Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico

Many scholars believe that the modern concentration camp was born during the Cuban war for independence when Spanish authorities ordered civilians living in rural areas to report to the nearest city with a garrison of Spanish troops. But the practice of spatial concentration—gathering people and things in specific ways, at specific places, and for specific purposes—has a history in Latin America that reaches back to the conquest. In this paradigm-setting book, Daniel Nemser argues that concentration projects, often tied to urbanization, laid an enduring, material groundwork, or infrastructure, for the emergence and consolidation of new forms of racial identity and theories of race. Infrastructures of Race traces the use of concentration as a technique for colonial governance by examining four case studies from Mexico under Spanish rule: centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections. Nemser shows how the colonial state used concentration in its attempts to build a new spatial and social order, and he explains why the technique flourished in the colonies. Although the designs for concentration were sometimes contested and short-lived, Nemser demonstrates that they provided a material foundation for ongoing processes of racialization. This finding, which challenges conventional histories of race and mestizaje (racial mixing), promises to deepen our understanding of the way race emerges from spatial politics and techniques of population management.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction. Before the Camp Chapter 1. Congregation: Urbanization and the Construction of the Indian Chapter 2. Enclosure: The Architecture of Mestizo Conversion Chapter 3. Segregation: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Problem with Mixture Chapter 4. Collection: Imperial Botany and Racialized Life Epilogue. Primitive Racialization Notes Bibliography Index

Review :
"Nemser's work offers a theoretically complex and multifaceted argument that shows how the material and the ideological worked in conjunction to form colonial notions of race, especially those defining indigenous subjects." (Hispanic American Historical Review) "Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities...Through Nemser's case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives." (New Book Network: Science, Technology, and Society) "[Nemser makes] a valuable contribution to the field: to wit, race is not an idea, but a structure." (Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies)