Debating Paper in Early Republican Mexico

In the decades after independence (1821), a handful of entrepreneurs established paper factories in Mexico. While colonial authorities had prohibited papermaking as part of mercantilist policy, officials in the new Mexican government threw their support behind papermaking, which they described as essential for the nation’s economic development, state formation, and intellectual progress. In the eyes of influential economic policymakers like Lucas Alamán, director of Mexico’s Board of Agriculture and Industry, securing a domestic paper supply was a matter of national security. By the 1840s, however, heated debates about paper pitched policymakers, industrialists, and their investors against printers, printmakers, and their political allies, who bemoaned the poor quality, high prices, and monopolistic business practices associated with domestic paper. Their complaints, amplified by newspaper coverage that resurfaced frequently and centered paper as “the question of the day,” aimed to overturn protective tariffs on domestic paper and usher in a free trade in paper goods.

My presentation examines debates about paper in early republican Mexico in order to sketch out the contours of an emerging papermaking industry, identify the major uses and users of paper, and evaluate how commentators thought about paper in relation to economy, state, labor, and society. In their debates about paper tariffs, observers constructed hierarchies of craft and industry, grappled with the question of whether paper was a commodity like cotton or something altogether different, and argued over whether papermaking—which incorporated local fibers such as ixtle de maguey and refuse from the textile industry—provided jobs for the most destitute rural poor. Centering paper, so often treated as an invisible substrate for more important processes like writing and printing, foregrounds the material dimensions of politics and state formation in early republican Mexico.