Reviewed by: Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico by Corinna Zeltsman Christopher Conway KEYWORDS Print Culture, Printing, Mexico, Mexican Newspapers, Authorship, Public Sphere, Broadsides corinna zeltsman. Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. U of California P, 2021, 327 pp. The increasing availability of digitized nineteenth-century Mexican journalism and print has encouraged a boom in keyword research that allows scholars to recover, collect, and curate collections of articles from that period. These keyword archives can be illuminating, but their promise is limited by how search engines shape the visuality and experience of access. For example, while digital platforms allow quick and satisfying keyword searches, broader page-by-page views can be unwieldy and awkward. Under these conditions, our ability to absorb the form, variety, and evolution of newspapers or broadsides becomes more difficult, as does our ability to explain their history and uniqueness. These challenges are a reminder of the importance of combining digital resources with traditional archives and of being more probing and ambitious in how we interact with primary sources of all kinds. In other words, the scholar, and not the digital platform, should be the research algorithm. Corinna Zeltsman's Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico is a fantastic example of what is possible when a scholar puts their sights beyond keywords toward the bigger story of the political, discursive, and symbolic meanings of print culture. Zeltsman sketches vivid portraits of the most important printers of the century as well as their disputes with state and religious authorities over freedom of speech. Unlike narrower, thematic studies, Ink under the Fingernails delivers a wide-ranging history and framework for studying Mexican print culture and nineteenth-century intellectual life writ large. The latter point is important because virtually all nineteenth-century Mexican writers were newspaper writers who frequently found themselves in print skirmishes. Zeltsman tells the story of the print ecosystem that published these writers and provides invaluable information about newspapers and their editors, the material and technological practices of printing, and changing definitions of authorship and editorship. The book elegantly stores its literature reviews and secondary sources in notes, producing a readable narrative that will appeal to scholars in different disciplines. Chapter 1, "The Politics of Loyalty," explores the political and bureaucratic hierarchies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century state-s ponsored newspaper printing, particularly Manuel Antonio Valdés (1742–1814), the editor of the Gazeta de México. Official printed material required viceregal licensing and was assessed by representatives from the Mexican Inquisition and other Catholic dignitaries. This network of power and patronage defined print through negotiation with power brokers whose authority was, in turn, reinforced by the publication of censors' reports and official licenses. Zeltsman also underlines competing definitions of what an official newspaper should be and identifies the kinds of political, technical, and financial barriers that troubled the printing of the Gazeta de México. The cultural politics of printing during the Mexican War of Independence is at the center of chapter 2, "Negotiating Freedom." This chapter considers competing definitions of freedom of speech and how royalists and insurgents deployed print to argue their respective causes. Zeltsman tracks the uneven and inconsistent application of freedom of speech and how editors and authors like José Joaquín [End Page 110] Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827) tried to support and expand the role of print. She also examines the controversy surrounding Felipe Merino's broadside El liberal a los bajos escritores (1820), which attacked the timidity of writers and the reluctance of Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca (1754–1835) and other military officials in implementing parts of the Constitution of Cadiz. This cause célèbre, like other case studies contained in the book, is a kind of laboratory that allows Zeltsman to delineate actors, interests, trends, and shifts in political and cultural debates about print. Chapter 3, "Responsibility on Trial," explores two topics: the management and understanding of legal responsibility regarding print, and how one of the most notable printers of the century, Ignacio Cumplido (1811–1887), theorized the role of the printer in a republic. These two issues are linked because...
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Nov 3, 2024
Claire E F Wright 
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Open Access