{ "id": "gremios-de-artesanos-de-nueva-espana", "type": "entity", "name": "The artisan guilds of New Spain and the opening of the trades to women (1546-1800)", "summary": "Mexico City had fifty craft guilds with their own ordinances, most of them older than the eighteenth century. In 1798 the viceroy overruled the embroiderers' guild in favour of a poor widow who wanted to earn her living at their craft, and in 1800 the crown approved his order and told the guilds to reform any ordinance that shut women out. The same file carries a viceroy's judgement that the guilds had left the trades of America in the deepest backwardness.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "new-spain", "mexico", "labour", "women", "institutions", "economics", "eighteenth-century", "spanish-empire" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "academia-de-san-carlos-de-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-tribunal-general-de-mineria" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "ordenanzas-municipales-de-cortes-1525" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-hospicio-de-pobres-de-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "ferrocarril-de-la-habana-a-guines" } ], "questions": [ "Could women work in the guild crafts of colonial Mexico?", "How many artisan guilds were there in Mexico City?", "What did the real cédula of 16 February 1800 order about guilds?", "What did viceroy Revillagigedo think of the guilds of New Spain?", "Who trained artisans in eighteenth-century Mexico?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "On 3 August 1798 the viceroy of Mexico issued an order granting the petition of a poor widow to support herself by embroidering shoe uppers, and undertook to do the same for any woman in her case, against the opposition of the inspectors of the embroiderers' guild, who invoked the third and ninth articles of their ordinances reserving the craft to examined masters. He reported the decision to the government in Madrid. The compilation that prints the case does not name him.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "His reasoning is quoted: in Mexico, far from women being forbidden their regular and sedentary occupations, they ought to be encouraged not to live in idleness, and rules that reserved to a small number of men congregated in guilds work that did not call for robust arms had by then become \"ridículas y absurdas\". The argument is productive rather than emancipatory in its terms — the widow's subsistence and the country's industry, not her right — and the object states it as the source states it.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The crown backed him. His edict was approved by royal decree of 16 February 1800, with the direction that guild ordinances opposed to the promotion of industry and the arts should be reformed, particularly in branches in which women could be employed, and above all those that lacked royal approval — which, by law 25, title 4, book 1 of the laws of the Indies, no corporation's ordinances could be executed without. Files were to be opened on each guild's ordinances, hearing its inspectors, the civil fiscal and the consultative vote of the real acuerdo.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The guild ordinances the widow ran into are described as made by the city on 20 September 1546 and approved by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza \"en 17 de junio de 1747\" — a date that cannot be right, since Mendoza left the government of New Spain in 1550, and which is printed here as it stands rather than silently corrected to 1547. The compiler's own text is the only evidence available for the dating, and this claim is carried low for that reason.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The reform had been prepared by the previous administration. The compilation quotes numbers 316 to 345 of the memoria of the viceroy count of Revillagigedo, who governed from 1789 to 1794: fifty guilds were then to be found in the capital with their distinct ordinances, very few made in that century, many in the one before and most in the one before that; being so old they were full of defects and of provisions \"más propias para atrasar, que para adelantar las artes\", tending in great part to stagnate industry and to burden the artisans with useless dues and formalities.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "On the bakers' guild the same viceroy argued for free entry over price control, in 1794 and in print: \"Sería muy conveniente el que no hubiese tales gremios, y que quedase libre absolutamente esta clase de industria\", so that any individual of middling capital could take it up and the abundance of competitors would cheapen supplies in the public's favour — which would be got better that way than by the many diligences and orders of government, \"fáciles de eludir como lo tiene acreditado la esperiencia\". He proposed to extinguish outright the guilds he judged no longer necessary, such as the confectioners and the chandlers, and to reform the rest.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The counterpoint is in the same memoria and in the same voice. At number 337 the crown's own senior officer in America writes that \"los oficios y artes se hallan en el mayor atraso por falta de una educación propia de los artesanos\", and at number 340 that the decadence successively noticed in Spain was equally transcendental to America and had been making progress there for two and a half centuries. The failure of the craft economy is stated by the administration itself, not by its critics.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "What the guilds no longer did, an academy was made to do. The memoria credits the royal academy of the noble arts of San Carlos with many advantages in this respect: the silversmiths sent their apprentices there by their own constitution, a practice the viceroy wished extended to other trades that would profit from the principles of drawing; the director of engraving was granted 300 pesos to teach pupils to print, an exercise then \"en el mayor atraso\"; and a professor of mathematics had been established to teach the sciences needed to know architecture thoroughly. Architects, sculptors, painters and surveyors were made subject to the academy, having before been subject to the city or to the alderman judge of guilds.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The academy's endowment is itemised in the same passage and shows who in the colony paid for artisan training: 13,000 pesos of royal assignment, 1,000 from the city of Mexico, 5,000 from the mining tribunal, 200 from Veracruz, 200 from Guanajuato, 100 from Querétaro, 50 from Orizaba and 4,000 of interest on a principal of 80,000 — 26,580 pesos in all, against 25,043 pesos 6 reales of salaries, pensions and prizes. The remainder, the viceroy observes, would not stretch to maintaining in Spain the six pensioners who ought to be sent there to perfect themselves in the three noble arts, which \"no ha podido verificarse\".", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Everything above is read in a compiler's alphabetical digest of ultramarine legislation printed in Madrid in 1845, which quotes the royal orders and the viceroy's memoria at length but is not either manuscript, and whose author served the same colonial administration whose measures he is arranging. The object is tiered secondary on that ground, and the passages are reported as quotations in that volume rather than as text collated against the originals.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "The guilds of colonial Spanish America are usually met either as a footnote on caste exclusion or as a line about Bourbon deregulation, and the 1800 decree that told them to stop shutting women out of the trades is almost never quoted at all. This object gives the case that produced it — a poor widow who wanted to embroider shoe uppers, the inspectors who cited articles three and nine of ordinances from 1546, the viceroy who called those articles ridiculous, the decree of 16 February 1800 that generalised his answer — and sets beside it, from the same printed file, Revillagigedo's count of fifty guilds, his judgement that they stagnated industry, his argument for free entry against price-fixing, his admission that the trades of America were in the deepest backwardness, and the peso-by-peso endowment of the academy that took over the training the guilds had stopped giving.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-14", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/gremios-de-artesanos-de-nueva-espana", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/gremios-de-artesanos-de-nueva-espana.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The artisan guilds of New Spain and the opening of the trades to women (1546-1800)", "description": "Mexico City had fifty craft guilds with their own ordinances, most of them older than the eighteenth century. In 1798 the viceroy overruled the embroiderers' guild in favour of a poor widow who wanted to earn her living at their craft, and in 1800 the crown approved his order and told the guilds to reform any ordinance that shut women out. The same file carries a viceroy's judgement that the guilds had left the trades of America in the deepest backwardness.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/gremios-de-artesanos-de-nueva-espana", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-14", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Biblioteca de legislación ultramarina en forma de diccionario alfabético, the volume covering D-I", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=m-LJ2bewEjwC&pg=PA237" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The artisan guilds of New Spain and the opening of the trades to women (1546-1800)" } }