Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In the late 1890s, Spanish authorities in Cuba relocated over half a million civilians, placing them in the first modern concentration camps. This model of control through concentration would be copied by British and American authorities in their colonial holdings before becoming infamous as a central feature of Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic policies. Daniel Nemser's Infrastructures of Race argues that the spatial concentration of colonial subjects did not have its origin in the nineteenth century but rather in the sixteenth century. From its inception, Spanish colonialism enacted policies of concentration on its indigenous subjects to further its aims of material exploitation and religious conversion. Using the lens of concentration with a robust theoretical paradigm rooted in Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics, Nemser traces how several colonial projects used concentration to forge “infrastructures of race” that defined Spain's indigenous subjects.Nemser's work traces the development of these infrastructures of race through an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. In his introduction, Nemser argues that a close reading of colonial sources reveals that the process of racialization in colonial Mexico was predicated on the development of two forms of infrastructure. A material form based in roads, towns, jurisdictions, and boundaries facilitated the concentration of particular people in specific, discrete places. At the same time an ideological infrastructure developed in which nascent racial notions “enable[d] the ongoing functioning of specific machineries of extraction and accumulation” (p. 5). Each chapter examines a slightly different colonial project that contributed to and expanded the process and conceptualization of concentration that shaped colonial racial constructions.The first chapter examines the policy of congregation (congregación) enacted by Spaniards to relocate indigenous communities in order to make them more accessible to Spanish economic and religious enterprises. Nemser argues that this policy “constituted both an organizing principle and a material practice of Spanish imperial reason, linked across space and time” (p. 29). Importantly, he asserts that the spatial concentration of indigenous subjects facilitated the racialization of the Indian subject.Building from the first chapter, the second chapter examines the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán, a school intended for the collection and education of early mestizo boys. In this chapter, Nemser argues that the school attempted to use a process of enclosure (recogimiento) to shape and mold such children to be agents of the imperial project. Although this project failed to produce such an end, the school served as an infrastructure (both material and ideological) that produced a racialized understanding of mestizos through the “spatial politics of colonial rule” (p. 68).Chapter 3 jumps forward in time to the late seventeenth century and the policy of urban segregation enacted in the wake of the Mexico City riot (tumulto or motín) of 1692. Here Nemser examines how colonial authorities enacted a policy of segregation that would isolate an exclusively Spanish urban core from a plebeian periphery. Although this policy responded to a failure of earlier forms of concentration, it continued to mobilize racial concentration as a means of enacting governance.The final chapter examines the eighteenth-century fascination with collecting diverse flora and fauna from the far-flung regions of empire. Nemser uses the rise of botanical gardens and the new language developed for taxonomic descriptions of living creatures to illustrate a shift toward a more scientific notion of concentration. In doing so, the new science of the eighteenth century helped to transform the discourse of race into the scientific form so common in the nineteenth century. The epilogue highlights that these infrastructures of race can be seen as historically and formally linked to Karl Marx's notion of primitive accumulation, a theme that Nemser emphasizes in each chapter.Overall, 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. Scholars may be disappointed by the lack of attention paid to subjects of African descent. Although many of the infrastructures of race described by Nemser operated on Africans and their descendants, a critical discussion of those subjects and the racial constructions mapped onto them does not appear in this work. Many of the juridical statutes that established the concentration of indigenous subjects cited the need to separate indios from negros, mulatos, and zambaigos. Similarly, the notable rise of individuals of mixed ancestry, including those of African-indigenous ancestry, represented a significant failure of these infrastructures of race. An analysis of such issues could highlight important tensions between the ideological and the material as well as illustrate how Spanish infrastructures of race failed to prevent interracial connections and affiliations, whether affective, domestic, economic, or social. This shortcoming does not negate Nemser's rich and well-argued work; instead it offers new directions for further exploring colonial infrastructures of race.