This talk examines the intertwined development of racial subjectivation and notions of property during a period of intense land privatization in Mexico. It situates Mexico’s racial imaginaries in conversation with the framework of critical settler-colonial scholarship, tracing the rise of a deeply entrenched narrative that has framed communal Indigenous practices of land ownership as obstacles to the formation of an economic ethos. In a political culture that equated private property with full subjecthood, the talk explores the consequences of racializing discourses that cast Indigenous possessive practices as fundamentally opposed to the growing values of accumulation, savings, consumption, and future planning central for capitalist development. It also analyzes the specific constructions of whiteness and mestizaje that underpinned such racialized views.

Bio Ana Sabau is Associate Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Riot and Rebellion in México: The Race War Paradigm  (UT Press) winner of the 2022 LASA Mexico Best Book in the Humanities award.