Mercado Benito Juárez

Under an iron roof on cast-iron columns, trade is gathered into permanent aisles and stalls. The city’s main market once took place in Plaza de Armas, today’s Zócalo (Plaza de la Constitución), while here commerce was given its own covered space. On an ordinary day, vegetables, dried chiles, and cheese lie between the stalls; nearby, chocolate and mezcal are poured, and clothing and work by local craftspeople are sold.

Traders occupied this block long before the iron roof appeared. In sixteen seventy, Manuel Fernández Fiallo, a Portuguese merchant who had settled in Antequera—the name Oaxaca had at the time—bought the plot and handed it over to vendors. Fiallo himself made his living through trade and understood well the value of a permanent place. Thanks to his purchase, a market could be held here without taking over someone else’s courtyard or a church porch.

Yet the city’s main market continued for a long time in Plaza de Armas—today’s Zócalo (Plaza de la Constitución). At the end of the nineteenth century, the municipality moved the vendors from there into a permanent hall on Fiallo’s plot. On April second, eighteen ninety-four, Governor Gregorio Chávez opened the building with its cast-iron supports and named it Mercado Porfirio Díaz. The rows received fixed places; today they sell vegetables, dried chiles, cheese, chocolate, mezcal, clothing, and handicrafts.

Its current full name is Mercado Benito Juárez Maza. It was dedicated to the son of President Benito Juárez: Juárez Maza was governor of the state of Oaxaca and died in office in April nineteen twelve. At that point, the former name of Porfirio Díaz was removed. In everyday use, Maza is almost always left out, so the market is often mistaken for a memorial to his much more famous father.

The move from the plaza under a roof survives in the story of one stall. Petrona Contreras and her daughter Luisa Morales sold fruit drinks in Zócalo (Plaza de la Constitución), as the space of today’s Zócalo was officially known. After the covered market opened, Luisa was allotted a place here that Petrona had used before. The family trade acquired a permanent address.

Luisa’s daughter, Casilda Flores Morales, helped prepare and sell drinks from childhood. In nineteen twenty-six, when she was sixteen, the municipality issued her a vendor’s license; the document survives in the city archive. Casilda was widowed at twenty-two. From this stall, she supported her family, and both her children grew up in the same trade. Casilda worked here until nineteen eighty-six; then the place passed to her daughter, son, and granddaughters.

The Aguas Casilda kiosk remains inside the market. Casilda’s granddaughters, Berta and Irenea, prepare drinks from chilacayote and soursop, and horchata, a sweet rice drink, with prickly pear fruit, at the place their family received when the hall opened more than one hundred thirty years ago.