Alhóndiga y Pósito of Mexico City: a public grain exchange with a posted price, 1583
In 1583 the crown confirmed ordinances forcing every load of wheat, flour and barley entering Mexico City into one public hall, where the first price of the day stood all day, carriers had to produce a magistrate's certificate of what they had paid, and grain unsold in twenty days was sold by order. A levy on the same grain funded a granary that bought maize in scarcity and resold it below market. The granary was gone by 1830 and its levy paid for street lamps.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of food in colonial Spanish America reach for famine and the maize riot of 1692 and leave the standing machinery unexamined; the Alhóndiga usually appears as the building the insurgents stormed at Guanajuato in 1810. This object quotes the machinery instead, from the law that founded it and from the city's own accounts: the posted-price rule that binds buyer and seller alike, the purchase certificate a muleteer had to carry, the twenty-day limit on holding grain, the porters' fee capped in cacao beans, the court sitting from eight to eleven, and the levy that bought maize in scarcity to resell below market. It also carries the cost in the same voice — a tax on food collected at the gates, a monopoly of place, a farmed-out renta, and a famine fund that ended in 1813 and was reborn in 1819 as a lighting budget.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The foundation is dated and its motive is stated in the law itself. Libro IIII, título XIIII of the Recopilación, "De las Alhóndigas", opens with ley j, margin "D. Felipe II en Madrid á 31 de Marzo de 1583. Ordenanza de Alhóndiga de México": the cabildo of Mexico City had found that "se iban encareciendo con exceso los bastimentos de trigo, harina y cebada, á causa de los muchos regatones y revendedores que trataban y contrataban en ellas", and considering that "en muchas Repúblicas bien gobernadas se han fundado casas de Alhóndigas, para estar mejor proveidas y abastecidas", founded one with the agreement of viceroy Martín Enríquez, so that farmers could sell their grain there and bakers provide themselves "á los precios mas acomodados". The ordinances were presented to the Conde de Coruña, who approved them pending royal confirmation.
The price rule was a posted price, not a fixed one. Ley ij orders the city to name each year a Fiel who gives bond of four thousand pesos, lives in the Alhóndiga "de ordinario, sin hacer ninguna falta", and keeps account of every load entering; and it provides that "al precio primero, que valiere aquel dia, y se le pusiere por los vendedores, se ha de vender todo el dia, y no subir de él", on pain of losing the grain for the seller and ten pesos for a buyer who pays above it. The mechanism sets a ceiling that the sellers themselves set each morning, and it binds the buyer as well as the seller.
Three further laws of the same title are a transparency regime aimed at middlemen. Ley viij requires carters and muleteers carrying wheat, flour or barley to Mexico to go straight to the Alhóndiga on arrival, unload there, and bring a certificate from the magistrate of the place where they bought stating from whom and at what price, on pain of being held a regatón; the certificate costs one real and no more. Ley viiij requires everyone else to declare on oath before the deputy councillors whether the grain is their own harvest or bought. Ley x forbids holding grain in the yard and porticoes of the Alhóndiga longer than twenty days, after which the Justicia and deputies order it sold at once at the ruling price.
The hall was also a court with published hours. By ley xiiij two Regidores Diputados named by the city, serving a month at a time and never leaving before their successors are named, must be present in the Alhóndiga every day from eight until eleven and from two in the afternoon "hasta que en la Alhóndiga no haya que hacer", hearing every cause arising there and punishing breaches of the ordinances, with appeal to the city cabildo. Ley xij caps what the porters may charge: no more than a quartillo de plata, "ó veinte y cinco cacaos", for a sack holding a fanega and a half — a wage ceiling quoted in cacao beans as well as silver. Ley xj forbids anyone to enter the Alhóndiga carrying arms.
The granary attached to the market had an explicit anti-famine purpose and a dedicated tax. The city's own economic report of 1830 quotes ley 17, título 14, libro 4 of the Recopilación — of all wheat and barley entering the Alhóndiga the owner pays three cuartillas per fanega, and as much per quintal of flour, "que ha de ser para gastos de la Alhóndiga y Pósito de la ciudad" — and states the point of the charge in one line: "esto es á fin de comprar maiz en tiempo de escaseces y venderlo al pueblo bajo del precio mas equitativo". The commission puts the barley entering the city at about fifteen thousand cargas in the old accounts and the whole yield of the renta at some 12,500 pesos.
