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View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City (1695) by Cristóbal de Villalpando.

Interchange – Forms of Concentration: Constructing Racialized Bodies

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We’re not talking about the mind today, but of internment, and ghettos, of settlement camps.

Today’s conversation focuses on the history and origins of concentration, a form of biopolitics that seeks to manage and structure the movement of social groups in a predictable manner. Modern forms of concentration have become a nearly ubiquitous force of social structuring: from mass incarceration in the United States to the confinement of refugees in settlement camps the world over, we can see the logic of concentration at work. The most prevalent and commonly recognized form of concentration in modern history is that of the 20th century concentration camp, with its most brutal and horrific manifestation during the Holocaust of WWII.

Historians and theorists have often identified the origins of the concentration camp with the Cuban war for independence, when the Spanish colonial officer Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau ordered rural civilians to report to the nearest city that had a garrison of Spanish troops. This historical account suggests that Spanish colonialism in Cuba provided the condition of possibility for the concentration camp to emerge and to spread to different contexts around the world. However, our guest today, Daniel Nemser, in his book Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, raises the important question: “If (Spanish) colonialism was the camp’s condition of possibility, why would it have emerged only at the end of a long colonial project that had already endured over four centuries?”

Nemser instead extends the history of concentration back into the very beginning of Spanish colonialism in Mexico, tracing the forms that it took under the auspices of the colonial project. In doing so, he likewise shows that the colonial implementation of concentration not only produced a social order through population management, but also instituted this order through the production of race itself. Nemser looks at the various techniques of colonial governance that Spain implemented – centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – to demonstrate that race is not a pre-existing identity, but is produced and subsequently experienced through forms of population management tied to concentration.

What is most striking is that what Nemser describes of 17th century Mexico City is a mode of organization nearly unchanged over those four centuries. The colonial project of Empire is alive and well in cities in the United States. And there is something very familiar in the ways that colonizers describe and denigrate local populations.

We’ll also learn of a food riot where Spain lost control of the center of the city for one day and the methods undertaken to regain and maintain control.

Our music today comes from the 2012 album Cu Taan by Adrián Terrazas-González. Born and raised in Chihuahua, Mexico, Terrazas-González is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who attended the University of Texas El Paso and now lives in Los Angeles. We’re listening to the title track.

GUEST
Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan where his research and teaching focuses on colonial history in Latin America. He is currently working on a second book that looks at colonial infrastructure tied to circulation and movement, most prominently roads and ports, and how it informs the production of race in Colonial Mexico.

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MUSIC
Cu Taan by Adrián Terrazas-González
“Cu Taan”
“Fantasmas”
“Oda al Viento”
“Untitled”
“Alba”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Episode Producer: Cole Nelson
Assistance from Mia Beach
Audio Editor: Sean Milligan
Executive Producer: Kade Young

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