Making Paper in Mexico: A Material, Political, and Environmental History

FAIN: FEL-288886-23

Corinna Zeltsman
Georgia Southern University (Statesboro, GA 30460-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the material, political, and environmental history of paper milling in Mexico, from pre-Columbian times to the present.

My book project examines how a cross-section of society made, used, and debated paper to offer a new analysis of political culture and state formation in post-colonial Mexico. It reconstructs practices of production and consumption from independence to the contemporary era to argue that paper became an essential, if unevenly available, political tool used by elites and ordinary Mexicans for negotiating power and status in the new nation. Papermaking generated controversy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the newsrooms, forest communities, and mill towns whose fortunes were increasingly bound up with production. By tracing the material, environmental, and discursive contests that swirled around paper, my project demonstrates how government officials, businessmen, journalists, workers, forest communities, development experts, and a range of ordinary Mexicans shaped a political culture in which paper served as an increasingly ubiquitous medium of exchange.