Foreign and National Booksellers-Publishers-Printers, Architects of the Literary Culture of Mexico (1821-1838)

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to reflect on booksellers-publishers-printers, who were decisive cultural agents in the Mexican historical and cultural context in the period prior to the definition and development of the first consciously national literary and cultural project, that of the Academia de Letrán. I analyze similarities and differences between Variedades o el Mensajero de Londres (1823-1825), El Iris (1826) and El Recreo de las Familias (1837-1838), literary magazines that circulated in Mexico during the period and that due to their cultural and artistic impact can be considered as representative of the scope and limits of others of their genre. The booksellers-publishers-printers who planned and published them contributed both to keeping literary praxis alive during the convulsive years that followed the consummation of independence, as well as to renewing the historical, cultural and artistic resolutions and frameworks through which a specific literature and tradition, the Mexican one, was subsequently defined and articulated.