Mining the Margins: Production and Illicit Trade in Liberal New Spain

In 1788, during a viceregal review of Mexico’s salt mines, a guard stationed at Tehuantepec’s salinas filed a complaint in which he claimed that the two former indigenous owners of the salt mines were effectively functioning as “caciques” under the new royal administrator, in which capacity they sold salt illegally and siphoned off profits at the expense of the treasury. Who were these men? What did their illicit enterprise look like? And why did their transgressions go unpunished? This paper considers illegal acts and the official response as a window onto the liberalization of economic life in Mexico at the end of the colonial period.

The coastal and ethnically indigenous province of Oaxaca (in southern Mexico) serves as a revealing case study. From the perspective of officials, the Villa of Tehuantepec was at best a second-tier urban center, distant in spatial and social terms from ecclesiastic and royal authority in Mexico City, Puebla, and even Antequera, Oaxaca’s capital. But like other provincial towns, Tehuantepec was a vital market and hub of regional trade, one that supplied goods that were integral to the colonial economy, including salt – a principal input in the silver refining process. Salt made Tehuantepec central to Bourbon Spain’s geopolitical schemes and a laboratory in which to test and consolidate liberal reforms.

What did it mean to transgress royal prerogatives? How did such transgressions revise state designs? The indigenous salt merchants of Tehuantepec reveal intertwined experiences of liberal dispossession of property, the persistence of underground economies, and the dependence of royal authorities on regions and people deemed backward, in the (il)liberal language of the period. Their story sheds light on the contested nature of modernizing projects, as these ramified through networks of social, ethnic, and economic power in Spanish America.