Tianguis (Mexico)
| Tianguis 🇲🇽 | ||
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| Location: Mexico | ||
| Definition: Informal street markets in Mexico | ||
| Keywords: Mexico – Informal economy – Informal employment – Trade – Second hand – Flea market – Entrepreneurship – Fee avoidance | ||
| Clusters: Informal entrepreneurship | ||
| Author: Horacio Espinosa | ||
| Affiliation: Observatorio de Antropología del Conflicto Urbano (OACU), Universidad de Barcelona | ||
By Horacio Espinosa, Observatorio de Antropología del Conflicto Urbano (OACU), Universidad de Barcelona
| Tianguis are informal street markets present in most Mexican towns and cities. It can be as small as a few number of stalls or extend for kilometers as Tepito in Mexico City or El Baratillo in Guadalajara. While street markets exists around the globe tianguis has a specific historical value in Mexico. The word is a hispanisation of the Nahuatl 'tianquiztli' and in its original Aztec form is described in early chronicles of the Spaniards in Tenochtitlan, such as that of López de Gómara (originally from 1552). The practices that occurred in the Aztec tianquiztli could hardly be described as "consumption" practices. The verb tianquiztlayualoa (exchange of goods in the tianquiztli) for example, has some ontological, religious and celebratory implications that does not correspond to what we understand as trade practices (Robles 2004: 68). |
During colonial times, while indigenous people continued to shop in the now renowned tianguis, in novo-Hispanic Guadalajara, now Mexico's second most populated city, criollos (Spaniards born in American lands) shopped in the formal municipal markets or brought goods from Europe (González Casillas 2010: 51-61). In the southeastern regions of the country, it is documented that the Spanish received a large quantity of foodstuffs from the peninsula, such as wines, vinegars, figs, sultanas, olives, and oil (Gage 1980: 109). However, it is almost certain that the tianguis was reserved for indigenous and mestizos of the Colony as their only space for consumption, de facto creating "two spaces of social encounter" (Flores 2005: 92).
The boom of contemporary tianguis is associated with the precarious Mexican labour market, result of neoliberal policies introduced in the 1980s. The Mexican economy is the 15th in the world, but half of all Mexicans live in poverty (CONEVAL 2021). Mexico's entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was expected to create jobs, but economic openness and state deregulation only increased precarisation, leading to informality. As of 2021, 58 per cent of jobs in the country are in the informal sector (CONEVAL 2021).
Municipal markets ceased to be built, progressively replaced by malls and supermarket chains. Since the 1990s, increasing poverty led to an explosion of tianguis. Although difficult to quantify, in the city of Guadalajara for example, they grew from a few in the 1970s, to 111 in the 1980s, up to 349 at the end of the 1990s (Contreras 1999). There are different kinds of sellers in tianguis. There are many mobile sellers, like fruit sellers who go, with their trucks, from tianguis to tianguis. Others have wheeled or human-powered carts, from which they sell sweets, peanuts, homemade fruit juices, tejuinos (fresh drink made of corn, ice, lemon, salt and ice cream), soft drinks, aguas frescas (fruit juices mixed with water and sugar), or ice cream. Others offer nail clippers, scourers (sponges for washing dishes or showering), sewing kits, scissors or other goods. All these vendors are mobile: if they do not sell in one place, they move to another (Espinosa 2021).
Some vendors are referred as tilichentos (“storerooms”) or manteros. They offer all kinds of merchandise, objects brought from their homes or found in the streets and displayed on a simple blanket. They usually put their blankets in the periphery of tianguis in zones known as los tiraderos (“the dumps”). Lastly, there are also vagabonds and beggars. Despite the important differences between them, stall-less vendors have in common that they either do not pay a fee or they pay only a little mordida to tianguis delegates. In a euphemistic way they call this a “pay for the sweep” as tiangueros have to sweep the streets after tianguis is “closed”. While putting up a stall implies a certain investment in addition to the bureaucratic issue of getting a permit, informal arrangements such as setting a blanket in exchange for mordida allows lower classes to enter the market. Tilichentos are both the stigma and pride of the tianguis. Media and authorities speak with admiration of these vendors that sell “all the pieces to build a helicopter” (PROFECO 2010) but they are also stigmatised.
