Tending the Store: Trade and Silver at the Real de Huautla, 1778-1781

In the complex network of distribution in New Spain in the middle of the eighteenth century, after two centuries of capitalist commerce on a New World frontier and already the world’s largest producer of silver, there had developed a hierarchy of capitalization and merchandising, a hierarchy descending from Mexico City warehousemen-wholesale importers (almaceneros) to provincial storekeepers or country traders (tenderos), down to itinerant dealers (viandantes, marchantes) owning a string of mules, and, at the lowest level, pack-peddlers, chapmen, or hawkers of varying denominations, whether quebrantahuesos, mercachifles, or cacahuateros.¹Viandantes both large and small scale, as well as mercachifles, who formed the universe of “thousands of small and traditional proprietors,” were narrow capillaries of the arteries of merchandise flowing from many parts of the world, from regions within the colony itself, from the Spanish colonies of “Caracas” (Venezuela) and “Guayaquil” (Ecuador), from the Spanish metropole's Atlantic port of Cádiz, which drew on western Europe’s producers, and from India and China via Manila.² Beginning with the trickle of penny-capitalist, itinerant tradesmen selling for fractions of a silver peso—that is, a medio real and less—came an accumulation of uncoined and coined silver in the hands of successive tradesmen that culminated in millions of silver pesos, coined in the Mexico City mint and then exported by the capital’s almaceneros to Manila and the Far East via the Pacific port of Acapulco, through the Gulf coast port of Veracruz to Spain’s Caribbean island colonies (principally Cuba), and—by far the largest amount of precious metals—to the metropole and through it to northwestern Europe. This linked infrastructure testified to the already invasive penetration of commercial capitalism in the principal mining area of the western Atlantic, New Spain, whose Mexico City mint coined on average more than 16 million pesos per annum over the decade 1770-1780.³

To a great extent, to enlarge and deepen these extractive structures by incorporating more New World consumers was, at bottom, a fundamental premise of Spain’s high bureaucrats involved in colonial affairs in the eighteenth century—Uztáriz, Patiño, Campillo, Ensenada, and their successors, Campomanes and Gálvez, to name only six among many.

At the end of the chain of distribution were hundreds of itinerant tradesmen pursuing the carrera de la viandancia, the tradesman’s profession, throughout the countryside of New Spain.⁴Viandantes represented what Daniel Defoe found in the English countryside, “a set of traveling merchants . . . who go all over England with droves of pack horses, and to all the fairs and market towns. . . . Here they supply, not only the common people by retail . . . but they supply the ships by wholesale or whole pieces. . . . They are really traveling merchants [handling] a very great quantity of goods.”⁵ By the early eighteenth century, country viandantes were a colonial fixture. Their preconquest antecedents were depicted in Juan de Torquemada’s early seventeenth-century Monarchía indiana.⁶

While handling an impressive volume of merchandise, they operated with small amounts of capital, mostly borrowed; and they were keenly profit oriented. They had to cut corners and, being by necessity aggressive cost cutters and sharp dealers, they were invariably looked down on by city-based almaceneros.⁷Marchantes frequented the countryside’s “pueblos, rancherías, y haciendas” unencumbered by ledgerkeeping, for “they are accountable to nobody, nor trained to keep accounts indicating brands and numbers.”⁸ At the close of the century, viandantes, mercachifles, or quebrantahuesos were supplied by wholesalers at Mexico City, Veracruz, Puebla, Guadalajara, and other large provincial urban centers.⁹ They trudged to country fairs and market towns, visiting haciendas and pueblos de indios to sell 30 pesos of goods here and 50 there, accepting payment in silver or in local products from “indios, rancheros, and hacienda help,” whose “congenital neglect” of personal appearance had to be overcome, claimed Mexico City almaceneros, by the display of itinerant merchants’ cloths and adorno for sale.¹⁰ As a petty businessman, the viandante was considered by most contemporaries in New Spain an indispensable element behind “all the movement and labor of the Mines, especially in those very remote corners where residents are few . . . and all sales are conducted slowly, by pieces [retazos] as they say.”¹¹

Three categories of itinerant merchants criss-crossed the countryside of New Spain, delivering to well and lightly commercialized areas alike goods consumers needed—or could be induced to need—while exporting, in many instances, locally produced foods and raw materials. First were the relatively well capitalized marchantes, able to arrange “considerable credit” among town-based tienda proprietors. These “traveling wholesalers” employed one or two mule teams (requas of 12 to 15 animals) in the care of two to four drivers (arrieros) making the rounds of market towns and fairs. Then came smaller tradesmen (detallistas ambulantes), owning one or two mules and operating in a smaller sales area.¹² Covering an even more reduced trading space were hawkers, chapmen, or pack-peddlers. Probably many marchantes commenced as arrieros freighting merchandise, selling overpriced goods during the planting season and at harvest time receiving payment in underpriced primary products.¹³

Some were Spanish immigrants like Juan López Cancelada, who once boasted he had worked his way through the interior of New Spain “as a traveling trader, many of whom can be found at Cádiz”; or Salvador Casanova ("a fine youth, white, good looking, dark chestnut hair, narrow nose”) who came to an almacenero of Mexico City bearing a letter of introduction (supported by another sent by mail) and “consequently he was supplied with an assortment of European and Asian goods, in all the equivalent of seven packs.”¹⁴Viandantes knew the preferences and means of their clientele, where certain goods were lacking, and where sales looked promising; they selected their assortments accordingly, basing final price on “the cost of transportation, the sales tax due at final destination, and other circumstances.”¹⁵ Both large- and small-scale viandantes trafficked in domestic foods (salt, maize, chile, beans, cheese, fruit, dried fish) and in local cottons and woolens manufactured at Puebla, Querétaro, and other urban centers of New Spain, along with a surprisingly high percentage of imported European and Asian textiles—bretañas, indianillas españolas, paliacates chinos, and silk stockings. Settlement of accounts with their suppliers involved a sophisticated financial instrument in widespread use: the bill of exchange (libranza).¹⁶

Although resident merchants usually scorned viandantes vagos retailing items “as low as half a real of silk or ribbons” instead of the more respectable “pack or whole box as is customary,” the petty enterprises of itinerant tradesmen should not be minimized. On the whole, they were reliable credit risks, obtaining considerable merchandise on the strength of their word. They peddled goods everywhere, “spending two years in travel and the collection of sales made,” in the process creating “more sales than otherwise would be possible only at fair prices.”¹⁷ A viandante mayorista, Manuel García Girón, operating from his base at Teposcolula, bought on credit from the Anglo-Irish-Spanish firm of Morphi y Cotarro of Veracruz imports in the amount of 23,000 pesos, including woolens produced by Spanish manufactories at San Fernando, Brihuega, and Guadalajara; silk ribbon from Granada; French linens (pontivíes superfinos); and Genoese muñequilla, along with Málaga wine and Catalan brandy. From Teposcolula he distributed them to pueblos in the Mixteca and to the cities of Tehuacán, Puebla, and Mexico City.¹⁸ In effect, viandantes followed established routes through the provinces, covering hundreds of miles on their circuits before returning to settle accounts and resupply. Always there were risks, headaches, losses—but also profits. Few doubted that a mercader viandante practiced a “difficult . . . career.”¹⁹

