Gachupines and Tlalchicholes: Bread, Unions, and the Emergence of the Formal Market in Mexico City, 1915–40

This paper discusses the emergence of the formal market in Mexico City's bread trade and the subsequent persecution of the “informal” market. According to bakery regulations, first promulgated in 1929 and reissued semi-annually until 1940, the formal market included only licensed businesses that fulfilled health, safety, and pricing norms. However, the actual licensing of businesses had little to do these norms. Instead, regulations served to resolve decades of labor strife within the city's dominant, mostly Spanish-owned bakeries, which became unionized in 1929, by pushing the nonunion shops out of the formal market. Nonunion bakeries had no obligation to observe the agreements in the larger, unionized shops' labor contracts, but they threatened to disrupt the balance between the Spanish owners and the unionist bakers. Thus, even businesses that fulfilled the ostensive requirements to acquire licenses became “tlalchiches” or “clandestine” bakeries. By imposing a minimum distance between bakeries and setting minimum prices, the regulations effectively codified the Spaniards' hold on the bread trade and inaugurated a decade of violent closures of small shops that relied on nonunion, family labor. By the late 1930s, however, the spectacle of the police closing small Mexican-owned bakeries because they sold bread cheaper than the Spaniards had worn the state's legitimacy. Bread itself took on new meanings central to the discursive acrobatics of the regime that endeavored to assure consumers that, despite evidence to the contrary, government intervention in the economy was populist and revolutionary.