{ "id": "division-de-mexico-en-quarteles-1782", "type": "entity", "name": "The division of Mexico City into quarteles and the alcaldes de barrio (1782)", "summary": "In December 1782 Mexico City was cut into 8 major and 32 minor quarters, each minor one given an unpaid resident magistrate who had to keep a street book, take a house-by-house register of every inhabitant \"sin reserva de sexo ni edad\", procure a physician, midwife and apothecary for his quarter and a school for its boys and girls, and keep the paving, sweeping and lighting up. The same ordinance ordered Indians out of the centre.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "colonial-institutions", "new-spain", "mexico", "urban-history", "public-health", "statistics", "spanish-empire", "americas", "eighteenth-century" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "real-hospicio-de-pobres-de-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "juzgado-general-de-naturales" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "enumeracion-de-revillagigedo-1790-1794" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-ordenanza-de-intendentes-1786" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "republica-de-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "limpieza-y-empedrado-de-la-ciudad-de-mexico" } ], "questions": [ "What were the quarteles and alcaldes de barrio of Mexico City?", "Who counted the inhabitants of colonial Mexico City, and how?", "Did colonial Spanish cities have neighbourhood government?", "What did an alcalde de barrio in New Spain actually do?", "Was the 1782 reform of Mexico City good for its indigenous inhabitants?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The reform is read here from the text of the ordinance itself, printed verbatim as copy number 9 in the second tome of Eusebio Bentura Belena's compilation of the acts of the Audiencia and Sala del Crimen of New Spain (Mexico, Felipe de Zuniga y Ontiveros, 1787): the viceroy's narrative, the oidor's Descripcion of the boundaries, the Reglamento for the alcaldes, and the bando published to the city.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "Four earlier attempts had failed, and the document says so before it says anything else. The Duque de Linares divided the city into nine quarters \"en el ano de trece de este siglo\" and the division lapsed when a visita changed the state of affairs; the Real Sala proposed six in 1720 and, though approved, \"si se reduxo a practica no subsistio\"; a Real Cedula of San Ildefonso, 15 September 1744, answered the Audiencia's report of \"los muchos ladrones y facinerosos\" in the city; a division into seven quarters with comisarios and quadrilleros followed in 1750 and \"tampoco subsistio\"; and a royal order of El Pardo, 18 March 1778, signed by Jose de Galvez, was left without effect by the death of the viceroy Bucareli.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The surveying was done on foot. The oidor Baltasar Ladron de Guevara, commissioned by decree of 22 January 1780, states that he walked the city and its arrabales repeatedly \"por el centro y su circunferencia\", with \"los Mapas que halle mas exactos\" before him, before dividing a terrain he describes as intricate alleys, ruined buildings between acequias and ditches, and huts of adobe or cane \"sembrados sin orden en dilatados terrenos\". His Descripcion is dated Mexico, 6 November 1782.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The result was a two-tier grid: \"Queda pues esta Ciudad de Mexico y sus Barrios dividida en ocho Quarteles principales o mayores compuestos de treinta y dos menores\". The eight major quarters were distributed among the five ministers of the Real Sala del Crimen, the corregidor and the two alcaldes ordinarios; each of the thirty-two minor quarters got an alcalde of its own. Where a boundary fell in open ground with no bridge or street to mark it, a numbered stone pillar was to be set up so that neighbouring alcaldes would not dispute their limits.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The office was compulsory, unpaid and residential. The Reglamento makes the post a carga concejil that the man chosen may not refuse under a hundred-peso penalty and banishment from the city if he persists; \"La Casa de su habitacion sera precisamente en su Quartel\"; the term is two years, renewable once at the holder's option. The compensation is honour rather than salary - a certificate of service from the judge of the quarter, preference in later claims, a blue coat and breeches with a scarlet cuff and a silver frog, a baton as insignia of the Real Justicia, and fuero pasivo in his own suits.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "Article XVII turned each quarter into a written record of itself. Every new alcalde had to open a folio book listing all the streets of his quarter separately, following the map and its description, leaving blank space under each; renew the house numbers that had been effaced from the doors and the missing name-plates at the corners; and mark the houses with workshops, the accessories used for trade, and those serving as inns, lodgings or eating-houses. The books passed to his successors.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "Article XVIII is a household census with no exclusions. The alcaldes were to make \"un Padron exacto de la familia o familias que vivan en cada casa de Eclesiasticos o Seculares de qualquiera esfera que sean, sin reserva de sexo ni edad\", naming the women, children and servants, their state and calidad and the occupation of the head and his dependants; heads of families were bound to give a faithful account, deaths were to be entered in the book, and innkeepers had to send in every morning a list of their guests with names, companions, where they came from, where they were going and when they left.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "Article XXII defines the alcalde as \"Padres politicos de la porcion de Pueblo que se les encomienda\" and gives that phrase a concrete content: each was to procure that his quarter have a physician, a surgeon, a barber, a midwife and an apothecary's shop, the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato concurring; and to be told of any sick person too poor to be cured at home, so that he could be carried to hospital with what comfort was possible, \"por ser tal la infundada preocupacion de la plebe, de que van a morirse a los Hospitales, que eligen quedar sepultados en su miseria\".", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "Article XXIII puts schooling for both sexes on the alcalde's list of duties. He was to solicit that there be an Escuela and an Amiga in his quarter \"para la ensenanza de Ninos y Ninas, con Maestros virtuosos y aptos\", inform himself of the pupils' progress, and where parents \"como sucede regularmente en la plebe\" were too indolent to send them, admonish them twice and then report them to his judge - the same procedure applying to parents who did not put children to a trade at a fit age. The ordinance obliges the magistrate to procure schools; it does not fund them, and it is silent on who was to pay the masters.