Freedom from the surveillance, constraints, and competition in colonial cities and towns allowed viandantes to find a number of profitable niches. They cheated on alcabala (sales tax) payments by colluding with provincial buyers and tax officials. Tradesmen in mining zones bought up unminted metal from small mineowners and mineworkers, in the process netting “large profits by avoiding payment of the 10 or 20 percent tax” by reselling the gold or silver to Mexico City’s exporters or to flotistas at Xalapa and Veracruz, who then smuggled the bullion into Cádiz and “other ports of those Realms.”²⁰

For people isolated from a monetizing marketplace offering an array of products of many provenances, contact with the outer world usually came first in the persons of itinerant merchants, and then through the general store (tienda mestiza) in the provincial town center, where the merchandise “consists largely of goods and products of this colony, and some Spanish goods.”²¹ Some tienda proprietors rose from the ranks of prospering itinerant vendors; others were set up by hacienda owners; and many—perhaps a majority of the medium and well capitalized—were almost wholly owned subsidiaries (in a sense, virtual sucursales) of almaceneros in the capital of the colony. Examples include Francisco de Septien, Rodrigo Antonio de Neyra, Manuel Aldaco, Pedro [Alonso] de Terán, and Alberto Rodríguez de Cosgaya, to name only a few prominent after about 1770.²² These were numbered among the 150 to 200 almaceneros, “the core” of the trade of the capital and the colony by virtue of their “advances in goods and . . . the stores they own in many places of the interior which they entrust to their clerks.”²³ Other country storekeepers may have been established by direct contact with Cádiz suppliers.²⁴ The criollo Felipe Fernández de Lima y Jáuregui Barragán made a small fortune as an itinerant trader whose main route took him from Mexico City to Querétaro, Río Verde, the Valle del Maíz, and on into modern Tamaulipas; a brother managed his tienda mestiza, capitalized at the considerable sum of 20,000 pesos.²⁵

Given the time it took for correspondence to move between Mexico City and provincial capitals, the often ample line of credit extended by principal partners to salaried managers of their country stores (often partners or socios, and usually relatives or townsmen from the peninsula), and the variety of daily decisions a tendero had to make, Mexico City principals were constantly on the lookout for reliable managers or manager-partners. They recognized the “fit,” as one immigrant manager analyzed the issue, between their need for control and the peninsular immigrant’s “wish to do well in business that brought me here.”²⁶ Hence a Mexico City almacenero “is always on the lookout for people both capable and trustworthy, and once these qualities are shown, they entrust them with the merchandise that will enable them to earn a fortune.”²⁷ Small wonder that as a rule, recruitment of clerks (cajeros), partner-managers (socios), and creditors or debtors had a foundation in kinship or shared place of birth in the metropole, in shared peasant experience in the Cantabrian socioeconomic matrix, in extended family networks, and in shared language (Basque, Catalan, or other regional dialects).²⁸ These factors and the bonding of peninsular immigrants dispersed among New Spain’s native peoples (Indians and blacks, mestizos and mulattos) formed the social milieu of Spanish business enterprise, from viandante to tendero to almacenero. In this climate, ever-acute Spanish regionalism reproduced and flourished as Basque immigrants favored Basques, and montañeses other montañeses. In the provinces as well as the capital of New Spain, as Claude Morin has well put it, merchandising remained “an affair for ‘whites’”; mestizo and mulatto participation was minimal, while Indians were systematically excluded.²⁹

Tienda proprietors in the interior, the tierra adentro, rarely used their own capital in starting up a business or in taking one over. When the principal partner was a Mexico City almacenero, he supplied most of the capital, the manager generally contributing merchandising skills, which, in practice, may have been mainly the art of knowing when to extend or limit credit to clientele always money-short. Profits seem to have been evenly split. Perhaps one entrepreneur in 2,000, Manuel Abad y Queipo once estimated, invested his own capital without seeking outside supplements, while perhaps one in 20 might put up as much as two-thirds of his tiendas capital.³⁰ A well-stocked provincial store operator could (and usually did) also borrow from local religious corporations: convents, monasteries, cofradías, and other sodalities.³¹

A large number of small country stores had working capital ranging between 100 and 200 pesos, others from 5,000 to 20,000, some going as high as 70,000 pesos. The contracts of partnerships usually specified an effective term between 3 and 7 years; others 20, 30, or more years.³² Partnerships in which Mexico City almaceneros or warehousemen were principals might stipulate that their store managers follow prescribed limits or guidelines on consumer credit, refrain from acting as loan guarantors (fiadores) for third parties, or seek the principal’s consent before investing the firm’s capital or earnings in mining enterprises. Mine speculation could be almost too magnetic to reject.³³ All of which did not prevent managers from running into debt and thereby ruining the enterprise confided to their care.

Credit, it seems, was always a critical factor in tienda management, linking customers to the tendero, then linking the tendero upstream to his suppliers and ultimately to Mexico City warehousemen-importers. A Valladolid tendero received merchandise on credit from a major supplier at the mining center of Guanajuato; the tendero, in turn, sold on credit to correspondents in smaller provincial centers at Uruapan, Tacámbaro, and San Luis Potosí, as well as to itinerant buhoneros, revendedores, and regatones.³⁴

Stocking a country tienda mestiza required rigorous attention to the selection and inflow of basic store goods produced in New Spain, plus traditional and new items from Europe, Asia, and other Spanish colonies. A provincial tendero might go down to Acapulco to buy—for his own account, for other tenderos, even for a provincial cathedral chapter—such items as Chinese silks, linens, and cottons at the fair of the annual Manila galleon.³⁵ Actually, a tiendas capital and credit needs were dictated by the size and variety of inventory, which not infrequently stocked more than one hundred types of merchandise. Tiendas mestizas satisfied a broad range of local demand, from basic foods like flour (“an article absolutely required to stimulate sales”), sugar, cocoa, cinnamon, butter, and cheese to colonial and imported brandies and, of course, textiles (ropas).³⁶ Textiles, like other goods, demanded informed selection sensitive to local consumer preferences, “because sales in the interior are only at retail, and to those locations they bring odd lots of merchandise in colors everybody wants,” to cite the advice of a Mexico City importer-consignee to the directors of Madrid’s Compañía de Filipinas.³⁷ A country store might stock a range of textiles (these géneros nobles often accounted for up to 75 percent of inventory), from silks (Chinese, Neapolitan, and Genoese), linens (French pontivíes and bretañas, Silesian contrahechas) and French woolens (ruanas) to English stockings and cotton prints (indianas) in a variety of widths.³⁸

