Rachel Anne Chico Department of History "Print Culture and the Circulation of Information in 19th-century Mexico"

The Tinker Grant I received in the amount of $700 (in addition to $300 stipend monies) enabled me to continue to work towards completion of my doctoral dissertation for the History Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Research on the project, titled "Print Culture and the Circulation of Information in 19th-century Mexico", required time in archives in Mexico City and environs during a three-month period from June to August 2002. Tinker monies subsidized round-trip plane fare to Mexico and, in addition, the generous $300 stipend covered photocopying expenses, the purchase of several volumes available only in Mexico as well as the costs incurred to attend the conference "Public sphere and intellectual elites", held at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City (see Figure 1, digital reproduction of conference program). Indeed the research completed on my doctoral dissertation from June to August 2002 functioned not only to broaden the way I had originally conceived of my dissertation project but also played a central role in redirecting and sharpening my arguments.

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Having arrived in Mexico City to begin research in October 2001, I received news of the Tinker grant having already completed seven months of research in Mexico City. Up to that point in time, I intended to use a tripartite organization for my dissertation, which would include a first section laying out the infrastructure in place for information circulation in 19th-century Mexico, a second section examining factors that impeded movement of information within that infrastructure, and a third section discussing the ways in which individuals finally received and processed information. I had decided that I would use Mexico City and Veracruz as end point cities in light of their individual importance as information centers and the frequent exchange of information that went on between Mexico's national capital and its principal Atlantic port.

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Thus I had worked towards laying out the many different avenues through which information, whether it be newspapers or broadsheets posted on city streets, circulated. Tracing these avenues and understanding how they interacted brought me to research the state of postal routes in the archives of the Mexican Postal Service (see Figure 2, digital reproduction of 19th-century postal broadsheet for an example of what I found there), as well as road conditions and carriage itineraries in the Roads and Highways collection of the National Archive. I had also begun to scan 19th-century crime records and newspaper stories for references to any highway banditry that may have prevented mailbags from arriving or derailed carriage travel. However the problem of understanding how individuals conceived of the printed information they received remained. While examples of this printed material abound, accounts of its consumption by the public was scarce. I had encountered several anecdotal references to individuals reading newspapers in European travel accounts and memoirs by 19th-century Mexican intellectuals as well as in accounts of city life in the more extensive 19th almanacs. One European traveler wrote of waiting patiently to tour the library while the librarian finished perusing the newspapers on his book wheel. Journalist, and later Postmaster General of Mexico, Guillermo Prieto wrote of reading the recently arrived newspaper outloud to the largish group that gathered outside a local post office. A description of

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the "Agujero" in a Mexico City marketplace also alludes to the verbal diffusion of newspaper information, with the water merchant playing a more important role in spreading the news than the four-paged periodical itself (see Figure 3, digital reproduction of the text of “El Agujero”). Yet there was still little testimony by those outside of the more traditional literate -- and more traditionally literate -- classes as to how they received and passed on information on a daily basis.

While working in the National Archive, however, I encountered a collection of documents titled "Infidencias". This collection of over 150 volumes encompassed the hundreds of court cases brought against those individuals suspected of participating in the insurgency against Spain during the Mexican independence struggle between 1808 and 1820. Each case, some running to over 350 pages of documents, contained transcriptions of testimony regarding the behavior that had brought the individual under suspicion. Interestingly enough, much of the supporting evidence consisted of suspicious letters and newspapers as well as ambiguous conversations overheard by others. It became clear that individuals paid even closer to how information was relayed, and who was relaying it, during this time of internal turmoil. In order to protect themselves from suspicion, many paid painstaking attention to their surroundings. Thus over the course of the summer months as I read further in this collection, I gained a sense of how individuals talked in town plazas and bars and cafes, how individuals expected letters to arrive, how individuals gathered trusted information. It became clear that instrumental individuals from all social sectors played indispensable roles in gathering and compiling information for distribution to a more amplified audience. Indeed the sector of 19th-century Mexican society, usually identified as the Mexican literati, did not dominate the production of printed information at all. This realization buoyed my confidence in arguing for the circulation of information as more of an exchange than a diffusion from a central source.

In addition, research this summer clarified how I plan to periodize my study. Having examined noticed that authors were most critical of their information sources during times of conflict and uncertainty, five particular instances emerged as highly indicative of information circulation in 19th-century Mexico. I have now decided to shape my narration around the Mexican insurgency period in the 1810-1820s as well as the four cases of foreign invasions of Veracruz up to 1863. These conclusions have lent shape to my project in a way that will greatly facilitate writing the dissertation when I return to the United States permanently in December 2002.