Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Paperback)
During the independence era in Mexico, individuals and factions of all stripes embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the broad struggle for political power. Taking readers into the printing shops, government offices, courtrooms, and streets of Mexico City, historian Corinna Zeltsman reconstructs the practical negotiations and discursive contests that surrounded print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses and examining their social practices and aspirations, Zeltsman explores how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship. Beautifully crafted and ambitious in scope, Ink under the Fingernails sheds new light on Mexico's histories of state formation and political culture, identifying printing shops as unexplored spaces of democratic practice, where the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor blurred.
Corinna Zeltsman is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Georgia Southern University. She is trained as a letterpress printer.
"A fascinating study of the role of printing technologies in state formation. . . . Ink under the Fingernails will be of interest to scholars of Mexico, state building, censorship, authorship, press laws, and the printing press. The text will also be useful for upper-level courses on Mexican history and specialized courses on archives, special collections, and the history of printing."
— Information & Culture
— Information & Culture