Growth in colonial demand by monetized and monetizing consumers was palpable; it is corroborated by the costumbrista-like oil paintings of eighteenth-century New Spain by Miguel Cabrera and others, depicting the widespread use of muslins, linens, lace, silk brocade, belts, trimmings, and ribbons.³⁹ A tienda attached to a hacienda might stock items for its workmen: iron and steel bars and tools and machetes, along with “woolen cloth for sleeves, dresses, blouses, hats, soap.” Textiles inventoried fell into two categories: Mexican products (listado de Oaxaca, paños de Tenancingo, paños poblanos, paños ozumbeños de Otate, paño Queretano, Coapastles, piezas de manta de Texcoco) and European imports (pontibí, bretaña, angaripola de Barcelona).⁴⁰ Obviously an ample stock of trade goods was one way to ensure the tiendas viability; another was repeated bargain sales. And for retaining clientele in the face of competition, nothing was more effective than giving small change in the form of store tokens, tlacos or clacos of wood, copper, soap, or hide usually worth one-eighth of a real, and accepting pawn goods for credit. It is hardly farfetched to characterize the country store as a kind of pawn shop.⁴¹

The use and abuse of store tokens was widespread, and related in part, although not wholly, to periodic monetary shortages caused by massive silver exports at Veracruz, a phenomenon widely perceived between 1752 and 1772.⁴² As a rule of thumb, perhaps 10 percent of New Spain’s internal trade was transacted in silver coin. To remedy the shortage, a viceregal order (bando) of 1773 prohibited—ineffectively, as it turned out—export of small coins, the two- and one-peso denominations along with the smallest, the medio real (one-sixteenth of a peso).⁴³ At the same time, tenderos everywhere in New Spain resorted to tokens in trading with rural and urban low-income customers, each issuing perhaps up to 500 pesos’ worth (32,000 tlacos). “They offer them,” wrote the irate criollo son of a Oaxaca-based Spanish country merchant, “two reales in silver and the remainder in six of that particular store’s tlacos to pressure them into making all their purchases there.”⁴⁴ Motivated partly by the scarcity of small change, the practice also proved to be a source of superprofits to unscrupulous country storekeepers, superexploitation to their poor rural customers. Country stores may have generated annual profits between 100 and 125 percent.⁴⁵

As another response to the specie shortage, tenderos manipulated the monetary denominations used in superficially simple exchange, or cambalache. The practice undermined the bargaining position of rural people entering a monetizing colonial economy.⁴⁶ Storekeepers would confuse clients with four peso types: pesos en plata worth eight reales, along with three “monedas imaginarias”: pesos a precio de proyecto (6 reales), pesos a precios antiguos (4 reales), and pesos de la tierra (2 reales). By buying from native producers small quantities of their maize crop, or chile or rum, paying in cheap pesos de la tierra, and demanding, for manufactured goods like ribbon or ordinary cotton cloth (manta judía), payment in higher-value pesos de proyecto or de plata, storekeepers swindled their customers (or tried to).⁴⁷ In addition, they would buy crops at harvest time at low prices, later reselling the same foodstuffs at grossly inflated prices. More specifically, a “farmer who harvests today one hundred fanegas of wheat or corn with great effort tomorrow proceeds to buy what food he requires at prices four times greater than the price of his harvest.”⁴⁸ And not to exhaust forms of unequal exchange imposed on Indian customers, tenderos practiced the art of lending against pawned items whose value they underpriced by 66 percent in the “monedas imaginarias,” later requiring full payment at time of redemption in pesos de platal.⁴⁹ Indian consumers recognized the magnitude of such exploitative penny capitalism. They had to accept the “malicious variety of prices” imposed on them along with “the fictitious coins normally used in trade.”

To Padre Juan Morfi, a contemporary observer, it was intolerable that Spanish storekeepers claimed higher status (that of Españoles) to victimize Indians, even though for two centuries the Indians had accepted Spain’s dominación, laws, and Catholicism.⁵⁰ Morfi, who traveled extensively in New Spain’s northern provinces during the last half of the eighteenth century, pinpointed such commercial practices and tried to understand the systemic nature of the exploitation. Chihuahua’s rural storekeepers, he noted, found that they, too, were overcharged in the prices of what they ordered, as well as in interest and commissions. Caught in a chain of distribution and credit, tenderos had to rely on Chihuahua City suppliers for both credit and goods. It was all part of what Morfi termed the “desórdenes del Nuevo México.”⁵¹

What appeared to observers with a social conscience, like Padre Morfi, as a “disorderly,” inequitable, and hence dysfunctional economy failing to conform to the expectations of a moral economy was simply a manifestation of the profitmaking function of the country tenderos in daily contact over many years with their rural clientele, the indios. Tienda managers and (where trade volume warranted) their cajeros drew salaries of between 150 and 300 pesos annually and a weekly food allowance of 2 to 5 pesos from store income, accumulating savings for retirement or investment; it was not uncommon to defraud partners or employers in the process.⁵² A tienda mestiza was a complex enterprise, usually consisting of a general store and perhaps an adjacent bakery. Its clientele was often large and dispersed, to judge by the lists of debtors, ranging from one hundred to more than three hundred, carried on one Valladolid merchant’s ledgers. Francisco Gutiérrez de los Ríos carried, over 15 years (1760-1775), debtors owing from 1 to 1,700 pesos. Some were located within an 18-mile radius of the provincial capital; others were as far away as Uruapan or even Mexico City. His successor at the tienda, José Rafael Pérez, raised the number of debtors to 185 between 1778 and 1781; among them were 20 women. His clients were also dispersed from Uruapan and Tacámbaro northeast to San Luis Potosí.⁵³

Equally revealing is the size distribution of accounts receivable of a tienda with 321 debtors. The ledger shows, on average, 11 with arrears of seven hundred pesos, 150 with three hundred pesos, and 160 with an average of one hundred pesos each—constituting 57 percent of the receivables. Faith in his clients compensated this storekeeper, if not his creditors. When in 1784 his estate was embargoed in the course of bankruptcy proceedings, it was found that he had acquired over his business career a hacienda, a townhouse with 8,565 pesos of household furnishings — and four slaves.⁵⁴

This retail system floated on credit extended downward to the customers of a tienda, which in turn operated on credits from suppliers. A Valladolid tienda, for instance, accumulated sizable debts (between 12,000 and 15,000 pesos) owed to wholesalers or large-scale tenderos at the mining center of Guanajuato (Fernando Septién) and Mexico City (Alejandro Rodríguez de Cosgaya and Pedro de Terán).⁵⁵ Indeed, the magnitude of monetary flows from provincial stores upward to their suppliers is illustrated by the operations of Felipe Barragán, who opened his tienda at Tula with 5,000 pesos. He later added an itinerant merchant’s route, and by 1765 had accumulated stock in trade and debts to suppliers totaling 65,000 pesos. At one point he traveled to Mexico City to settle accounts with almaceneros, bearing along 45,804 pesos; 5,000 in cash and the balance in internal bills of exchange drawn on those almaceneros.⁵⁶

From outgoing correspondence over a three-year period (1778-80) of a tienda mestiza at the Real de Huautla, part of the alcaldía mayor of Cuautla Amilpas southeast of the capital of the colony of New Spain, one absorbs a sense of the daily rounds of a Spanish-born storekeeper from Ciga in the valley of Baztán (Navarre)—his hours and days; his preoccupations, values, and goals; his attitudes toward customers and kin, business competitors, and representatives of the colonial state.⁵⁷ With a free, non-Indian population (43 percent) in the alcaldía mayor of Cuautla Amilpas, the Real de Huautla was already integrated into the commercial circuits of the Audiencia de México, the most densely populated jurisdiction of the whole colony.⁵⁸