The money was kept under a three-key rule and the accounting was deliberately split. The 1830 report describes the product, after costs, as remaining "en la arca del pósito de tres llaves, de las que una conservaba el corregidor, otra el diputado del pósito y otra el tesorero"; and, for the separate half-real charged on each carga of maize sold in the hall, that the alcaide gave receipts to the farmers and encomenderos, entered them in a book titled "Entrada y venta de particulares", had them certified monthly by the escribano, and paid the money into the Alhóndiga's own chest on the first of each month, with Gálvez's article 37 expressly ordering that its product not be mixed with that of the three cuartillas. The commission's own regulation of the traffic is 98,178 cargas of maize a year, producing 6,136 pesos 1 real.
An independent printed statement of the city's finances gives the granary's size against the whole municipal purse. The documentary section of the printed Informe del Marqués de Sonora sets out, for the city of Mexico, "POSITO. Su Dote consiste en las tres quartillas que paga de entrada toda carga de trigo, Harina y Cebada, cuyo producto asciende á doce mil y quinientos pesos", and a union of funds — propios, pósito 12,500, sisa 50,000, obras públicas 7,450 — totalling 108,669 pesos of public revenue. The pósito was thus about one peso in nine of everything the capital raised, and less than a quarter of the drink excise. The salary list on the following page pays "á los dos Diputados del Posito y Alhondiga, á razon de ciento y cincuenta pesos cada uno" and the collector of the three cuartillas 750 pesos.
The law also protected the granary against its own government, which implies the raid it was guarding against. Título XIII of the same book carries ley xj, Felipe III, Madrid 6 May 1614: from the pósitos of the cities and towns no provisions may be taken in any quantity by royal officials "ni otros ningunos Ministros, si no se ofreciere tan urgente necesidad que sea forzoso valerse de ellos", and in such cases the value is to be paid at once and the same quantity restored, "para que estén siempre enteros, y sean socorridas las necesidades, que se ofrecieren".
Contemporaries treated a grain hall as basic infrastructure, and said so where it was missing. The first conde de Revillagigedo, erecting the mining camp of Bolaños into a jurisdiction of its own, records that its people suffered "grandes vejaciones en la carestía de los víveres, por no haber habido hasta ahora peso, medida, regla ni tasa en su venta, ni cuidado en la provision, por falta de alhóndiga y carnicería", and lists among the powers he grants "abastos, pósito y alhóndiga" alongside public works and the naming of judges. The absence of the institution is named as a cause of dearth in a document about mining, not about food.
The cost of the system belongs on the same page as its purpose. The grain charge was a tax on food, collected at the city gates: the 1830 report records the garita guards paid three hundred pesos a year to check that carriers delivered their loads to the Alhóndiga, and forfeiture of the goods for anyone selling maize elsewhere. The obligation to funnel all grain through one hall was a monopoly of place that suited the capital and bound the countryside; the twenty-day rule forced sales at whatever the ruling price was; and the same volumes show the revenue being farmed out — "antes se arrendaba esta renta y jamás pasó de ocho mil pesos su producto anual" — before Gálvez moved the collection into the city treasury and ended the six per cent the private collector had been taking.
The granary did not survive the wars of independence, and its anti-famine fund was repurposed rather than abolished. The 1830 commission records flatly "Quitado el pósito, se dejó de pagar la pension y aun así estaba mandado en bando de 7 de enero de 813", and that the conde del Venadito's bando of 14 May 1819 restored the levy on each carga "sin mas variacion que la de destinarse al alumbrado á que se habia de aplicar desde aquel dia". Writing in 1830 the commission still calls the successor charge the thing "que ha ocupado el lugar del referido Pósito". The tax that had bought maize for the poor in bad years was paying for street lamps.
What this evidence carries should be stated plainly. The Recopilación establishes what was ordered in 1583 and codified in 1680, not what was performed; the 1830 report is a municipal commission arguing for the reform of the city's revenues and is a partisan document about its own subject, and it says so of itself where it cannot vouch for the practice — of the three cuartillas it writes that it supposes the collection was made in the manner the law designates, "mas no tiene certeza de que asi se hubiera verificado". Together they establish the rules, the dates, the money and the end of the pósito. They do not establish grain prices in the city, how often the granary actually intervened, or whether the twenty-day rule was enforced.