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.

One day, a young romance writer who has lost his place to urban expansion in Buenos Aires overhears this intimate conversation coming from another bedroom in an all-women's residence hall. An “invisible houseguest” in Madame Bazan's pensionado for middle-class women of all ages, Mauricio Ridel works on finishing a happy ending for his latest serialized novel. During the writing process, however, he finds himself distracted by the sounds and rhythms of the house, his focus carried away to the conversations in the house on fashion, family life and female emancipation. Careful not to indicate his presence in any way (for he has agreed to respect the privacy of the women who live there), Ridel listens in to the conversations between female residents from the comfort of his assigned room. Believing themselves removed from male listeners, the female characters of Juana Manuela Gorriti's Oasis en la vida (1888) openly discuss their concerns and desires in the security of enclosed spaces. The dialogic sequence that begins this essay demonstrates the relief that a group of unnamed women experience when removing their uncomfortable clothing. They complain about the weight and needless complexity of their fashions and even flesh out a conspiracy theory concerning a few of those crazy designers. As the women contemplate the changes that tomorrow's fashions will inevitably bring, their soft, sweet voices appear punctuated by the incongruous thud of tossed garments.

In recent years, most historians have abandoned the idea that the revolutions that shook the Atlantic world between 1776 and 1848 were the work of a single social class. A number of studies on the social composition of the groups that ignited and propelled the different revolutionary processes demonstrate the diversity of conditions and social backgrounds of the revolutionaries. However, this revisionism is posing new questions as to why these contingencies in Europe and the Americas decided to mobilize, to construct new liberal national states, and how they carried it out.

Spain is a good sample case for this historiographical inquiry. At present, few historians accept the idea that the series of upheavals that brought about a new liberal state during the 19th century resulted from the exclusive pressure of a national bourgeoisie. Recent scholarship has revisited the classic bourgeois revolution paradigm by presenting liberalism as an ideology that captivated the imagination of Spaniards of a variety of social ranks, with special impact among urban middle and popular groups. But if Spanish scholars are providing better explanations regarding who embraced liberal ideas and facilitated their spread, the answers for the “why” and “how” this process occurred are, in my opinion, less convincing.

Tourists who visit a Mexican market to observe a butcher at work will readily notice the difference between the material cultures of meat in Mexico and the United States. Instead of thick, neatly cut steaks, wrapped in clear plastic, they will find butterflied strips of meat, corresponding to no known part of a cow, sawed with ragged edges but remarkable thinness, and hung on hooks and rods. Thick slabs called suadero might be steak except for the checkerboards carved across the front, and seemingly random chunks of retazo complete the baroque display of craftsmanship. Although of little use in making Anglo-American roasts or steaks, these cuts are ideal for such delicacies as carne asada (grilled meat) and mole de olla (chili pepper stew). Indeed, fajitas—skirt steak pounded thin and marinated, then seared quickly on a hot fire, and served with salsa and fresh tortillas— are nothing more than a Tex-Mex version of the standard method of cooking and eating beef in Mexico. Moreover, the differences between U.S. supermarket meat counters and Mexican artisanal market displays extend beyond national culinary preferences to reflect the historical growth of industrial supply chains. Indeed, meat provides a case study demonstrating the significance of consumer culture in shaping the development of Mexican capitalism during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911).

People use domestic material culture to create an image of themselves that they project to others who live in, or visit, their homes. This was as true in the Spanish colonial city as it is in any city today. If, therefore, we wish to investigate status and ethnicity in the Spanish colonies, domestic material culture is an excellent source of information on how people imagined their own place, and that of others, in society. The first step toward this is the reconstruction of the material culture of urban colonial houses. There are two main bodies of evidence available to accomplish this. The first is descriptions of household goods in the notarial archives of the colonies, and the second is the physical remains of household refuse found in archaeological contexts in cities. Each body of evidence can make unique contributions to our understanding of social relations in the colonial city, but each also has unique limitations. I use the interplay between colonial notarial documents and archaeological remains to help define the role of material culture in the study of caste relations in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Spanish colonial régimen de castas was a system that categorized people by caste, using a complex mixture of legal status, ethnicity, racial (or physical) categorization, and economic roles.