In late 1778 Juan Thomas de Mendiburu came to the Real de Huautla from Navarre as managing partner of the tienda mestiza recently bought by his cousin, Matias de Mendiburu, already proprietor of a tienda mestiza in Mexico City.⁵⁹ Matias had emigrated from Spain 13 years earlier in the company of Miguel de Mendiburu, recently matriculated in the Consulado de Cádiz; on the flota of 1765 from Cádiz to Veracruz, Miguel appears as cargador-factor and Matias as his dependent (criado).⁶⁰ Two years later, Matias was clerking (as cajero) in the Mexico City almacén of Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta, with an assigned annual salary of 150 pesos; sometime thereafter, he left Yraeta’s employ to establish his own commercial enterprise in the capital. Yraeta thought that Matias prospered, for he later commented to a Guatemalan correspondent, “Mendiburu is not doing badly at all at his tienda mestiza, for, because he understands trade, he always manages to sell something.”⁶¹ By then, other Mendiburu relatives were in the colony: Miguel, a cousin, at Xalapa; and Pedro Aycinena, a distant relative (and fellow townsman of Ciga), at Mexico City.⁶²

Oblique comments in Juan Thomas’ letters suggest that Matias bought the Huautla tienda to advance Juan Thomas’ business career. It is equally plausible that Matias aimed to repeat the pattern of Mexico City wholesale houses in setting up wholly owned distributors in the provinces.⁶³ Shared ties to Navarre and to family there were often explicit, indicating the source of Juan Thomas’ responsibility to his partner-cousin in Mexico City. Expressions of this responsibility, intertwined with deference, turn up in Juan Thomas’ lexicon in references to his wealthier cousin and benefactor as “patron” and “very beloved cousin” and to himself as Matias’ “loyal paisano” and “your slave unto death.” What could be more expressive of their unequal relationship than “you are my sole support?”⁶⁴ As for his sober dedication to work, he once reminded Matias, “I don’t mix with others, or gamble, drink, or engage in love affairs, or attend rowdy parties.” What follows draws on the Huautla tiendas outgoing letters; the gist of Matias’ correspondence can only be deduced from Juan Thomas’ responses.

Predictably, Juan Thomas’ letters deal with the general management of a medium-sized country store and attached bakery located in a mining town. The store also dispensed chocolate ground by women employees. The Huautla area contained a number of working as well as abandoned mines, usually the property of absentee Mexico City almaceneros like José Luís Fagoaga, Joaquin Colla, Pedro de Alles, and Miguel de Allende, whose oversight they entrusted to resident managers, “all of whom are employees of the owners of the Capitals invested in this mining center” and always reporting to “our Bosses.”⁶⁵ (By no means did the Real de Huautla share the luster of such mining centers as Taxco, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, or Zacatecas.) Roughly four categories of customers frequented the Mendiburu store: mineworkers (plateros, barreteros), itinerant merchants (marchantes), small-scale ranchers, and, infrequently, other storekeepers (comerciantes, tenderos) — all described as the “community, trade, and auxiliary activities of the Mines in this center.”⁶⁶ In addition to the usual items purveyed in tiendas mestizas, Juan Thomas had to maintain an inventory of indispensable mining supplies like iron and steel, mercury, salt, and pyrites for refining ores by the patio process.⁶⁷

Cuautla Amilpas was one of 118 alcaldías mayores in the jurisdiction of the Audiencia de México, the most important administrative division of the Reino de Nueva España. Cuautla and the Real de Huautla maintained communication by arrieros (mule team drivers) with Cuernavaca, Chalco, Puebla, and Mexico City. Of the alcaldía's population of 7,450 in 1742, 23 percent lived in Cuautla itself, as did the district officer (alcalde mayor) and his subordinate (teniente). At the smaller Real de Huautla in the dry season (las secas), townsfolk depended entirely on a nearby stream for drinking, washing, and other needs; the plateros also used the stream to “process their ores and draw off their silver.”⁶⁸

Huautla easily supported a number of general stores competing for the trade of mineworkers, ranchers, and the surrounding campesinos, in contrast with the virtual trade monopoly exercised by alcaldes mayores and their tenientes in many agricultural Indian communities of southern New Spain. Mendiburu, along with other tenderos, had to sell on credit. In accumulating silver barras to forward to Mexico City, their major preoccupation was debt collection from consumers who delayed payment and distrusted storekeepers, their ledgers, their pricing policies, and their sense of hegemony over the colonized. In colonial areas, trade, exploitation, and domination have always gone hand in hand.

The micro-universe of the manager of a tienda in a minor mining town was bound by the weekly round of storekeeping activities. It was punctuated by Sunday sabbath and perhaps a dinner shared with a fellow immigrant storekeeper (“Our Apecechea dines with me on every festive occasion”), by holy days (in particular, Easter week), and by the roller-coaster fortunes of of the local industry, silver mining. Isolation, however, is not to be taken in a strict sense. For Juan Thomas, there was the weekly post from Matias at Mexico City, the ordering of supplies and acknowledgment of their receipt (or complaints about the quality of a shipment), the coming and going of mule teams and drivers and of peddlers (marchantes, buhoneros), and always the inertia of customary activities—hoping to expand sales, collect debts, or receive reports of the opening of new mines or the resurrection of old ones. “Retail is detail,” and monotony was inseparable from the slow penetration and deepening of the twin processes of monetization and commercialization in Spain’s Atlantic world over 250 years. In the eighteenth century, Spanish emigrants in growing numbers abandoned their peasant hamlets in northern Spain, in the montañas of Asturias, and in the Basque provinces of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Alava, and Navarre to trade in a distant colony thousands of miles away, surrounded by an unfamiliar culture and strange phenotypes— Indian, mestizo, black, mulatto, and all their permutations, meticulously classified and ordered by Spanish colonials.⁶⁹

Juan Thomas de Mendiburu’s initial correspondence was devoted to taking over the tienda enterprise from its former owner (a don Bernardo) and securing ledgers, balance sheets, and debtors’ accounts to be shipped to Mexico City. In one of his earliest letters, Juan Thomas reports taking charge of the “store and its ancillary activities . . . [and] the orders that I’ve transferred and clarified from the Old Journal to the New.”⁷⁰ The previous proprietor had wanted to retain the “old day books,” but Juan Thomas refused, as he justified himself, “in order to have in hand the record of the sums owed me, in case of a question or outright rejection.”⁷¹ He had assessed the tiendas capital needs and proposed to Matias two separate funds, one covering the “store’s basic stock of goods to the best of our estimates,” the other (un capital aparte) to stock salt and pyrite for refining silver and to provide “credit and goods for the plateros.” With five thousand pesos for inventory and another two thousand for mining operations, “this capital will suffice for carrying on our trade.”⁷²

Juan Thomas’ early letters introduce preoccupations that later come to dominate correspondence with his cousin. First, he discovered that of the tiendas debtors, “more than half are out of town and currently uncollectible.”⁷³ Next came his intention to accumulate marcos de plata to ship to Mexico City, although, he warned, “actually . . . that hope is cold’ and sales are down because there are few customers”; mineworkers were drifting away as some mines suspended operations.⁷⁴ Still, he remained optimistic: “it may be that God wills that mining operations resume” or “there are signs that mining will shortly improve, since [ever the ray of hope] they’re expecting a bonanza at Yturralde’s mine.”⁷⁵

