The Monte de Piedad, lying northwest of Mexico City’s zócalo, is not your typical pawn shop. It’s a huge, elegant place, housed in a 16th century building that once belonged to Hernan Cortez. They’ve got estate jewelry, antique furniture and even artesanías from Oaxaca. (The latter haven’t been pawned, but are instead offered for tourists like me who wander around gaping at the place.)
The institution opened its doors in 1775, with the goal of offering short-term loans to people who needed them. Today, as has been the case for two centuries, this is still what happens here. Pretty much anyone can get a loan as long as you offer a piece of collateral as deposit. According to Wikipedia, the recovery rate of pawned items is about 96 percent.
My friend Ruth showed me the place last week, and it’s an impressive building to visit. We wandered down the wide hallways and touched the porous, lava-rock walls. We stared at the ceiling, much of it covered with a stained-glass skylight. Various salons stemmed off the main hallway, filled with glass cases containing clusters of vintage-looking rings, bracelets, gold and silver hoop earrings.
We decided to buy a few artesanía items, because they were cheaper than what you’d find at La Ciudadela, another Mexican artesanía area near the Centro.
Unfortunately, because this was technically a pawn shop, and not just that but a pawn shop in Mexico, the purchasing process was almost assured to take up most of the afternoon. The seller first had to tear off the small, perforated price tags on our desired items. Then we took those to a separate cashier window, which abruptly closed before we’d even gotten to the front of the line. So we were transferred to another cashier window, where we waited with about 20 other people.
The line inched along, and just when I was starting to think, “Is my cute yellow bag from Oaxaca really worth it?” I noticed a sign taped to the cashier’s window: “Foreigners paying with credit or debit cards must provide a passport as identification.”
A passport?! Who takes a passport with them to the Centro Histórico?
We tried to protest our case, but the cashier rejected us.
Ruth, feisty woman that she is, didn’t take no for an answer. She complained to the management about the injustice of taping a tiny sign to the front of a cashier window, and how upsetting it was that our seller, while he spent about 15 minutes gently tearing off the perforated price tags, didn’t say anything about needing a passport, even though he worked in the pawn shop’s most touristy section. And he knew we were foreigners.
I didn’t think much would come of it, but surprisingly her entreaties worked. I left with a new yellow purse and a embroidered blouse.
Lesson to you: If you go to Mexico’s largest pawn shop and you’re not Mexican, bring cash. Or your credit card and passport.
*Photo via Vivir Mexico and La Jornada