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The Mestizo State: Colonization and Indianization in Liberal Mexico

This essay explores the limits of the liberal critique of racism by focusing on the dynamic interaction among race, space, and modes of production. My context is a national-historical moment when the confluence of these themes was being debated with intensity: Mexico's 1880s project of colonization (colonización). Enabling my analysis is a critical reading—the first ever, to my knowledge—of a daring argument set forth by an advocate of the colonization policy, the newspaper editor and political activist Luis Alva. The idea is that if liberalism, whether neo or classical, relates to space, it does so through its tenacious drive to make space productive in the capitalist sense, enlisting the state (the government and its armed forces) in this task. People, of course, usually get in the way. In the modern world, this conflict often articulates to processes of racialization. Alva deals with this in a provocative, forward-looking, and ultimately unsustainable way.