How do public spheres survive when the material infrastructures of truth collapse? How does misinformation circulate through networks, and how does an atmosphere of mistrust feed into this circulation? I materialize Ute Frevert’s definition of trust as a historically constructed emotion that confers something of great value upon an institution’s safekeeping. By treating trust and mistrust as social practices, I show how they are shaped by obligation, inequality, and power. This talk investigates how the material precarity of infrastructures shapes, disrupts, or reconfigures public trust over time. I argue that the physical and resource scarcity of these materials ultimately fractures the public sphere.

Using Mexico as an empirical anchor, I provide a comparative framework to show how mistrust is produced and distributed unevenly across broader transnational contexts. As the site of the twentieth century’s first social revolution, the revolutionary and statesman Francisco Madero’s fragile and short-lived democracy (1911–1913) provides a testing ground to study how power asymmetries and material precarity shape communication. I examine how editor Rafael Martínez (“Rip-Rip”) turned the state gazette, El Diario Oficial, into a document-driven verification shield to counter sensationalist journalism. However, paper shortages and financial bottlenecks forced this institutional network into a compromised dependence on centralized bureaucratic control—revealing paper as an industrial technology of trust that was restricted to a slow, elite bureaucratic loop, inaccessible to most readers.

When these physical infrastructures failed, lawmakers in October 1912 deployed intense affective vocabularies of suspicion, pathologizing anti-Madero writers as “pirates of the mind” on the congressional floor to police and legally restrict public communication. This talk provides a cultural-studies methodology for tracking how material precarity shapes the emotional vocabulary of political crises. My talk expands upon a forthcoming afterword (December 2026) in the Amerikastudien / American Studies special issue on “Deception and Dis/Trust.”