“The Paper Question”: Materiality and Autonomy in Postcolonial Mexico

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Paper and its materiality generated anxieties about autonomy and prosperity in postcolonial Mexico. How would the new nation secure its own paper supply now that imperial networks had dissolved? This question prompted heated debate, which crystallized as “the paper question”—a conflict that started in the 1840s but extended through the contemporary era, engaging a diverse community of politicians, industrialists, workers, technical experts, forest communities, and ordinary Mexicans around the practical dimensions and symbolic meanings of papermaking. Corinna Zeltsman’s current research project explores how Mexicans made, used, and debated paper, using an apparently mundane material as a lens for a new analysis of Mexico’s postcolonial history.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER
Corinna Zeltsman is assistant professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021), which received the Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association. Trained as a letterpress printer, her research focuses on the history of printing and the book, political culture, and labor in Latin America.

DISCUSSANT
Monica Bravo, Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

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