Negotiating Freedom in an Era of Uncertainty: Mexico City’s Material Politics of Print at Independence

In 1820, soon after freedom of the press had been enacted in the viceroyalty of New Spain, a group of writers entered a battle in print with the Mexico City printer Alejandro Valdés. Accusing Valdés of abusive business practices, these individuals tried to shame the printer—a close collaborator of the viceregal regime—into accepting their definition of print as a public good under the newly re-established constitutional monarchy. Valdés responded in kind, offering his own definitions of the printer’s proper role in the new order, based on liberal notions of free contract. Lurking behind these discursive formulations lay the hard reality that only three major printers operated in Mexico City, wielding considerable power over what might be printed in an era of deep political uncertainty. Far from an abstract debate unfolding in an emerging public sphere, discussions over how freedom of the press should operate in Mexico were imbricated with local material concerns over printers’ newly acquired status as gatekeepers of intellectual production.

This paper explores how Mexico City’s material politics of print—the ways in which print was produced, consumed, and regulated—transformed during the tumultuous moment when the viceregal regime collapsed and Mexico become first an independent empire and then a republic in the 1820s. Although they have been typically overlooked in studies of the press in Mexico, printers were central actors in intense struggles to establish the new rules—both official and informal—that would govern its production as print transformed from a closely regulated colonial technology of power to a vehicle for spirited politics in the Mexican republic. These struggles unfolded in the city streets, printshops, pamphlets, and official spaces of Mexico City, the colonial and national capital that is also site of the oldest printing tradition in the Western Hemisphere.