Mexico Autlan Token 1835

Hello, Rogerio. I believe you have an old coin from the Municipality of Autlan in Mexico. It is a 1/8 real (pronounced ray - al), also known as an octavo. Individual localities in Mexico issued local coinage during much of the 1800s, and these pieces are sought by collectors with specialized interest. The coins are rare, which pushes prices up, but the market of specialized collectors is small, which pushes prices down. Our catalogs of such pieces are limited, and they do not list an Autlan piece like yours.

Items like this often fall under the general heading exonumia. There is a great web site for this subject, exonumia.com, and we wrote to Rich Hartzog to see if he would give us his insight into Rogerio's piece. Here is Rich's reply.

Dear Paul,

I have checked my book 'Tokens of Mexico' by Grove, and did not find it listed. However, this is not surprising, as I've found a lot of the early Mexican tokens are not listed. As it has the word 'Municipality', I'd say it would not technically be a hacienda token, but more likely issued by the city. And, it is a token, not a coin. While I've owned a number of these interesting early Mexican tokens, I make no claims as to being the world's expert on them. I'd say a decent estimate of retail value would be $25 to 50 US dollars. As noted, while there are a few serious collectors, there are only a few, so the market is very thin. One of the many crude style tokens issued at that time in Mexico. The book lists hundreds of them!

Happy Collecting!
Rich Hartzog
AAA Historical Americana - World Exonumia

We have a similar token at this CoinQuest link. Values of such old tokens can be signficant. If you go on eBay and do a search for 'trade token' you will find many examples, with prices.

Rogerio's token is in decent shape from a numismatic (coin collector) point of view. It's worn and dirty, but you would be worn and dirty too if you were born in 1835! The significant thing is that the legends are clear and it has not been cleaned.
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