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WORKSHOP OF REVOLUTION
Plebeian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810
By Lyman L. Johnson
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4981-5
Chapter One
Plebeian City
Late Colonial Buenos Aires
In February 1772, the slave Gregorio Ygnacio de Echeverria appealed to the alcalde de segundo voto, who served as defensor de pobres, indios y esclavos, to intervene in what had become for him an impossible situation. Twenty years earlier, Gregorio's mother, a free morena, had given his original master a 150 peso down payment toward his manumission. They had agreed that Gregorio's future wages in the building trades would provide the remaining 190 pesos. His original master put this agreement in doubt when he sold Gregorio to Nicolás Zarco, who owned a small brickyard. Even though Gregorio served as the brickyard's supervisor, his new master beat him in front of the other slaves and free laborers when he sought to clarify his legal status. When this humiliation failed to quiet Gregorio's protests, Zarco turned again to the whip. Unwilling to live with this treatment, Gregorio ran away.
From his hiding place, Gregorio protested to the defensor that after twenty years in the "most subordinated servitude," he was now "compensated with ever harsher punishments and harder labors." He begged the defensor "to avoid the fatal consequences" of sending him back into the hands of his enemy. While the defensor did not return Gregorio to Zarco, he forced Gregorio to pay the full 190 pesos for manumission without any recognition of the terms of the original agreement between his mother and first master or his twenty years of labor.
Like Zarco, many artisans and small manufacturers in late colonial Buenos Aires owned slaves. While most owned only one or two slaves, the most successful owned more than ten. The majority of these masters and slaves worked and lived together, sharing hard labor, humble housing, and rough meals. In most cases, there were few differences in the material circumstances of masters and slaves. Many slave owners were castas or, in a small number of cases, recently freed former slaves. In this case, Gregorio lived in Zarco's humble rancho, with its straw roof and mud walls, and shared sleeping quarters and meals with a mixed crew of free laborers and slaves. Nevertheless, Gregorio's long struggle to escape bondage reminds us that the differences between slavery and freedom were very consequential.
Nicolás Zarco was not a rich or important person, but he was able to control his slave's life in arbitrary and cruel ways as he obstructed Gregorio's struggle to gain freedom. If the defensor found a way for Gregorio to escape his captivity, he also took care to protect Zarco's property rights in the process. Slavery allowed men like Zarco to build their businesses and multiply their wealth, but it simultaneously eroded the egalitarian and corporatist underpinnings of traditionally organized skilled trades. Artisans and small manufacturers as well as many petty retailers funded their growing dependence on slave labor by discounting the once valuable coinage of corporate ideals.
In the late colonial period, the Buenos Aires plebe expanded in numbers and complexity in a built environment that flexed and strained to keep up with population growth and a surging local economy. The city's streets, plazas, and markets framed the search for work and leisure, creating small worlds where artisans and laborers worked, found friendship, and began families. The city's physical spaces, workshops, houses, and apartments, pushed the men and women of the laboring class together or pulled them apart, strengthening, or sometimes subverting, the social boundaries of occupation, skill level, marital status, ethnicity, and legal condition.
The city's fluid and dynamic demography, its constantly changing mix of origins, identities, and skills, also framed the lives of artisans and laborers. The decision of the Spanish Crown to create the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and make Buenos Aires its capital in 1776 initiated a long period of demographic growth and economic expansion. In this environment of scarce labor and high wages, the city attracted large numbers of free migrants from the interior and from Europe, and these new arrivals in turn challenged existing understandings of racial and ethnic identity negotiated in the less dynamic decades before their arrival. The growing importation of slaves after 1780 supplemented this stream of free labor, and this expanded slave trade eventually transformed the local labor market, placing slaves in nearly every craft—and calling into question the very viability of traditional artisanal forms.
The Cityscape
In 1780 Buenos Aires was the least distinguished viceregal capital in Spain's American empire. According to the city census of 1778, it was a city of approximately 25,000 inhabitants, although Spanish officials and visitors often claimed the city population was larger. It was also an immigrant city. African slaves, recently freed blacks (mostly recent arrivals), and casta migrants from the interior provinces or from more distant Spanish colonies constituted nearly 35 percent of the urban population and an even larger percentage of the populations of nearby small towns scattered across the countryside. Another 20 percent of the city's residents were European immigrants, mostly Spaniards but hundreds of Portuguese and Italians as well. While the city experienced steady immigrant-driven population growth from the 1770s to the end of the colonial period, it sent a reciprocal stream of out-migrants in search of better prospects across the river to Montevideo, along the much longer riverine routes to Santa Fe or Paraguay, or overland to Chile and the Andean provinces. Like in the better-known modern era of immigration in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Buenos Aires in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth both attracted waves of migrants and served as an important source of migrants across the whole Río de la Plata region.
