The cleaning and paving programme of Mexico City (1769-1782)
A bando of 1769 required every house in Mexico City to build a covered refuse pit and a masonry cesspit vented to the roof, banned tipping into the streets and acequias, and set convict carts to empty the pits; a later plan flagged the pavements and covered the house drains, charged to the owners. Four convents sued to be excused. A royal cedula of 1782 refused them, on the ground that paving keeps epidemics out of crowded places.
Why this wins its question: Urban sanitation in the Spanish Americas is usually dated to the nineteenth century or introduced through the well-known Revillagigedo works of the 1790s, and the earlier programme is cited, when at all, as a line in a bibliography. The text is here from a 1787 Mexico printing opened page by page: an 1769 order that every house build a covered refuse bin and a masonry cesspit with a stone lid and a vent shaft to the roof, that wells not foul the aqueduct channels, that cesspits not be flushed to the street, and that frontages be swept and watered by eight in the morning, with the pits emptied by convict carts; a paving standard with flagged footways, covered house drains and lead gratings, charged to the owners; and, from the royal cedula of 1782, the four convents that went to law to be excused, the four thousand pesos advanced from the treasury against defaulters, and the fiscal's reasoning that paving is a defence against epidemics. The punishment article, fifty lashes for a plebeian and a month in gaol for a Spaniard, is quoted here with the same weight as the standard.
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 programme is read here from two documents printed verbatim 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 bando of the viceroy Marques de Croix for the general cleaning of the city, dated Mexico, 26 October 1769, and the royal cedula of Madrid, 24 March 1782, approving the plan of paving and flagging, published in New Spain by the viceroy Matias de Galvez.
The stated reason is a theory of disease that the eighteenth century believed and the twentieth did not. The preamble holds that tolerating the tipping of every kind of refuse into the streets, plazas and acequias clothes the air in "vapores salinos corrompidos que indisponen y alteran la masa de la sangre, y son causa de que pierdan los cuerpos el equilibrio de los humores en que consiste la buena salud", with the fear of "pestes u otras enfermedades" named as the thing to be avoided. The mechanism is wrong; the measures that follow - covered refuse storage, sealed cesspits, drains kept clear of the drinking-water channels - are the ones a later theory would also require.
The bando was issued after consultation rather than by fiat. The viceroy states that he resolved on it "habiendo antes oido a la Junta de Policia formada de Caballeros Capitulares de su muy Ilustre Ayuntamiento, y a los dos Senores Fiscales de S. M. en esta Real Audiencia", and reserves further measures on the street lighting, which he admits had been ordered repeatedly and not obeyed.
Article 2 obliges every house owner, within two months and under a fifty-peso penalty, to build in a corner of his patio or entrance hall a stone or lime bin, open at the top and paved at the bottom, large enough to take the dry refuse then thrown into the streets, with a door and latch so that it can be emptied easily, and to place it near the street so that emptying is quick. Article 3 gives the tenants of accessory dwellings the hour from seven to eight in the morning to use the main house's bin, after which they must keep their refuse until the next day.
The collection service behind that rule was run on convict labour. The bins were to be emptied frequently "por los Galeotes del Presidio de San Carlos y Carros destinados a este fin" - a municipal refuse round in 1769, worked by men serving sentences, whose labour is the reason the householder's duty stops at the bin.
Article 4 is a building standard for cesspits. Within four months and under a hundred-peso penalty, every house owner was to make a latrine, cubo or well lined with masonry to the floor, with branch channels so that the tenants of the accessories could discharge into it; in tenement houses a room was to be set aside for it and kept locked; and its mouth was to have a movable stone lid closely fitted, with a shaft rising from the neck to the azotea so that the effluvia would be carried to the upper air and dispersed. Where a house already had a well, its siting was to be inspected by the alarife or fontanero so as not to foul "los canales que conducen de los aqueductos principales las aguas limpias para beber".
Article 5 forbids, under a fifty-peso penalty, the practice of emptying latrines and wells by letting water into them and flushing the contents to the street; once the new pits exist, no water is to leave the houses except rainwater, and the cleaning is to be done by the trade that mixes the contents with manure and carts them out to the country.
