Reviewed by: Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser Amber Brian Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. U of Texas P, 2017. 221 pp. Daniel Nemser opens his ambitious study of the dual and, as he argues, linked processes of racialization and concentration in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Mexico with a vignette from late-nineteenth-century Cuba. In 1896, the Spanish Captain-General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau arrived with the mission to quell the ongoing unrest on the island. One of his strategies was to implement a policy of reconcentración, forcing the removal of civilians from their homes to campos de reconcentración where they would be housed in camps ringed with barbed wire. Nemser points out that some scholars have cited Weyler's policy as the origin of the twentieth-century concentration camp. Nemser's objective, though, is not so much to trace the horrors of the campos in Cuba to the Holocaust as it is to suggest that these practices from the tail end of the Spanish colonial era [End Page 800] represent the culmination of a developing set of policies and practices related to efforts to exert power and authority through concentration. This "concentration of bodies," Nemser argues, "was intimately tied to a politics of race" (2). His thesis revolves around the study of what he calls "infrastructures of race," or "the material systems that enable racial categories to be thought, ascribed, lived, as well as the systems of domination and accumulation these categories make possible as a result" (4). This thesis is built upon two central tenets, the displacement and disappropriation of the colonial subject, which Nemser develops by engaging with Foucault's discussion of biopolitics and Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation. The author presents a range of instantiations of the proposition, each focused on cases from New Spain, over the course of four chapters. Chapter one, "Congregation: Urbanization and the Construction of the Indian," addresses the sixteenth-century practice of congregación, which sought to resettle disperse indigenous communities in order to facilitate evangelization. Studying examples of documentation of congregation in letters, petitions, and published texts by influential religious such as Motolinía, Vasco de Quiroga, and Diego Valadés, directives by viceregal authorities, as well as pictorial documentation in the form of maps of native communities, Nemser concludes that the congregación destabilized native communities and allowed for more effective economic extraction at the same time that it fomented a new form of subjectivity, encouraging diverse native peoples to identify as Indians. Further, Nemser asserts that there was a management of indigenous life that he views as being in line with the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. He names this process "the construction of the Indian" (63). Chapter two, "Enclosure: The Architecture of Mestizo Conversion," focuses on the Colegio de San Juan Letrán, an institution established in 1547 by Viceroy Mendoza for the education of Mestizo youth. For Nemser, the "Mestizo Conversion" involved "the conversion of mestizo bodies as a means of converting Indian souls" (66). A corollary to this conversion process, he argues, is the "racialization of the Mestizo," which by his account "takes as its point of departure not the purported biological reality of racial mixture but the material infrastructures of concentration and circulation that were implemented under colonial rule" (69). In letters and other documents that address the Colegio de San Juan Letrán, written by Juan de Zumárraga, Bishop of Mexico, and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, as well as the compelling report written by Gregorio de Pesquera, a Spaniard associated with the foundation of the school, Nemser finds evidence of a disciplinary process by which the Mestizo boys were brought into the school and then, while enclosed there, were reformed in such a way that would make them fit for serving as workers in the evangelical mission. Ultimately, neither this project nor the school itself survived beyond the end of the sixteenth century. Though Nemser's analysis of the Mestizo in colonial Mexico is narrow in scope, his study points to a web of political and intellectual connections that informed Mestizo education. Chapter three, "Segregation: Sovereignty...