Race

The result of a system of domination that, vampirelike, extracts the life of some in order to make others live better.
Gary Fields and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Theory of the organization of human difference that, even with the best of intentions, hides (or reveals) within itself a structure of hierarchy. It is dependent on an aesthetic vision of the human species: it is tied to beauty, form, representation, and narrative. It is productive of group identity. It can pull people together and form networks of solidarity. But because it is ultimately governed by a hierarchical impulse, race always returns to segregation.
The Mestizo State by Joshua Lund, page XIV

Race is a concept around which the actual political battle over land resources comes to light and is rendered narrative.
Racialization is the aesthetic mode for the representation of this battle.
The Mestizo State by Joshua Lund, page XIV

Race becomes meaningful in the real world only as it operates at the historical division of material resources and the institutional vigilance over that division.” The Mestizo State by Joshua Lund, page XIV

Initially, race emerged through the distinction between colonizers and colonized, even if with time it evolved to suppose biological differences, and then color of the skin became an emblematic of racial identity; nevertheless, race was created as a form of identity for social classification and as a mechanism of domination. This mechanism of dominance is not exclusive to the colonization of the americas, everywhere european colonization expanded to brought a form of labor control and domination that was associated with a particular race. Colonization inscribed in the controlled territories themselves that whiteness was linked with wage, institutional power in the imposed governance, othering the colonized as laborers, servants, and slaves.

Race itself may operate as a sort of infrastructure, a sociotechnical relation that enables the ongoing functioning of specific machineries of extraction and accumulation. Infrastructures of race are material systems that enable racial categories to be thought, ascribed, and lived, as well as the systems of domination and accumulation these categories make possible as result.

Racialization in colonial Mexico began with the Spanish colonial project and was routed through a politics of space, it was made possible in part by the construction of more or less durable structure like roads, walls, ditches, buildings, boundaries, and towns, into which both human and nonhuman objects were concentrated. These interventions wove together and organized colonial territory facilitated the composition of differentiated groups that, over time, became naturalized.
Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race p. 4-6

An individual of mixed-race heritage, usually assumed to be of european and Indigenous American ancestry. A symbolic protagonist of a new project of state formation.

The myth of mestizaje