Description
Book Synopsis2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico SectionChallenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system. Many scholars assert that Mexico's complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and
Trade ReviewTo undertake such an ambitious spatial and temporal project, Sabau closely analyzes a handful of documents generated by colonial and republican authorities as they sought to manage violent opposition. * Hispanic American Historical Review *
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. The Bajío
- Chapter 1. Vanishing Indianness: Pacification and the Production of Race in the 1767 Bajío Riots
- Chapter 2. “So That They May Be Free of All Those Things”: Theorizing Collective Action in the Bajío Riots
- Coda 1. From the Country to the City: Movement, Labor, and Race at the End of the Eighteenth Century
- Part II. Haiti
- Chapter 3. The Domino Affect: Haiti, New Spain, and the Racial Pedagogy of Distance
- Chapter 4. Staging Fear and Freedom: Haiti’s Shifting Proximities at the Time of Mexican Independence
- Coda 2. Haiti in Mexico’s Early Republican Context
- Part III. Yucatán
- Chapter 5. On Criminality, Race, and Labor: Indenture and the Caste War
- Chapter 6. The Shapes of a Desert: The Racial Cartographies of the Caste War
- Coda 3. “Barbarous Mexico”: Racialized Coercive Labor from Sonora to Yucatán
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