The third repeated theme concerns his first clerk, Montoro, apparently a holdover from the previous proprietor. When Montoro left Huautla on a brief excursion, things went more smoothly, Juan Thomas reported, “since that ungrateful montañés is away . . . and although there’s more work to be done, we don’t regret it and feel more comfortable.”⁷⁶ To Matias he complained, I can’t bear having that lousy little montañés continue working with us,” Montoro was usually “violento,” and finally Juan Thomas made him write Matias himself and explain to his “benefactor about the reasons for leaving.” Juan Thomas added a laconic warning, “Be careful with this matter.”⁷⁷ Meanwhile, Juan Thomas had hired “a man . . . well known in this mining town, who has improved matters.” The new addition was all the more necessary because Montoro usually outraged customers, who “swear that if he returns, they won’t.” Invariably he was “irritable with the Drunks. . . . We should not lose out because of violence on our part, because we feed off the Drunks, which is most unfortunate.”⁷⁸ Toward the end of 1778, Juan Thomas was showing satisfaction with his new cajero, a former mine manager, honorable and well-intentioned,” and—best of all recommendations — “very much a shopkeeper.”⁷⁹ Montoro’s irritability was doubtless a factor in his incompatibility, but was there the added friction of ingrained peninsular regionalism, given that Montoro was a montañés working under a Navarro from the Baztán Valley?

Compatibility of tendero and cajero aside, the next most important sphere of store management and another primary preoccupation was the mix of merchandise that would attract Huautla’s consumers. Juan Thomas never let his Mexico City cousin forget that “a promptly received selection of goods means profit,” that shoddy merchandise eroded “the reputation that our hard work is acquiring.”⁸⁰ He was also eager to drum up business for his cousin, often recommending that Matias fill the orders of other Huautla storekeepers (for example, “someone reliable and well regarded by me”), even forwarding with the order (memoria) an internal libranza of two hundred pesos.⁸¹ (In drafting his own orders, Juan Thomas would also cover them with funds drawn from the store’s operations.) Juan Thomas’ inventory policy was eminently practical: flour was a lead-in item, indispensable in drawing customers, as were rice, wine, brandy, tallow, and candles (“an indispensable item"). His “pobre tienda” also had to stock a variety of foodstuffs (sugar, lard, cheese) and especially textiles, including ordinary, Puebla-made cotton goods and all kinds of fine and speciality linens, for no one questions price if the quality is good.”⁸² Clothes were a marker of status, then as now. And there were special holiday items: for Easter he ordered from Mexico City imported textiles, carefully selected, such as “Barcelona laces and needlepoint from Lorraine,” Chinese “ribbons and prints,” and from Cádiz “the best Breton and Pontivy linens.” If French textiles were unavailable, cousin Matias should substitute the finest “imitation Breton linens”; the customers at the Real de Huautla “will pay high prices for them without question.”⁸³

No restraint was shown if Matias’ shipments turned out to be of poor quality. A delivery of tallow “that I ordered is very satisfactory,” while a second “is worthless, only useful to grease leather belts.” In the same vein, Juan Thomas added that a shipment of chile “was expensive, old and rotten. . . . God alone knows how we’ll get anything out of it.”⁸⁴ Despite Juan Thomas’ customary pessimism about sales volume, all Huautla’s plateros seemed to be free spenders, which may explain his impatience with Montoro, who could not abide drunken customers.

Drunk or sober, mineworkers, who customarily bought on credit, indeed “fed” the store.⁸⁵ But they were, as a group, poor payers, and generally represented the bulk of nonreceivables, so many debtors ultimately to be written off as total loss. The problem lay partly with the plateros’ dangerous occupation and their propensity to spend what they earned as soon as they earned it, partly with the necessity of selling to them on credit, and partly with unpredictable local minicycles—short boom and long stagnation—which characterized the mining economy. When silver mines were, as Juan Thomas phrased it, “closed down,” debt collection slowed perceptibly. On taking over the Huautla tienda, he quickly advised Mexico City that more than half the inherited debts were actually “uncollectible,” with many debtors either “absent or dead.”⁸⁶ When he complained to the former owner, he was told the store’s sale price had reflected this condition. “You will handle this matter” was Juan Thomas’ classic, laconic phrase when shifting responsibility to Matias.⁸⁷

For his part, “cousin” Matias, who had his own sources of information, monitored Juan Thomas’ credit policy and soon questioned his “many new debtors” despite orders to the contrary.⁸⁸ Defending himself, Juan Thomas responded that outstanding credits totaled only 200 pesos (his average weekly sales volume was 12 to 15 pesos), many debtors had guarantors (fiadores), and he promised if necessary to collect from them. Henceforth he would limit such credits, selling only to those who made weekly installments and whom he could evaluate as “hombres de bien.” And if he had not followed Matias’ orders to the letter, it was because he had to meet local competition; after all, “the wish to do well brought me here,” as he candidly put his goal.⁸⁹

Debt collection from Huautla’s plateros was always tedious, best executed on their day of rest, Sunday. Minework as a livelihood was harsh, but as Braudel has commented, mineworkers were, relatively speaking, freemen who could utilize their limited freedom to put off settling creditors’ claims against their wages.⁹⁰ Sundays, however, forced Juan Thomas to make hard choices: he could keep open the tienda to serve customers (“it’s the day the store can make sales”) and keep them from competitors’ stores, or he could track down debtors (“because only on Sundays can you locate them at home”), only to find them “incoherent because of their usual drunken stupor.”⁹¹ He elaborated various strategies, always constrained by the overriding reality of their working conditions: “our debtors have no other goods but their labor, and if there is no work, well, there we are.”⁹² With some, he worked out weekly payment schedules, accepting whatever they could afford (“perhaps four reales weekly, or one peso”). With others he simply threatened to call on “the Authority of the Law to collect something.” As he reported to Matias, “if you apply a small spur, you can collect at least something.” At the same time, Juan Thomas had to be wary. “If you try to collect something at the mine,” debtors resorted to their own protective devices: “They shift their trade to another store, which leaves us where we are.”⁹³ Perhaps more effective was pressuring absentee mineowners at Mexico City to order their mine managers at Huautla to deduct tienda debts from plateros’ weekly wages (“so that you can have deductions made from the mineowner’s account book”). To this end, Juan Thomas urged Matias to use his influence with “the mineowners to assign preference to my claims”; in this fashion “we’ll collect something bit by bit, this is very important to us.”⁹⁴

In local sales competition Juan Thomas found restraints on his ability to demand repayment from delinquent clients. Indeed, his wayward plateros did shop around, for “despite a decline, there are more stores.”⁹⁵ His rivals included the tenderos Manuel Caro (“he has two stores in this Mining town”), Miguel de Allende (“financed . . . by [José María] Samper”), and particularly aggressive competitors like Francisco Fernández, who pushed his aguardiente sales by underpricing and, moreover, threatened “to do the same with every other item.”⁹⁶ After one year as storekeeper at Huautla, rumors of the reopening of another tienda upset Juan Thomas, but his “fear” faded when the tienda finally opened at a distant hacienda. Competition, he wrote Mexico City, induced a low sales volume, and consequently he had to lament that “we’re eating into our capital.”⁹⁷