At the top of pyramid of the tianguis ecosystem there are tiangueros who have a metallic solid stall. They are equipped with a vehicle to transport the tubes, boards, ropes, tarps and accessories necessary to maintain their stall. Before engaging with clients, these tiangueros have to install their stall and set the tarpaulin to create shade. Finally, they place products such as clothing, footwear, makeup, vegetables, fish, meat, living animals, or toys on the boards of their stalls. As they often inherit the profession, tiangueros’ strategies and tricks are handed down generation after generation.
In Mexico City, where many tianguis have ceased to be periodic to become permanent features of streets, tianguis have merged with the barrio (neighbourhood) to construct a rumbo (a popular term similar to latin locution ‘locus’) (Barbosa 2006: 02). This is the case of Tepito, a popular barrio-tianguis. Rumbos have emerged as a popular way of dividing the city that does not correspond to the administrative division. “New neighbourhoods” are created from the territorial delimitation created by street vendors and their stalls, working as a liminal space between public/private dichotomy. The emergence of these barrio-tianguis blurs the distinction between work and housing (Barbosa 2006: 08). At Tepito, tianguis has become a neighbourhood and the neighbourhood has become a tianguis.
There is no doubt about the political strength of the tianguero leaders in Mexico City, especially in Tepito. Tianguero leaders do not subordinate to the authorities, but resist, negotiate their legitimate presence in the public space. Performing a complicated balancing act between resistance and co-optation, they use palanca to keep the tianguis afloat. Yet, in becoming local informal leaders, they never set a mafia style criminal organisation resting on corruption, as they are often accused of (Cross 1998: 41-61). While often tolerated by authorities, at times there are special operations targeting tianguis. For instance, during years 2015 and 2016, in Guadalajara, instructed by local authories, the police eradicated the tianguis from a large part of the city centre, through a social cleansing operation of extreme violence (Espinosa 2016, 2017).
References
Barbosa, M. 2006. ‘Rumbos de comercio en las calles: fragmentación espacial en la ciudad de México desde comienzos del siglo XX’, Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, Vol. X, núm. 218 (84)
CONEVAL. 2021. México ¿Cómo vamos?, informe sobre pobreza laboral. https://mexicocomovamos.mx/publicaciones/2021/11/la-pobreza-laboral-en-mexico-va-nuevamente-en-ascenso/
Contreras, C. A. 1999. ‘Los tianguis, reguladores de la economía de la ZMG [Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara]’, Gaceta Universitaria, 4 October
Cross, J. 1998. Informal politics: Street vendors and the State in Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Espinosa, H. 2016. ‘Neo-higienismo y gentrificación en el discurso de la movilidad urbana: Desalojo de tiangueros en Guadalajara, México’, in Aricó Mansilla & Stanchieri (eds.), Barrios corsarios: memoria histórica, luchas urbanas y cambio social en los márgenes de la ciudad neolibral. Barcelona: Virus: 173 -196
Espinosa, H. 2017. ‘Les vertus de la violence. La légitimation d’un projet de rénovation urbaine par le néo-hygiénisme’, Espaces et sociétés, (3), 173-186
Espinosa, H. 2021. ‘Informal appropriations in the face of the state of exception. Ethnographic snapshots of the right to the city’, AIBR - Revista de antropologia iberoamericana, 16(2), 266-297
Flores, M. 2005. ‘Tianguis, Mercados y Tenderetes en Jalisco’, in González, Luis A. (ed.), Las culturas populares de Jalisco. Guadalajara: Secretaria de Cultura/Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco
Gage, T. 1980. Viajes en la Nueva España. La Habana: Casa de las Américas
González, M. 2010. Voces de Guadalajara. Guadalajara: Secretaria de Cultura/ Conexión Gráfica
López de Gómara, F. 2000. Historia de la Conquista de México. Madrid: Dastin
PROFECO. 2010. ‘La historia de los tianguis en México’, Podcast 53, http://www.profeco.gob.mx/Podcast/Programa_podcast/PODCAST53.mp3
Robles, I. 2004. ‘Del tianquiztli a las plazas: Recorrido histórico por los mercados tradicionales de México’, FOCUS, Vol 1 (3). pp. 67 – 74