Voceadores and the Limits of the Press in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City

Abstract: This essay traces textual and visual representations of newspaper sellers (known as voceadores or papeleros) in Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century, from the era of the Porfiriato to the early post-revolutionary period. Drawing from such representations in chronicles, novels, illustrations in the press, and photographs from the Casasola archive, the essay contends that these child newspaper sellers functioned as unstable signifiers that signaled both the potential reach and the stark limits of the lettered city. Although in the late nineteenth century papeleros were primarily associated with crime and urban problems, by the 1920s they were discursively and visually incorporated into the narrative of the post-revolutionary nation-state.