Parián

Parián, the central marketplace of Mexico City in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Located in the city's main plaza, the Parián consisted of numerous shops, built of stone to a standardized size and height, and arranged in two concentric rectangles. The market received its name (possibly from Filipino merchants) because of its supposed likeness to an enclosed shopping district in Manila. The construction of the Parián—mandated by a royal Cédula of 30 December 1694—represented a multipurpose response to the Mexico City riot of 1692. The new stone shops, rented to local merchants, provided safer, more durable replacements for the wooden shops (cajones) burned in the riot, thereby promoting commerce and restoring an important source of the city's income. The crown also hoped to achieve its long-standing goal of dispersing the petty vendors, beggars, and vagabonds who thronged the plaza. This last aim failed, but the Parián (completed in 1703) did become the most active of Mexico City's markets, selling all manner of goods, elite and plebeian, imported and domestic. Sacked during a popular uprising in 1828, the Parián never recovered; its merchants drifted away, and the increasingly untenanted marketplace came to be an eyesore. Antonio López de Santa Anna ordered its demolition, which took place on 27 July 1843.

See alsoCédula .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuel Orozco y Berra, Historia de la ciudad de México desde su fundación hasta 1854. México: Secretaria de Educación Pública, (1973), pp. 110-118.

John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.

Silvia M. Arrom, "Popular Politics in Mexico City: The Parián Riot, 1828," in Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (1985): 245-270.

Additional Bibliography

Carlos Casas, Bernardo. El Parián. Tlaquepaque: H. Ayuntamiento de Tlaquepaque, Dirección de Comunicación Social, 1997.

McFarlane, Anthony. "Popular Politics in Mexico City: The Parián Riot, 1828." In Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910, eds. Silvia Arrom and Servando Ortoll. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996.

                                        R. Douglas Cope