Contraband trade dominated the city's early history. In fact, it was the Spanish Crown's desire to stem the illegal flow of Andean silver through Buenos Aires to European rivals that led to the decision to create the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. Over the next thirty-five years, the presence of a viceroy, an audiencia, an enlarged colonial bureaucracy, and an enhanced coast guard, naval force, and garrison failed to suppress the long-established willingness of the local merchant community to bend the law or the eagerness of Spanish officials to line their pockets. By the last decade of the colonial period, changes in commercial policy permitted by a Spanish Crown facing enormous fiscal pressures pushed the door further open. The era's succession of wars disrupted Atlantic trade and forced the Spanish Crown to grant neutral ships access to Buenos Aires. The Crown also permitted local merchants to purchase foreign vessels to use in neutral trade as well as in the African slave trade. In practice, these measures served as a thin disguise for a dramatic expansion of contraband trade. Across the long sweep of the colonial period, smuggling and official corruption created a resilient legacy of freewheeling commerce and lax official oversight.
With the possible exception of the small army of cart drivers and muleteers recruited in the small towns and villages of the viceroyalty's interior, the physical city impressed few visitors. Passengers arriving from Europe, Brazil, or the Caribbean disembarked in one of three inconvenient locations. The deepwater port of Montevideo was the most secure regional harbor, but goods and passengers arriving there had to be carried more than 140 miles to Buenos Aires in small boats. Some large vessels chose to anchor in deep water well off the Buenos Aires riverfront and land their cargos and passengers via a system of small boats and wagons. Smaller ships with shallow drafts could enter the Riachuelo. Once ashore there, however, passengers faced a long, muddy transit to the city.
Thomas Falkner reported in 1774 that "Buenos Ayres (properly speaking) has no port, but only an open river, exposed to all the winds. [This is] because the shallowness of the coast obliges ships to come to anchor three leagues from the land." Twenty years later, another British traveler reiterated that no ship "can approach nearer the town than three or four leagues." As a result, small boats carried passengers, their bags, and freight in the initial stage of disembarkation, and then, as the shore rose up to meet them, people and goods were transferred to rough, horse-drawn carts mounted on huge wheels to traverse the last hundreds of yards to shore.
Whatever appearance of urban grandeur strangers thought they had glimpsed in the distance from shipboard was erased incrementally by the town's humble built environment. At the riverbank, the customs house and walls of the decrepit fort framed a first glance of the city's central political and commercial precinct. The modest physical presence of Spanish imperial authority, municipal governance, and ecclesiastical power were arrayed around the central plaza, the Plaza Mayor. The cabildo was located opposite the fortress at the far side of this large and open plaza. On the cabildo's left flank was the still unfinished cathedral. If the cabildo expressed local political ambitions and the merchant elite's growing sense of self importance and power, the unfinished cathedral and the relative obscurity and small size of the city's convents and parish churches suggested a church establishment weakened decades earlier by the expulsion of the Jesuits and now constrained in its ambitions by limited funds.
Across the expanse separating the authority of the viceroy from that of the town council sprawled the busy public market with neighboring food stalls, cafes, confiterías, and taverns. At best, municipal regulation and local custom proved to be a poor defense for the boundary between the seat of local authority, the cabildo, and the organized chaos of the city's major market. The commerce of the Plaza Mayor routinely pushed its way into the ground floor of the cabildo building and even onto the steps of the cathedral. During the rainy season, butchers routinely relocated their stocks of beef and pork to the hallways of the cabildo from their stalls in the plaza, leading the councilors to complain that blood and offal were destroying the building's tile floors. This was simply one symptom of the city's lack of hygiene and cleanliness. Until 1800, there was no organized effort to remove the piles of waste accumulated in the plaza by the end of a market day. The powerful odors of spoiled meats, fruits, and vegetables left behind by market venders combined with the equally powerful smells from the nearby pastures that hosted the thousands of grazing oxen, horses, and mules used to move carts and wagons to city markets. The casual, uninhibited use of city streets as garbage dumps or worse pushed the raw, exterior world of decay and waste through the doors and windows of even the richest households.
