Infrastructure and Race in Colonial Mexico

• In Event: Colonial materiality: everyday objects in early-modern Spanish America

Abstract

In his book In Defense of Things, Bjørnar Olsen reflects on the place of objects in scholarly treatment of such “imagined communities” as the nation. While a great deal of attention is paid to their symbolic “meanings,” less has been aimed at the ways in which objects contribute to the construction of social life, “the brigades of nonhuman actors that constitute the very condition of the possibility for such large-scale social institutions to be imagined, implemented, reproduced, and remembered” (141). Although he does not use this terminology, what Olsen is concerned with here is infrastructure—that most everyday of objects, those objects that enable the operation of other objects along with the networks of social relations that take shape around and among them, the material conditions of possibility, in other words, for the production and reproduction of a particular social order. This paper examines the infrastructure not of the nation but of race, by considering a series of infrastructural forms that were designed and deployed in colonial Mexico. By tracing a genealogy of spatial concentration over three centuries of colonial rule, it argues that Spanish colonialism generated a repertoire of techniques and technologies that both facilitated the emergence and consolidation of key categories of racial identity and rationalized them through architectonic systems of classification. From reducciones de indios to segregated neighborhoods in Mexico City to the Archivo General de Papeles, the development of increasingly expansive iterations of concentration in colonial space smoothed the transition from pastoral power to modern biopolitics.

Author

• Daniel Nemser, University of Michigan