Twilight of the Mission Frontier by Jose De la Torre Curiel

Author:Jose De la Torre Curiel [Curiel, Jose De la Torre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, Mexico
ISBN: 9780804787321
Google: BapbAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-01-09T22:23:34+00:00

What these tabulators meant in practice was the following: A product such as Brittany cloth had a retail price of, say, one peso—eight reales—per vara. However, if a trader found that conditions were favorable to sell a vara of such merchandise at its “full standard price”—depending on the purchaser’s means of payment, or on his social position—then the seller could argue that the purchaser needed to “pay,” or to acknowledge a debt of twelve reales in order to acquire one peso of Brittany cloth rated at “full standard price.” Thus, the seller would obtain a profit or, to put it more accurately, would defraud the purchaser of four reales per vara. If, on the other hand, he set a price of ten reales then he would realize a profit of two reales on the transaction. However, he might even sell the vara at the “de a peso” rate, which meant parity between the goods that were being tabulated. In this way, if one wished to “purchase” a vara of Brittany cloth by “paying” with corn—which was priced at three pesos per fanega—and the cloth were sold at the “standard price,” the buyer would have to exchange half a fanega of corn for one vara of cloth.

Operations such as these did not constitute a devaluation of the peso but, rather, an artificial modification of the price for different kinds of merchandise. The imbalance was generated in the product that was actually exchanged, which the damaged party in such transactions understood as the unavoidable need to pay as much as 50 percent more than an article’s real value in order to obtain it or, in the case of those who received their wages in the form of goods, the indignity of being forced to accept perhaps 25 percent less than the fair amount of product.45

TABLE 4.2. Example transaction with merchandise at full “standard price”

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