Available From UC Press

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.

"Thanks to painstaking and intensive archival research, Ink under the Fingernails offers an exceptional, in-depth examination of print politics and commerce during Mexico's pivotal and formative nineteenth century. Amid the wars, unrest, and unpredictable economic swings Zeltsman tracks the strategies, triumphs, and controversies as printers struggled to define and defend press freedom amid shifting legal frameworks while simultaneously developing and marketing new products and peddling traditional printed materials."––Edward Wright-Rios, author of Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico

"This well-written and sophisticated book gives us a fresh, exciting look at the material realities behind Mexico’s vibrant and rich nineteenth-century periodical press, as well as rich insights into how printers negotiated press freedoms in the challenging political context of the era. A very welcome contribution to nineteenth-century studies."––Margaret Chowning, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

"Zeltsman directs a perceptive eye at the social and political aspects of printing in Mexico City. This detailed and comprehensive account of the materiality, technology, and production processes of all printed matter during more than a century of national history challenges the usual hierarchies that have shaped scholarship: instead of journalists, it deals with printers; instead of freedom of speech, it looks at freedom of printing. In doing so, it proposes a useful revision of a history centered on intellectuals and shows the relevance of a diverse cast of characters, from editors and sellers to those who handled types, paper, and ink."––Pablo Piccato, Professor of History, Columbia University