IHR Latin American Seminar: 'Debt and the Economic Lives of Mexico City’s Market Vendors, 1870-1960'

This paper analyses the political economy of petty trading, by focusing on vendors’ credit relations in Mexico City’s public markets. Neither capitalist nor workers, their social relations of production implicated them in negotiations and conflict with consumers, suppliers, creditors and the public authorities. They also competed bitterly with one another and with other economic actors seeking to provide the city with everyday essentials. Starting with a public report on vendors’ economic situation, written in 1871 in response to a fire that consumed the city’s largest market, this paper tracks vendors from their embeddedness in a moral economy that retained important colonial features, to their role in the creation of a Bank of Small Commerce during the so-called Mexican miracle. This illuminates the interconnections between self-employment and the particular ways capitalism developed in Mexico.