Cloth and Silver: Pawning and Material Life in Mexico City at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

For most residents of Mexico City at the turn of the nineteenth century, daily life was cash poor. Homemakers with servants or without, merchants and artisans, carpenters and domestic servants all turned to pawnshops to finance routine household, business and recreational needs, some on a daily basis. At the end of the colonial period and in the first decades of independent republican rule, residents from the lower and intermediate ranks of the city commonly raised cash by securing loans with possessions as collateral, leaving clothing, tools, and jewels temporarily with pawnbrokers. Based on more than 8,000 transactions culled from pawnshop records from the 1780s to the 1820s, this article argues that pawning material goods served to alleviate economic and other pressures at the household level.It was mostly women managing households who provided for dependents and/or maintained class and ethnic identities through creative financing strategies that depended on regular use of petty credit mechanisms. Archival documents and literary sources suggest that there were fundamental continuities in this material history of Mexico City from the last decades of the colonial period well into the decades after Independence, which was achieved in 1821. Material goods continued to serve as collateral for small loans throughout the nineteenth century. Pawning was a regular strategy used by many urban residents to negotiate the colonial and post-colonial political economy as well as cultural hierarchies. Petty credit secured by women helped individuals and families steady their precarious foothold on the social ladder of hierarchy. While pawning could allow some to maintain their status or even ascend the ladder, for most people collateral credit cushioned (or simply prolonged) the slip down.

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