The enforcement was graded by rank and colour, and the text says so in the same sentence as the rule. Article 6 forbids all persons "sin distincion alguna" to throw refuse into the streets, plazas or acequias, then fixes the penalty at ten pesos for contraventors who can pay it and cleaning at their own cost; for those without goods, a month in gaol if they are Spaniards; and for plebeians fifty lashes given publicly at the pillory, three days' exposure there and a month in the Presidio de San Carlos on ration alone, with twenty-five lashes and three days' exposure for plebeian women. The sanitary order and the caste order are carried by one article.
Article 7 makes street cleaning a household duty on a clock. Every neighbour, under a two-peso penalty, was to have his frontage swept and watered by eight in the morning, corner shops sweeping to the middle of the street, the sweepings going into the house bin and the water drawn from the house well.
The paving specification is engineering, not exhortation. The pavements were to be flagged a vara and a half wide from the foot of each house wall towards the drain, in the stone called recinto set in mortar, the matriculated pavers laying the rest of the footway to the main drain running down the middle of the street; the house drains were to pass under those flags and be covered to their outfall with strips of the same stone, made concave underneath to enlarge the channel; a lead grating was to be set in the mouth of each drain to keep it from silting, so that only clean water reached the main channel; and surveyors were to level the streets beforehand to fix the fall for rainwater. Article 21 closes the loophole by forbidding holes to be dug in the paving for Holy Week stands or for the palo volador without licence from the Junta de Policia and an undertaking to make good.
The work was paid for by the owners of the houses it fronted. The commissioners were to value the cost of each vara of flagging and paving, submit the valuation for approval, bring the materials to the streets, and exact from the owners - "y en su defecto de los Inquilinos a cuenta de los arrendamientos" - the amount corresponding to their frontage, against a simple receipt, with an account kept of materials, costs and wages.
The levy was resisted in court by the institutions best able to pay. The royal cedula of 1782 recites that the convents of Jesus Maria, San Lorenzo, San Joseph de Gracia and Santa Teresa la Antigua brought suits to suspend the paving of their frontages "baxo de pretextos y suposiciones poco justificadas y desatendibles", nearly all of them pleading want of funds and the harm of laying out capital; and that the Junta de Policia had had to set four thousand pesos aside from the treasury to buy materials for the houses whose owners would not act, the sum to be recovered from them afterwards.
The fiscal of the Audiencia answered them with a public-health argument and a constitutional one. The utility of the work, he held, "no limita a el piso suave y comodo, ni a evitar los pantanos que se hacian en tiempo de lluvias: ni tampoco se sujeta a el adorno y hermosura ... pero si se estendia a preservar contagios de pestes y epidemias a que son propensos los lugares populosos, y a proporcionar mas duracion a las Fincas"; and no member of the republic could exempt himself from contributing to so great a good, the more so as the convents owned houses in most streets, so that exempting them would break the continuity of the work. On the second point he laid down that bandos bind executively and that their publication does not require the prior consent or separate hearing of the several corporate bodies making up the public, though those bodies remain free to petition in due time for revocation or amendment.
The crown refused the exemption, and the same document records both that the burden was softened and that the work was largely done. The cedula of Madrid, 24 March 1782, approved the plan "desatendiendo la pretension de los Conventos de Religiosas y demas Individuos que intentaban eximirse"; the fiscal proposed for the nuns alone that they be allowed to pave gradually so as not to charge their rents; and the recital lists as already paved the frontages of the archbishop, the royal mint and custom house, the Colegio Seminario, the Marquesado del Valle, the convents of San Francisco and Santo Domingo, entailed estates, titles of Castile, some ministers and many merchants.
The scheme's own cost estimate had fallen. The fiscal reported that what was then being executed differed little from what had always existed and was therefore less costly, that the vara-and-a-half flagged pavement was where expense lay, and that a quarter of what had been projected and begun under the Marques de Croix would cover it fully; he added that owners were only advancing the money, the tenants reimbursing them, "como se habia practicado en Madrid con los Pozos que se hicieron para su limpieza".
The limits of this evidence are worth stating. These are two normative documents and a royal recital of an administrative dispute: they show what was ordered in 1769, what was still being litigated in the later 1770s, and what the crown decided in 1782, together with the crown's own list of frontages reported paved. They are not a measurement of how many refuse pits or cesspits were actually built, how often the convict carts came, how many people were flogged under article 6, or what happened to mortality in the city afterwards.