Summary

Free speech was a greater concern for Mexican politicians, legislators, and intellectuals during the 19th century than electoral democracy. This can be easily verified by looking at the large number of laws, decrees, trials, appeals, and polemics provoked by contradictory efforts to guarantee the right to express reasonable opinions, formulated since the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, and the concern to limit that freedom for the preservation of stability, morality, religion, and honor. Mexican public men spent considerably more energy reading and arguing about written words than counting votes. Yet the historiography of Mexican liberalism has, for the most part, stressed the history of frustrated attempts to expand representation and thus consolidate sovereignty. This article looks at the public sphere as a space for but also of contention. Politics, as was understood by most political agents of the time, took place in that virtual space, and a good part of political conflict revolved around the right to speak on behalf of public opinion. The broader arc to be described here starts with the contentious and romantic decades since the 1857 Constitution consecrated free speech and press juries and moves through the taming of the press using legal reforms and politically motivated prosecutions under Porfirio Díaz, to the consolidation of a new order in which a diverse and prosperous press struck an understanding with the post revolutionary regime to constrain the possibilities of political debate, around 1930.