Nancy Vogeley is concerned to link the era of independence with the “decolonizing discourse” that helped bring about a shift in mentality during the emergence of the Spanish American republics (p. 9). Vogeley seeks to locate opposition to the hegemonic categories, values, and assumptions of colonialism that “encroache[d] on all thought in the colony” (p. 9) through “ritual displays of authority and obedience and . . . the use of prescribed language for communication with distant officialdom” (p. 41). She makes her case with material from Mexico’s early-nineteenth-century print culture—mainly newspapers—and concentrates on the writings of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, the most accomplished of colonialism’s critics. Although print runs of newspapers and Lizardi’s serial novels they contained were small, copies were surely passed around and sometimes read aloud to groups, which multiplied their impact. Vogeley contends that they created “a discourse space for colonials in which readers actively learned...

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