Diario de México (Mexico City, run of 1806)
A daily newspaper printed in Mexico City, read here in its bound second tomo for 1806, from the press of a woman, Doña María Fernández de Jáuregui, under licence of the superior government. It is made largely out of its subscribers' letters: verse and the criticism of that verse, a standing notice of where children were being vaccinated and how many were done last time, lost dogs and found earrings, and an essay against grain hoarders who starve the Indian poor.
Why this wins its question: The Diario de México is normally handled at the level of a bibliographic fact — first daily of New Spain, founded under Iturrigaray, suppressed later — with nothing quoted from inside it. The sheets are opened here, and what they show is more interesting than the fact: a licensed colonial daily whose content is overwhelmingly written by its own readers, which ran vaccination as a standing service notice with counts and next appointments, printed a critic dismantling the verse the paper itself had published, and carried a political-economy essay that puts the Indian labourer's wage at the centre of the grain question. Each of those is quoted from the page it stands on rather than summarised, including the numbers. The boundary is stated as plainly as the achievement: the imprint line "con licencia del superior gobierno" is quoted and given its own claim, so the object cannot be cited as evidence of a free press. The one date that is inferred rather than read — the paper's founding in the autumn of 1805 — is flagged as arithmetic in the claim itself.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The collected volume is titled "DIARIO DE MEXICO, DEDICADO AL EXMÔ. SEÑOR DON JOSE DE YTURRIGARAY, CABALLERO PROFESO DEL ORDEN DE SANTIAGO, Teniente General de los Reales Exercitos, Virrey, Gobernador, y Capitan General de N. E. Presidente de su Real Audiencia. &c. &c. TOMO II", and its imprint reads "CON LICENCIA DEL SUPERIOR GOBIERNO. En la Imprenta de Doña Maria Fernandez Jauregui, calle de Santo Domingo. Año de 1806." The paper was therefore printed by a woman running a press under her own name, and appeared by permission of the viceregal government to which it was dedicated.
It was a genuine daily with continuous numbering. The issue at page 66 of this tomo is headed "Núm. 110. Tom. 2. … DIARIO DE MEXICO. Del Sábado 18. de Enero de 1806", and later leaves of the same tomo carry Tuesday 21 January, Friday 14 February and Tuesday 18 March 1806. Counting 110 daily issues back from 18 January 1806 places the first number in the closing days of September or the opening days of October 1805; this is arithmetic from the issue header, not a date read on a page.
Each issue opened with a standing almanac line before any content: the saint or feast of the day, the church at which the Forty Hours devotion was then being held, and an astronomical note. The issue of 18 January 1806 reads "La Catedra de San Pedro. Q. H. en el Hospicio de San Jacinto. Llena á la 1. y 26. minutos de la tarde."
The body of the paper was subscriber correspondence, addressed to the editor as "S. D." and signed with initials or pen-names. The issue of 18 January prints a letter offering a drinking song the writer disclaims authorship of, signed F. J. P., followed by a second letter from a correspondent who confesses that in his youth he had the madness of making verses and was cured of it by reading Costantini's critical letter on the prejudices of poetry.
The paper printed sustained criticism of itself. A correspondent signing "El Pasante" runs a technical demolition of verse the Diario had published — the tedious assonance of three rhymes in -ante crowded into a few lines, a rhyme scheme "capaz de lastimar aun al que tenga orejas de tapia" — and generalises: what he has said "comprende á otros muchos versos publicados en el diario, en los que se advierte mucho malo y poco bueno". He refers his target to chapters 23 and 24 of Ignacio de Luzán's Poética, names two other correspondents he is quarrelling with, and cites the day and number of the issues at stake.
Smallpox vaccination was run through the paper as a standing public notice, with a place, a date, an hour, a count and the count from last time: "Vacuna. El dia 20 de el corriente se vacunaron en la Parroquia de San Miguel 89 niños de ambos secsos, y se repetirà el Martes 29 de nueve à onze. Nota: La vacuna pasada fué el dia 11 y el numero de los niños vacunados fueron 97." Similar vaccination items recur through the tomo, including returns from the parishes of the Antequera valley of Oaxaca certified curato by curato, and a report of a parish priest and a subdelegado who had his own two children vaccinated first, in sight of the people who had brought theirs, so that the Indians would lose their fear of the operation.
The same page carries the ordinary civic traffic of a city: judicial notices of the auction of a bankrupt's goods, including a house on the Rivera de San Cosme valued at 9,300 pesos and a printing shop in the calle de Tiburcio at 1,400; a wet nurse seeking a place and another sought; a diamond earring found in the church of Balvanera and held for its owner; a lost Puebla lapdog with half-black ears, described mark by mark, half an ounce offered for its return; and a theft reported from a woman's person in the church of Santo Domingo the day before.
The paper also carried serious political economy. A running unsigned essay, "Siguen las reflexiones", attacks the withholding of grain as "ese detestable monopolio" and argues that the public holds "un derecho preminente sobre los granos, semillas, y alimentos que se dan en su recinto", asking whether it can ever be permitted "encubrir al verdadero dueño aquello que lejitimamente le pertenece", and proposing that prices would fall notably if the quantity of grain harvested and in store were publicly known.
That essay names who bears the cost, and it is not the writer's own class. The grains hoarded are maize and wheat, "uno y otro casi el unico pasto del indio y de la jente infeliz", on whom "por su miseria deben excitar la compasion de los corazones mas feroces" the weight of the monopoly falls hardest. The Indian, having almost no food but maize, must either buy so little that it barely feeds him and his children or lose the work of many days to get through one; and while the price of maize rises as far as it can be pushed, "el trabajo del indio queda satisfecho con una cuota bien pequeña" — wages, that is, do not rise with the grain.
Mortality and parish returns were published as news. One leaf prints a parish's figures for 1805 — 90 marriages, 615 baptisms, 561 deaths, with a padrón de almas of all classes and ages reaching 90,364 — and another tabulates burials with a note that those made in the hospital are not included; a further item reports a cough epidemic that fell hardest on Indians, "ya por su poco cuidado con los enfermos, ó por su miseria para aplicarles los remedios oportunos", and another traces a contagion reaching the pueblo of San Bartolomé Quautitlalpan through one Indian who had fallen ill in another curato.
The freedom on display has a boundary printed on the title page. The paper appeared "con licencia del superior gobierno" and was dedicated to the sitting viceroy, so the arguments it carried — including the attack on grain hoarding and the criticism of its own contributors — were published inside a licensing system, not against one. What the volume shows is a working public argument conducted by permission, which is a weaker thing than a free press and a stronger thing than none.