Making paper in mexico: a material, political, and environmental history [my book project examines how a cross-section of society made, used, and debated paper to offer a new analysis of political…

This Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) under the Promotion of the Humanities Fellowships and Stipends program (CFDA 45.160) provides $60,000 to support the completion of an individual book project examining the material, political, and environmental history of papermaking in post-colonial Mexico from independence to the contemporary era. The grant recipient, based in Statesboro, Georgia, will produce a manuscript analyzing how paper became an essential political tool used across socioeconomic classes to negotiate power and status in the new Mexican nation. The book will reconstruct paper production and consumption practices over two centuries to argue paper's growing ubiquity shaped Mexico's political culture as an increasingly available medium of exchange. It will also trace environmental and discursive debates surrounding the paper industry, especially among newsrooms, forest communities, and mill towns economically tied to manufacturing. The project aims to demonstrate how government officials, businessmen, journalists, workers, development experts and ordinary Mexicans shaped the nation's political culture through contested uses of paper. The period of performance is September 1, 2023 through August 31, 2024.

Making paper in mexico: a material, political, and environmental history [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.]