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Article XXIV extends the same duty to orphans, poor maidens and widows, to be commended to the charitable of the quarter, boys of age placed in a trade, and sewing and spinning found for women who could not otherwise subsist - with the qualification that this be done \"sin obligar para esto a ningun vecino\". Article XXV adds the promotion of trades and of spinning and weaving by women, materials and an outlet for their yarn and cloth to be facilitated.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The street-level public services were the alcalde's too. Article XXVIII required him to see that the flagging and paving of his streets were in repair and to notify the regidor when they were not; to make each neighbour sweep and water his own frontage in the mornings; to stop refuse and excrement being thrown into the middle of the street or choking the drains; and to enforce the bandos of the Superior Gobierno or Junta de Policia on those matters and on the street lighting at night. Article XXIX kept him out of the pricing of bread and provisions, which belonged to the regidores and fieles executores.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The cost is in the same text and is not incidental to it. Article XIX orders that Indians living in the centre and casco of the city leave it and settle in the towns and barrios of the two parcialidades of San Juan and Santiago; they might still come in to work or sell their produce from five in the morning until the evening prayer, and masters examined in a trade who kept a public shop, with their apprentices under fifteen, were exempt. The bando of 7 December 1782 gave four months for the removal. The measure is a residential expulsion by calidad, ordered in the same instrument that created the neighbourhood magistracy.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "The same article is also the ordinance's own qualification of that measure. It requires that Indians as well as others be entered in the padron and be under the care of the alcaldes de quartel; forbids the alcaldes to encroach on the offices and powers of the indigenous governors and officers of the two parcialidades or to meddle in their elections; and orders them to prevent \"los perjuicios que suelen causarse a los Indios\", reporting whatever matters to their benefit to the minister who was asesor of the Juzgado de Naturales.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "Other costs are stated by the ordinance in its own voice. Article XIII has the alcalde privately admonish the head of a family where he has well-founded notice of disorder within the house; article XX fines a family ten pesos, or six days in gaol, for moving house without telling its alcalde; article XXI makes a dismissed servant carry a paper from his master before another may hire him; and article XXVII sends the able-bodied poor who will not take a trade \"a servir a su Magestad en los Presidios\". The bando answers the objection directly, asking that \"el injusto y vano recelo, de que pueden causar estos Alcaldes inquietudes en las familias\" be laid aside.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c15", "text": "There was a route of complaint against the new magistrate. The bando declares that a neighbour who thinks himself wronged or neglected by the alcalde of his quarter, in a matter of justice or of economic government, may go to the superior judge of that quarter verbally or as suits him, \"pues se les oira benignamente\", with appeals left open to the Real Audiencia or the Sala del Crimen in the cases the law allows. Minor alcaldes were also barred from acting on anything grave without the order of their superior judge.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c16", "text": "The ordinance took effect on 1 January 1783, by bando dated \"Mexico y Diciembre siete de mil setecientos ochenta y dos anos\" and signed by Martin de Mayorga, publication having been ordered by decree of 21 November 1782. The jurisdictions of the Alcalde Provincial and Juez de la Acordada and of the revenue tribunals were expressly preserved alongside the new one.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c17", "text": "What this evidence cannot show should be said plainly. It is the text of a regulation and of the decree publishing it: strong evidence of what the crown's officers in Mexico designed and ordered in 1782, and of the abuses and failures they admitted while doing it. It is not evidence that the padrones were taken, that the schools appeared, that the midwives were found, that the removal of the Indians was carried out, or that any alcalde was ever called to account by a neighbour. The design is documented here; the execution is not.", "sources": [ "ordenanza-quarteles-mexico-1782" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of eighteenth-century Mexico City mention the quarteles in passing as a policing measure, and the standard reference works give the numbers without the text. Here the ordinance is read article by article from a 1787 Mexico printing opened page by page, so the thing itself is visible: a two-tier grid of 8 and 32 quarters, an unpaid resident magistrate for each of the small ones, a folio street book with renewed house numbers, a household register naming women, children and servants without exception of sex or age, a duty to find a physician, a midwife and an apothecary for the quarter and a school for its boys and girls, and the paving, sweeping and lighting of the streets. It also carries, from the same pages and with equal weight, the order expelling Indians from the centre to the parcialidades within four months, the presidio for the able-bodied poor, and the four earlier attempts the viceroy admits had failed.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-19", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/division-de-mexico-en-quarteles-1782", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/division-de-mexico-en-quarteles-1782.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The division of Mexico City into quarteles and the alcaldes de barrio (1782)", "description": "In December 1782 Mexico City was cut into 8 major and 32 minor quarters, each minor one given an unpaid resident magistrate who had to keep a street book, take a house-by-house register of every inhabitant \"sin reserva de sexo ni edad\", procure a physician, midwife and apothecary for his quarter and a school for its boys and girls, and keep the paving, sweeping and lighting up. The same ordinance ordered Indians out of the centre.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/division-de-mexico-en-quarteles-1782", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-19", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Ordenanza de la division de la Nobilisima Ciudad de Mexico en Quarteles, con la Descripcion de sus limites, el Reglamento para los Alcaldes de Quartel o de Barrio, y el Bando de 7 de diciembre de 1782 (copia numero 9)", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=0itnL4OvtDsC&pg=PA26" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The division of Mexico City into quarteles and the alcaldes de barrio (1782)" } }