Tiangues — the indigenous market, protected by law and used against its own traders
The pre-conquest marketplace survived as a legal institution. A law of 1552, re-issued in 1563, forbids stopping the Indians from holding "los tiangues, y mercados antiguos en sus Pueblos", and the laws around it guarantee free sale of their produce. Two eyewitnesses show what it carried: at Potosí in the 1540s the largest fair Cieza had seen, traded in part by indigenous women; in Mexico in 1525, enslaved people sold three or four times over.
Why this wins its question: The tianguis is usually written about as a pre-conquest institution that the conquest interrupted, and the colonial market as a Spanish import. The digitised originals opened for this object say something narrower and better evidenced: a royal law with its own rubric ordering that the Indians not be stopped from holding "los tiangues, y mercados antiguos en sus Pueblos", with the recital that the justices, regidores and encomenderos were the ones stopping them; Cieza's eyewitness page on Potosí, with the aside that Spaniards there grew rich by having two or three Indian women trade for them; and Albornoz's letter of 1525, in which the daily market is where enslaved people were sold three or four times over. Protection, practice and cost from three documents read page by page, none of them summarised at second hand.
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 market is protected by a law with its own rubric. Recopilación de leyes de las Indias, libro VI, título I, ley xxviij — "Que los Indios puedan hacer sus tiangues, y vender en ellos sus mercaderías, y frutos" (Charles V and the Prince Governor, Madrid, 2 March 1552; Philip II, Madrid, 26 April 1563) — orders: "NO se prohiba á los Indios hacer los tiangues, y mercados antiguos en sus Pueblos, ni consienta que reciban agravio, ni molestia de los Españoles, ni otras personas, aunque sea con pretexto de que vayan á vender á las Ciudades sus mercaderías, mantas, gallinas, maiz, y otras cosas, que es novedad, de que resulta daño, y vexacion." The word the law protects is Nahuatl, and the thing it protects is called "antiguo" by the crown itself.
The trade itself is declared free, with the coercion named. Ley xxiiij (Charles V, Burgos, 6 September 1521; Valladolid, 6 June 1523; Toledo, 21 May 1534) holds that dealing between Indians and Spaniards will join them "en amistad, y comercio voluntario, siendo á contento de las partes, con que los Indios no sean inducidos, atemorizados, ni apremiados", and penalises whoever contracts against the Indians' will in everything so traded plus half of all his goods.
The following law records who was doing the coercing. Ley xxv (Valladolid, 12 May 1551; Philip II, El Pardo, 30 January 1567) recites that "las Justicias, Regidores, y Encomenderos de Indios no les consienten comerciar con libertad los mantenimientos, y otras cosas, que traen á las Ciudades, con pretexto de buen gobierno, ó porque son de sus encomiendas, en que los Indios reciben muchas vexaciones, y daños, con fuerza, y violencia, no pudiendo disponer de sus frutos, y mantenimientos, y algunas veces se los quitan, habiendo de sustentar á sus mugeres, é hijos", and orders the audiencias to stop it. The officials charged with the market are the defendants.
Price is regulated in the Indians' favour rather than left to the market. Ley xxvj (Philip III, Valladolid, 24 November 1601) charges viceroys, audiencias and justices that, the natives being "gente necesitada", they be accommodated in the prices of provisions "así en los asientos de minas, como en otras partes", assessed "con justicia, y moderacion", and that they find them cheaper than other people do "en atencion á su pobreza, y trabajo", the excesses to be punished.
Sale of an Indian's own property is hedged with formalities that protect and restrict at once. Ley xxvij (Philip II, Aranjuez, 24 May and 23 July 1571; San Lorenzo, 6 May, and Madrid, 18 May 1572) requires goods to be cried "á pregon en almoneda pública, en presencia de la Justicia", thirty days for real property and nine for movables, anything otherwise sold being void; and because such diligences would cost more than the goods are worth, the rule is confined to sales above thirty pesos de oro común. Day to day trading in the tiangues fell below that line and stayed free.
What the institution carried at its largest is described by a participant who counted. Pedro de Cieza de León, at the mining camp of Potosí in the 1540s, writes that the trade was such "que creo que ninguna feria del mundo se ygualo al trato deste mercado", and that on the flat that made the plaza of the camp he saw on one side "una hilera de cestos de Coca, que fue la mayor riqueza de estas partes", on another "rimeros de mantas y camisetas ricas delgadas y bastas", on another "montones de mayz y de papas secas y de las otras sus comidas", besides a great number of quarters of the best meat in the kingdom, the fair running from first light "hasta que escurecia la noche".
The same page records who was doing the selling, and who took the profit. Cieza: "muchos Españoles enriquecieron en este assiento de potossi con solamente tener dos o tres Indias que les contractauan en este tianguez" — Spaniards grew rich at Potosí by having two or three Indian women trade for them in the market. The sentence is evidence of indigenous women as the working traders of the greatest market in the Andes and of the arrangement by which their trading enriched somebody else, and it is the chronicler's own aside rather than a finding he sets out to make.
The market was also where the Atlantic economy met the Andean one, and where it cheated. Cieza notes that in his time there "se hazian muchas trapaças, y por algunos se tratauan pocas verdades"; that the goods were so many that "se vendian los ruanes, paños, y olandas casi tan barato como en España"; and that in the auction he saw things sold "por tan poco precio, que en Seuilla se tuuieran por baratas", while men who had made fortunes ruined themselves buying and selling and fled to Chile and Tucumán for debt.
In New Spain the same institution is attested at the other end of the moral scale, in a royal official's letter of 1525. Rodrigo de Albornoz, contador of New Spain, writing to Charles V from "su gran ciudad de Temistitlán" on 15 December 1525, reports the enslavement of Indians for trivial causes — a man who became a slave for the right to play a drum at an areito — and adds that "despues le habian vendido tres ó cuatro veces en sus tianguez ó mercados que tienen cada dia; y así hasta los músicos se venden, que es una cosa de burla y de mucho daño". The daily indigenous market is the venue in which enslaved people changed hands.
The witness is a partisan and the object says so. Albornoz was a royal accountant who took part in the factional government of Mexico in the 1520s, and his editor, García Icazbalceta, printing the letter for the first time in 1858, judges that on Indian slavery it "revela los innumerables y horribles abusos que se cometian en esa materia; pero no tiene bastante valor para resolverse á cortarlos de raiz", proposing half measures, favouring perpetual repartimientos and advising oppressive measures against a feared rising while wishing colleges founded for both sexes. What the passage establishes is the practice he describes and the currency of the complaint, not the remedy he urged.
What these sources cannot show. There is no series of prices, no count of market days, and no indigenous account of a tiangues here: the legal spine is a code stating what was ordered, and the two eyewitnesses are Spaniards, one a soldier-chronicler dedicating his book to the heir to the throne and one an official writing in his own defence. The repetition of the laws of 1552 and 1563 is evidence that the interference they forbid went on, and nothing read here shows how often the audiencias enforced them.