Keeping the store well stocked and pressing delinquent clients are age-old tactics small businesses have always followed to avoid eating into capital and to obtain returns on labor and investment. Matias de Mendiburu had set up the Huautla tienda under his cousin’s management to ensure a return flow of profit in the form of silver, unminted barras of marcos (a marco was worth 68 pesos) delivered by arriero to Mexico City. His self-imposed goal, Juan Thomas once confided, was to be able to ship Matias one silver bar monthly and, he added, “may God will it, since my hope is no other than to lighten your burdens.”⁹⁸ In one of his earliest communications, he reported with satisfaction that he retained “in my control 70 marcos de plata” and hoped to accumulate rapidly “a Bar to forward to you.”⁹⁹ By late January 1778 he planned to send “a small bar with God’s help, as I already have more than half”; actually he soon dispatched a “pretty large Bar of silver of 93 marks and 3 libras, all I could put together,” and by April he held slightly more than 70 marcos “and they are readying a few more for me now.”¹⁰⁰

Like all else at the Real de Huautla, the level of economic activity was attuned to local mining operations; when the mines slackened, “of course we’re poor, we collect nothing, nor sell anything because there’s no money. . . but, patience.”¹⁰¹ When mines closed, workers and their families drifted away (“every day matters worsen, to the point that even people have left”), sales fell off (“now our weekly sales average 12 or 15 pesos”) and accordingly less silver was packed off’ to Mexico City.¹⁰² In September 1778, Juan Thomas reported, “silver is getting scarce,” mineworkers “[are] unemployed for lack of ores, and we are living off the tailings alone.” This implies that they no longer enjoyed the partido incentive system, whereby mineworkers kept a percentage of ore mined, usually above the assigned quota (tequío); and until or unless the system was restored, “shipments will be much delayed.”¹⁰³ Finally, in the closing weeks of 1778, he had to write apologetically to his “Primo y Dueño” Matias to ship him mercury and two hundred pesos to finance refining “another Bar [for delivery] in the middle of next year.”¹⁰⁴

While the cousins shared an interest in silver shipments generated by the Huautla tienda, Matias left little to chance in applying a yardstick to the store’s income. Because Matias shipped mercury to Huautla for sale to local refiners, he could easily gauge the approximate returns in silver. For his part, Juan Thomas warned Matias to keep careful account of silver shipments, “because the Bar you gave Dutari matched” the mercury Matias had shipped. Matias put great stock in his cousin’s forecasts of imminent silver shipments, and when they did not materialize after “so many promises,” Matias called him to account.¹⁰⁵ Business invariably imposes boundaries on kin relations.

Juan Thomas’ preoccupation with the mechanics of a country store—inventory maintenance, debt collection, profit remittance—portrays a Cantabrian peasant’s attitude toward work, parsimony, and petty accumulation, as well as the kinship responsibility of an immigrant in the commercial sector of the Spanish colonial milieu. Yet another side to this European peasant exposed to colonial profitmaking is suggested by another preoccupation: the silver-mining syndrome in New Spain. As a tradesman on the colonial mining frontier, Matias de Mendiburu’s “fiel paisano” cousin revealed marked schizoid tendencies: this usually cautious, penny-minded, petty bourgeois tendero could not resist a speculative enterprise—mining.

Merchants in mining towns were readily drawn into mining speculation. As a rule, mineowners purchased supplies on credit, while refiners borrowed to obtain silver ores. Despite the risks associated with silver mining, the mirage of bonanza returns usually overcame merchants’ fear of over-exposure. As John Kicza has commented, mining and merchandising “were perceived as complementary.”¹⁰⁶

This attraction was perhaps inevitable in a community whose lifeblood was mining silver-bearing ores and refining them by mercury or smelting, and whose store sales waxed and waned with the size of mineworkers’ weekly take-home pay. At one level, Juan Thomas revealed a peasant’s ingrained distrust of high-risk speculation; at another, he had no immunity to the bonanza fever affecting, for example, fellow tendero Juan José Apecechea.¹⁰⁷ Apecechea, who invested in mining properties, dispensed credit freely to his customers and was forever “hoping . . . soon to offer a source of great happiness to our Casa.” Shopkeeper and mining speculator, Apecechea was, in Juan Thomas’ optic, “madcap in his schemes.”¹⁰⁸ Juan Thomas recognized the perils of the mining syndrome; he could pinpoint examples of gross mismanagement that warned what involvement might bring. He reported to Matias that one mineowner allocated more of his mine’s earnings to personal expenses—60 pesos weekly—than he paid in weekly wages to his workmen (30 to 40 pesos). Another manager wasted mine profits, and “on such Projects he loses money.” As for one Miguel de Allende, his mine required everything—“intelligent people and a new method in order to profit from the labor force and capital.”¹⁰⁹ Meanwhile, Juan Thomas allocated credit sparingly to his-platero customers, particularly when “silver is scarce”; at such moments, he wrote Mexico City, he ran his enterprise “with some reservations” in dispensing mercury and hardware “in the small hope that I have of obtaining them.”¹¹⁰

On the other hand, he had migrated to the colony to better his economic status as quickly as possible, and he could not afford to pass up a chance to profit, even if indirectly, by interesting others in participating in “readying a promising mine, whose processing installations are virtually set up, that was proposed by a capital-short mineowner, “a person well provided and responsible.” By now, Juan Thomas had mastered some technical expertise, as evidenced by his report to Matias that the mine s ore quality and quantity were promising (“it obtains from each barretero 12 to 14 arrobas of ore, while the pepina extracted weighs 20 onzas”) in the upper levels; and while lower levels remained to be exploited, “obviously the quality of the ores will be better.” Only a small investment was needed “because smelting will hold down costs” and, he assured his cousin, “we will quickly be in a position to obtain silver by merely improving the old refining plant.” If Matias could quickly persuade Manuel Santos to invest between three thousand and four thousand pesos, the enterprise could “redound to my great benefit and allow me to settle my debts, which all my efforts are directed to doing.”¹¹¹ Presumably Juan Thomas would earn a commission for his mediation. His correspondence contains evidence that while he continued to flirt with the possibility of committing his own funds to mine speculation, he had to follow Matias’ advice to resist such temptation.¹¹²

No community, metropolitan or colonial, capital city or provincial center, is ever the ideal kingdom, and late eighteenth-century “Guautla” was no exception. Differences between owners (amos) in Mexico City and managers of Huautla’s stores and mines were unavoidable, revealed in the conservative strategy of Matias de Mendiburu and the speculative propensity of his cousin and manager-partner. There were cleavages or rifts within the community as well, between local representatives of the colonial state — alcabala tax collectors or the colonial district officer, the alcalde mayor and the joint interests of local businessmen, as well as among tradesmen and mine managers.

