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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.

Scholars of the infrastructural turn have generally described infrastructure in relation to modernity, and modernity in terms of the Enlightenment, highlighting the association between circulation and progress in Enlightenment thought as infrastucture's conceptual ground. This essay questions this periodization of infrastructural modernity by exploring the case of a late-sixteenth-century road project in colonial Mexico, which formed part of a global assemblage of infrastructures that wove together the emerging racial capitalist world system. Building on the work of Nancy Fraser, it proposes an alternative approach to periodizing infrastructural modernity that can distinguish and track transformations between historical regimes of accumulation.

Although Marx and Weber are traditionally read as offering opposing narratives of the transition to capitalism, Weber's notion of the Protestant ethic can clarify the subjective dimensions of the process Marx calls primitive accumulation, which set the capital-relation in motion. By rooting these cultural values in northern Europe, however, Weber cannot account for the foundational role of the Iberian empire in this process. Rather than the Protestant ethic, this essay takes up the concept of possessive individualism to consider the spirit of capitalism that emerged in the context of the initial, Iberian-led phase of the transatlantic slave trade. Iberian scholastics, especially Jesuits, used the concept of dominium, or property rights, to develop a theory of the individual as the owner of the self and of freedom as a possession that could be freely sold on the market. Voluntary enslavement and freedom of exchange were thus mobilized to justify a relatively autonomous sphere of economic activity in which the transatlantic slave trade could develop. In formulating these arguments, Jesuit authors drew on interviews with slave merchants that reflect a subjective orientation toward profit over morality. The Jesuits' ambivalent response both highlights and attempts to rationalize the contradictions of an emerging economic order based on the global circulation of commodities and racialized bodies.

On May 2, 1612, Mexico City’s authorities executed thirty-five Black people who had allegedly “conspired” against the colonial order. This article compares two accounts of the supposed plot, one written in Spanish by an anonymous member of the Audiencia, the other in Nahuatl by the indigenous historian Domingo de Chimalpahin. The former narrates the “conspiracy” by representing the Black body as incapable of self-mastery and thus predisposed to raping Spanish women. In contrast, the latter proceeds through triangulation, offering a critical reflection on the Spanish account and the racialization process. This analysis highlights the limits of existing translations of the original Nahuatl text, which unintentionally reproduce the colonial myth of the Black rapist. El 2 de mayo de 1612 las autoridades de la ciudad de México ejecutaron a 35 negros que supuestamente habían “conspirado” contra el orden colonial. Este ensayo compara dos relaciones del supuesto complot, una escrita en español por un miembro anónimo de la Audiencia, y la otra en náhuatl por el historiador indígena Domingo de Chimalpahin. La primera narra la “conspiración” representando al cuerpo negro como incapaz de autocontrol y, por lo tanto, predispuesto a violar a las mujeres españolas. En contraste, la segunda se vale a la triangulación, proponiendo una reflexión crítica sobre la narrativa española y el proceso de la racialización. Este análisis subraya los límites de las traducciones existentes del náhuatl original, que sin querer reproducen el mito colonial del violador negro.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a critical interest in capitalism has begun to return to humanities departments across the United States, from literary/cultural studies to history. The thesis of Iberian \"backwardness\" and colonial Latin American \"feudalism\" provide the context for a series of debates in the mid-twentieth century that reached their climax with the emergence of dependency theory and world-systems analysis in the 1960s and 70s.2 Critics in these \"schools\" aimed to advance a new interpretation of the region's past and on this basis identify a political strategy for resolving its contemporary economic and social problems. While acknowledging that capitalism had taken hold in Latin America by the twentieth century, for example, Assadourian argued that the colonial period would require an answer more complex than the \"simple formula\" of feudalism or capitalism (76), while Cardoso began to sketch out the concept of \"dependent\" or \"colonial modes of production\" that had endured in the Americas beyond political independence. \"5 The trajectory from dependency theory to world-systems analysis to decolonial thought thus highlights a turn away from political economy and the Marxist tradition in Latin Americanist humanities in recent decades.6 In contrast to these recent trends in Latin American studies, the second genealogy looks to a different corner of the humanities-namely, \"American\" (read:

On May 2, 1612, Mexico City’s authorities executed thirty-five Black people who had allegedly “conspired” against the colonial order. This article compares two accounts of the supposed plot, one written in Spanish by an anonymous member of the Audiencia, the other in Nahuatl by the indigenous historian Domingo de Chimalpahin. The former narrates the “conspiracy” by representing the Black body as incapable of self-mastery and thus predisposed to raping Spanish women. In contrast, the latter proceeds through triangulation, offering a critical reflection on the Spanish account and the racialization process. This analysis highlights the limits of existing translations of the original Nahuatl text, which unintentionally reproduce the colonial myth of the Black rapist. El 2 de mayo de 1612 las autoridades de la ciudad de México ejecutaron a 35 negros que supuestamente habían “conspirado” contra el orden colonial. Este ensayo compara dos relaciones del supuesto complot, una escrita en español por un miembro anónimo de la Audiencia, y la otra en náhuatl por el historiador indígena Domingo de Chimalpahin. La primera narra la “conspiración” representando al cuerpo negro como incapaz de autocontrol y, por lo tanto, predispuesto a violar a las mujeres españolas. En contraste, la segunda se vale a la triangulación, proponiendo una reflexión crítica sobre la narrativa española y el proceso de la racialización. Este análisis subraya los límites de las traducciones existentes del náhuatl original, que sin querer reproducen el mito colonial del violador negro.

TWO DECADES AFTER PLAYING his instrumental role in the reorganization of the social geography of Mexico City, the Creole intellectual José Antonio Alzate found himself entangled in a heated dispute with the Spanish botanist Vicente Cervantes, who had been sent to the capital of New Spain in 1787 with orders to establish a new botanical garden there. In the course of the debate, which centered on the value and validity of Linnaean taxonomy, Alzate made a casual yet nevertheless significant observation about the relation between plants and (certain kinds of) people: Porque las plantas en las tierras que conocemos aqui

ON FEBRUARY 10, 1896, a ship carrying the Spanish Captain-General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau docked at the port of Havana, where it was received with enthusiastic applause by crowds loyal to the Spanish empire. Cuban insurgents had declared independence from Spain the previous year and taken control of much of the countryside. Within a week of his arrival, General Weyler issued what would become an infamous decree, ordering civilians living in the rural areas of the eastern part of the island to report to the nearest city with a garrison of Spanish troops within eight days. There they would be