The city's jail was located behind the cabildo, and the cries of poor prisoners begging for a crust of bread or a small coin assailed pedestrians on their way to and from the market. Subsistence for prisoners was provided by leftovers from city convents and day-old or spoiled bread donated by bakers because the municipal authorities provided no budget for prisoners' meals. When finally forced to confront the near starvation afflicting its prisoners, the cabildo hired a stonemason to place a grilled window at ground level to facilitate their begging.
A short distance away from this intersection of commerce and politics were the temporary encampments of cart drivers and muleteers who connected the capital with its dependencies in the interior of the viceroyalty. The cabildo repeatedly attempted to ban the passage of large carts drawn by teams of four to eight oxen. These awkward but durable conveyances hauled the goods the city required from Córdoba, Mendoza, Salta, and other points to the north and west, but they had a destructive impact on streets and plazas. Each prohibition faced massive complaints from merchants and petty retailers who resented the complications imposed on deliveries.
As a compromise, the city initially permitted smaller, lighter carts pulled by only two oxen as well as horse carts and mule teams to enter the city center. This expedient ultimately failed because three or four of the smaller carts were necessary to carry the goods brought from the port at Riachuelo or from the interior by a single large cart, and, as a result, transportation costs increased and traffic congestion intensified around the Plaza Mayor. In the end, the cabildo agreed to permit large carts on the streets in the early morning and at dusk. This schedule forced cart drivers, muleteers, and the laborers they employed to remain in the center until the markets closed. They spent hours napping or talking in the shelter of the carts' great bulk as they waited for return cargos. The English visitor John Mawe dismissed these porters and carters as "idle and dissolute," and claimed that "when they have a little money, they drink and gamble, and when penniless, they sometimes betake themselves to pilfering."
During the heat of the day laborers and drivers wandered off to join unemployed artisans and day laborers in the taverns and gaming places along the narrow streets that led away from the river. The transportation sector was essential to the city's economy, but authorities relentlessly held to the opinion that the hundreds of temporary sojourners present in the city on any day were essentially lawless and lazy. Police officials interpreted the time spent by crews waiting to accumulate cargos for return trips as idleness providing an opportunity for criminality. While the hundreds of drivers and peones who lounged around the carts or congregated in the pulperías scandalized the city's gente decente, the days or weeks (often months) of dangerous and exhausting work needed to bring cargo to Buenos Aires from the interior was little appreciated by city residents.
The layout of the city was organized in the familiar grid pattern that framed Spanish urbanization across much of the continent. Despite the appearance of order conferred by the grid, the built environment had developed with little guidance and few restraints in Buenos Aires. Before 1776, individual property owners routinely sought to increase the size of their residences and commercial buildings by ignoring regulations intended to maintain the width of streets, stealing up to a vara (32.9 inches) or sometimes more of living or working space from the public way. As a result, in parts of the city center, it was impossible for two carts to pass at once. More-ephemeral intrusions contributed to urban congestion as well. Carpenters, furniture makers, and smiths often moved their work into the street to escape the confines of small rented spaces. Bakers, brickmakers, and millers routinely stacked wood and charcoal for furnaces and ovens as well as other supplies in the street, interfering with the passage of pedestrians and cart traffic. In the warmer months, artisans in the indoor trades, tailors, shoemakers, and even silversmiths often escaped the dark and airless interior spaces of their shops by moving tables and benches into the street, taking advantage of sunlight and cleaner air.
At midcentury, most of the private residences in Buenos Aires had been constructed from adobe, and the majority had straw roofs. One Jesuit passing through the city in 1729 wrote, "the houses are low, of a single floor, and the majority is made of raw earth. Each [is] a rectangle of four walls without a single window, receiving whatever light possible through the open door." As the city grew and prospered after 1776, urban construction became more substantial and better regulated. City authorities began to require building permits by 1788 and carefully scrutinized the design and location of new construction in the city center. As the city's wealth grew, property owners tore down older structures in the blocks surrounding the Plaza Mayor and replaced them with flat-roofed brick buildings, many with a second story. One English resident in 1797 found "the middle of the city ... better, and some of the principal streets [had] a show of opulence and taste that [was] very agreeable." However, even during the long era of expansion in the 1780s and early 1790s, some rundown or abandoned buildings remained to blight the city center.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WORKSHOP OF REVOLUTION by Lyman L. Johnson Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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