Scattered in the Huautla correspondence are references to problems with colonial bureaucrats; for example, Pedro Pacheco, who supervised sales taxes collected on incoming goods, or the district officer and his teniente. Pacheco insisted that local merchants turn in the alcabala guías (waybills) required by law to accompany each shipment freighted by arrieros; Pacheco could then match the guías with the official tallies prepared by the issuing alcabala officer. Thus he was positioned to calculate his tax receipts (“calculate what each Person pays”).¹¹³ When merchandise was delivered to Juan Thomas’ tienda mestiza tagged with the guía intended for another shopkeeper, he complained to Matias about the “carelessness in forwarding orders for goods via Gómez, the muleteer,” which would oblige him to pay an additional alcabala tax.¹¹⁴ This was no minor matter to tenderos competing for sales by underpricing items by fractions of a real.¹¹⁵ For example, difference in the number of alcabala payments became a source of friction between Veracruz and Mexico City importers when goods routed through the capital, then sold and shipped to provincial storekeepers, paid an additional sales tax there. Mexico City almaceneros insisted that this placed them at a great disadvantage.¹¹⁶

Alcabala was, after all, collectible throughout the colony’s business community, and in this sense tolerable because it was generalized, at least in theory. But among Huautla’s businessmen, mainly mine and store managers, judging by Juan Thomas’ acerbic reports, relations with the colonial state could become confrontational. In an early observation, Juan Thomas probably mirrored the sentiments of Huautla’s storekeepers about local colonial officials when he commented, “we have thieves for Officials who profit from the duties that squeeze us,” an oblique reference to the colonial practice of funding tax collectors’ salaries with a percentage of their receipts.¹¹⁷ In general, it was preferable not to involve state authority in resolving local trade squabbles, so that when tendero Francisco Fernández underpriced his brandies, causing “an awful loss on brandies” and leading some Huautla competitors to petition the local “autoridad” (the alcalde mayor) to intervene, Juan Thomas informed his cousin, “I would not go along in any event.”¹¹⁸

There were grounds for such caution when, two years later, confrontation with the aggressive alcalde mayor was unavoidable. On December 1, 1779 (the holiday of San Juan), without warning, the official (never named directly) abruptly convened an assembly of Huautla’s notables (junta general), its “Vecindario, Comercio y Dependientes de Minas de este Real.” At the assembly, flanked by a deputy from Huautla’s merchant community and one from the mining community (José María Samper), and citing the need to control the “the criminals who hide in mining towns,” the alcalde mayor announced a six-thousand-peso construction project for a jail and municipal buildings. He expected each of the “Mineowners, Merchants, Ranchers, and other Members of the community” to contribute “whatever they could afford”; otherwise, he would have to levy his own assessments. Samper, representing the mineowners, immediately offered one thousand pesos with the promise to cover expenditures exceeding the planned six-thousand-peso budget.

Backed by his friend Apecechea and other store managers (they insisted they were mere “employees of those who owned Capital"), Juan Thomas petitioned for a delay to consult their distant “bosses.” Privately they feared that “once the Alcalde Mayor lays his hands on this money, he will keep it.” This was but one of “the many techniques of robbery.” Juan Thomas urged Matias to confer with merchants and mineowners at Mexico City who had investments at Huautla; namely, Francisco Lausau ("nuestro protector"), Joaquin Colla, and José Luís Fagoaga, and to advise of their decision by the first return mail, to avoid a tropelia. Samper, in their collective judgment, was a collaborator of the alcalde mayor, had recommended a municipal tax on wines and spirits, and should be removed as the mineowners’ local deputy.¹¹⁹

Back came instructions that might curb the “arrogance of this man.”¹²⁰ At the next junta general (December 19), when storekeepers and other businessmen advised the alcalde mayor that they preferred a compromise solution, he responded that he would now make his own assessments.¹²¹ Juan Thomas was afraid to write any more to his cousin than “You will understand what I’m capable of saying.” To Juan Thomas, the alcalde’s motive was self-evident: he hoped to make off with two thousand to three thousand pesos in cash “for his own pocket.” That explained why he refused offers of building materials by “poor souls” of the community and insisted he would buy whatever was required. Juan Thomas judged this a “a very malicious procedure”. At the end of December one late afternoon, true to his threat, the alcalde, accompanied by his staff, came to Juan Thomas’ store to demand 150 pesos by the following Monday. The mines were assessed more, between 500 and 1,000 pesos each.¹²²

The correspondence provides no clue to the outcome of the confrontation between local businessmen and representatives of the colonial state. One may assume that lobbying by Matias de Mendiburu and other colleagues with viceregal authorities at the capital failed. Within the next three months, however, the alcalde mayor departed, leaving a teniente, selected and financed by Samper and even more “presumptuous” than the alcalde. In reporting to Mexico City of the local changes, nevertheless, it was business as usual for Juan Thomas, who urged his cousin to intercede with the newly appointed alcalde mayor (he would, it was hoped, be an “impartial person”) in the form of “a recommendation favorable to me” so that the alcalde would assist him “in collecting some debts.”¹²³

The brush with local political “autoridad” seems strangely impersonal. Never mentioned is the name of the fractious alcalde mayor or that of the teniente occupying his office at the moment. Nor, for that matter, does Juan Thomas name the highest colonial officer whose intervention to quash the alcalde mayors plan he asked Matias to solicit: the viceroy is simply “S.E.” (His Excellency). Perhaps this tactic was emblematic of the prescribed deference to omnipotent authority in an old regime where office, and the status it conferred, were more important than the officeholder. Or perhaps complaining against the power of office was less dangerous than against the person exercising that power.

The contents of more than 20 letters from the Real de Huautla between January 1778 and May 1780 point to the importance of familial and micro-regional ties binding Cantabrian peasant immigrants in New Spain. Juan Thomas constantly wanted to be remembered to mutual friends in Mexico City (apparently all Basques)—Fermín, Ferminche, Izaguirre, and “chico” Arizo; to “don” Pedro and “don” Esteban. On learning of the election of Pedro Aycinena (“our relative”) as an officer of the Mexico City consulado, he expressed satisfaction that a “son of [the town of] Ciga,” as he phrased it, “could attain one of such honorable positions as a leading figure among those from the Bastán.”¹²⁴

These personal items, along with news of local business conditions, dominate his letters, to the total exclusion of comment on Madrid’s major shift in economic policy for colonial trade; for example, the two major reglamentos on comercio libre of February and October 1778, or the dangers of Spain’s joining France to support England’s rebellious North American colonies, or (closer to home) the departure of perhaps the richest flota (under the command of Antonio de Ulloa) ever to leave Veracruz for Cádiz. The world of Juan Thomas de Mendiburu, tendero at Huautla, was circumscribed, limited, isolated.

