would they, for the most part,
subsequently become so.
University of California, San Diego Eric Van Young
58 These ideas are developed at length in Van Young, Hacienda and Market in
Eighteenth-Century Mexico, pp. 271-358; Van Young, "Conflict and Solidarity in
Indian Village Life".
59 For a major recent interpretation which stresses the agrarian aspects of the
independence struggle, see Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico.

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The Past and Present Society

In Mexico conspiracies have almost always been brewed in

1 See, among the vast literature on Revolutionary Paris, George Rud

rural Mexico, did the cities of the realm remain so quie

Certainly violent collective action by rural people again

endured as focuses of sustained rebellion, and even to individuals

On the other hand, several characteristics of rural rebelli

developments in colonial Mexico, and which utilizes elements of psychoanalytic and

1 A.G.N., Historia, d, expeds. 3-4, fos. 168r-216r, 1797.

archy and certain marked signs of economic downturn

conspiracies were generally hatched by creoles of elite st

fact, ordered missions to be established in pacified paris

24 A.G.N., O.G., cxlix, fo. 54v, 18 Mar. 1813.

One contributory factor to the quiet of the cities, of course, was

ure mentioned, but not discussed at length - the

prices and unemployment; spontaneous "consumer" riots; and "tax-

30 Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, pp. 110-11; Thompson, Making of the English

imply that this was a factor in urban disturbances

33 Samuel K. Cohn, The Labouring Classes in Renaissance Florence (New York,

regional integration allowed only a low degree of social division of

And it was precisely in this region that the rebellion brok

38 A contrary current in the social-science literature disputes the general applicability

40 Moreno Toscano, "Desarrollo de los sistemas urbanos", pp. 174-5. Humboldt

Since our comparative reference-point for urban collective p

macrocephalic Mexican regions in the late colonial period, then

44 On the "envelope" model, see Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800

the whole, then, it is likely that in terms of living standard

47 Reference-group theory as related to urban migration and social mobility in

property, spatial segregation between rich and poor wa

environment in which sharp differences in wealth and status were

graphic pressure and increasing social differentiation and f

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