The city through its dealings: the meat supplies in Quito at the end of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century

This article approaches the supply of meat in the city of Quito in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to understand an empirical economy that accounts for forms of relationships, and the construction of social practices that cannot be reduced to those of the formal economy. All kinds of exchange, including meat, carried differentiations and symbolic contents linked to social identities, social mobility and the redefinition of ethnic borders. There it was present, a sociability that is beyond the market, in which an autonomous life develops.