The underlying current was, of course, the profitability of the tienda mestiza at the Real de Huautla, a small-scale commercial enterprise in one perspective, in another a source of small-scale accumulation and opportunity for career mobility, a platform from which to move on to the colonial capital and its profit possibilities. This is why Cantabrian country folk emigrated in ever growing numbers in the eighteenth century to what for them was a distant, ethnically strange, and alien colonial frontier. Family and regional links provided a sense of security among emigrants and bred solidarity, fidelity, and responsibility. To Juan Thomas, his cousin at Mexico City, six days away, was not only “cousin” but also “boss” and “patron,” who, Juan Thomas averred, could always rely on his “loyal paisano.” He insisted that Matias’ interests were always paramount: “I will defend your cause no matter what, and without any [personal] gain.”¹²⁵ And despite inevitable contretemps—over poor store management decisions in general, unnecessary losses in remaindering merchandise and financing speculative silver smelting operations—there is no reason to doubt his fidelity, which, moreover, accompanied a profound Catholic spirit of resignation.¹²⁶ Juan Thomas avowed his capacity to accept misfortune as “blows from God for my many sins, and as sinner I am resigned to suffer the appropriate punishment.”¹²⁷

An abiding bond of shared business enterprise, family clientelism, fidelity upward to Matias at Mexico City, and paternal-like responsibility and toleration downward to Juan Thomas at Huautla cemented the cousin-partner relationship despite recurrent differences over Juan Thomas’ management style and irrepressible illusions of bonanza awaiting him in silver mine speculation.¹²⁸ Yet it would be unrealistic to expect a Cantabrian peasant, aching to form a nest egg in New Spain (hoping one day to return to the homeland an indiano, wealthy or, at worst, self-supporting), not to share the dreams of a mining community in a colony then the world’s major silver producer. The pursuit of silver through trade and mining drew Juan Thomas and others from isolated Cantabrian communities to New Spain’s capital and interior; they could not fail to recognize that most were destined to remain, that relatively few returned to their peninsular patria chica. To Matias, the dominant partner in the Huautla tienda venture, fell the responsibility for reining in his cousin’s mining propensities.

New Spain’s peninsular immigrants—and there were many who flocked there once flotas to Veracruz resumed in 1757, after an interval of two decades—were not at all interested in creating a brave new world. They focused solely and primarily on “the hope of striking it rich,” the dominant theme in the four-year correspondence. In the words of their late-nineteenth-century successors, they came to "to make it in America.” To repeat Juan Thomas’ candor: “this poor store provides everything, its capital is small, and its customers are only the mineworkers.”¹²⁹ If their combined activities produced growth with some development, these were unplanned and very welcome outcomes of the operations of an invisible hand. No doubt the Huautla store yielded the cousins satisfactory long-term earnings. Still, the underlying threnody was uniform pessimism. In a late 1778 letter of the correspondence, Montoro, the clerk, who has just returned from a six-day trip to Mexico City via the provincial center of Cuernavaca, commiserates that he has “come to find all this far worse than when I left.” He has had to suspend further credits to one long-term client, and “unless business improves after Easter, things will get worse.”¹³⁰

Many who carved out business careers remained, often marrying criollo daughters of other immigrant Cantabrians, whether Vizcaínos or montañeses. A few elected to return to the métropole, drawing income from investments in the colony. Francisco Ygnacio de Yraeta (who had employed Matias de Mendiburu when he arrived as criado in the company of Miguel de Mendiburu), along with his immigrant nephew and son-in-law, Gabriel de Yturbe e Yraeta, remained in Mexico City; Miguel (Juan Thomas’ cousin at Xalapa) and Matias de Mendiburu chose to return. In 1783, when war in the North Atlantic had just ended and shipping was multiplying, Gabriel de Yturbe’s brother reported from Veracruz that two Mendiburus (Miguel and Matias) had just visited him before embarking for Cádiz. Presumably Juan Thomas had decided to stay on. Two decades later, another reference to Matias and Miguel de Mendiburu surfaced. They were now recorded as vecinos of Cádiz, to whom a prominent Veracruz merchant and commission agent, Pedro Miguel de Echeverría, forwarded the considerable sum of five thousand pesos.¹³¹ Earnings on investments in Huautla and Mexico City?

The figure of Juan Thomas de Mendiburu at Huautla is significant beyond illustrating an aspect of the microhistory of late colonial Mexico. He can stand as a metaphor for the world that Spanish imperialism created and maintained in the western Atlantic in the age of commercial capitalism. Like generations of Cantabrians before him, he emigrated from Spain to the colony of New Spain, called by a relative to participate in colonial trade. He arrived well prepared: he was literate; he could keep rudimentary store accounts; and he was blessed with diligence, parsimony, responsibility, and the acquisitive instincts of a western European peasant ready to trade as one of many “little men who helped build the demand side.”¹³² Settling in at Huautla was both a new and an alien experience, but the pattern was by now centuries old. Huautla was no new frontier, no upriver port as described in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, no Lorenzo Hubbell trading post in Navajo territory at Ganado, Arizona.¹³³ Juan Thomas left Navarre because he understood, as did Adam Smith in his “Digression on Silver,” that Mexico (like Peru) in the late eighteenth century offered “more extensive markets . . . than ever . . . before.” Peter Bakewell’s comment that “the bulk of mining profit came not in the hands of miners, but in those of middlemen . . . suppliers of goods and credit” closely fits Mendiburu’s role.¹³⁴

Juan Thomas was a cog in the wheel of international commerce that American silver had been energizing since the mid-sixteenth century. Merchants like him helped commercialize the economy of New Spain by introducing European and Asian imports in exchange for colonial consumers’ medio reales, reales, and pesos; they were key operatives in what has been termed a “contact zone . . . where disparate cultures meet . . . often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”¹³⁵ Theirs was one channel for drawing off silver to forward to Spain and, via Spain, to merchants and manufacturers in northern Europe. From there, Mexican silver went to South and East Asia for the spices and textiles East Indiamen carried back to Europe. Yet New Spain’s silver did not lead to the economic development of Spain or, for that matter, of New Spain.¹³⁶

At the Real de Huautla Juan Thomas repeated trade patterns centuries old in the colony, operations routinized because profitable year-in and year-out. To all appearances, his goal remained “the selling of goods that people had to buy,” no more and no less.¹³⁷ His correspondence lacks speculation about possible new business operations on a frontier of western European capitalism, about the sales potential of New Spain’s growing population of consumers, about seeking out new products conceivably to be marketed elsewhere in the colony. Perhaps his business horizon was shaped more by prospective losses than by putative gains, a cautious attitude shared with Mexico City’s large-scale merchants, the almaceneros. There is an underlying sense of penny capitalism practiced by white immigrants from Cantabrian Spain who were selling to the colony’s consumers of a subaltern phenotype and dreaming of a return to small-town life in the metropole to live on earnings accumulated in the colony. This was the secular pattern repeated by scores of Spanish tenderos in New Spain at the time the first industrial revolution was taking off.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge my debts to many for criticism and bibliography: to Barbara Hadley Stein, to members of Princeton University’s Davis Center Seminar (notably Jeremy Adelman, Kenneth Mills, Jaime Reis, Dilip Simeon, Robert Tignor), to William B. Taylor, Robert Patch, Ross Frank, to two careful anonymous reviewers, and to the HAHR’s copy editor, whose work saved me from errors of substance and style.

Archives consulted in the research for this essay include the Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Paris (AAE), Mémoires et Documents (MD); Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI); Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (AGN), Archivo Histórico de Hacienda (AHH) and Industria y Comercio (IC); Biblioteca de la Real Academia de Historia, Madrid (BRAH); Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City (BN), Reales Ordenes (Rs. Ords.); Biblioteca del Real Palacio, Madrid (BRP); Princeton University Library (PUL), Yturbe e Yraeta Papers (YYP).