States as colonial projects: Unevenness, combination and race through the lens of Abya Yala

Abstract

This article argues for an ‘expanded’ account of the modern state that places race and coloniality at the center of its analysis to enable a conversation between uneven and combined development (UCD) and critical race theories (CRT). Following a decolonial reading of both literatures and adjacent fields, I question UCD’s reproduction of Eurocentric epistemological assumptions through narratives of capitalist ‘modernisation’ that erase Indigenous and racialised peoples from the histories of modern state formation. This leads to an invitation to engage in cross-pollination between traditions by placing the concept of ‘interaction’, as recently developed by UCD scholars, in dialogue with ‘relational’ processes of colonisation and racialisation theorised by CRT and thinkers from Abya Yala. I argue that this combined perspective is better equipped to reflect on conflicts over land, territories, self-determination, and ultimately survival, by speaking of the experience of modern state formation in colonial central Mexico. I look at the formation of Iberian imperial governance in the sixteenth century as a Lettered City, a complex network of bureaucratic and Inquisitorial rule based on the prominence of the written word. In this context, Indigenous Nahua politicians, intellectuals and community leaders transformed and conditioned the state apparatuses by employing precolonial documents and producing many others to secure political and territorial autonomy. I conclude by suggesting that this approach can start a conversation on alternative genealogies of colonialism and state formation that emerge from Indigenous and racialised histories of struggle, negotiation and adaptation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the Anahuac now stands Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas of the Western Hemisphere.

2 An altepetl is fundamentally linked to the land because its name references the ‘territorial conditions of possibility for human existence’ (Nemser 2015, 345).

3 Many Indigenous epistemologies from Abya Yala are, in this sense, radically different from ‘Western’ or, more precisely, colonial epistemologies of social transformation. The relational character of several Indigenous worldviews conceives of difference ‘as being a matter of location rather than discrete essences’ (Blaser et al. 2010, 9), marking an affinity with unevenness and combination. ‘Diversity (of locations),’ Blaser et al. (2010, 9) argue, ‘is a precondition for the very existence of the web of life. By failing to recognise this relationality, analysts and commentators often misconstrue Indigenous movements for autonomy. For example, they construct Indigenous peoples’ demands for land in primarily economic or political rather than spiritual and emotional terms. Thus, they fail to recognise that their attempt to classify these demands as economic, cultural, political, or educational results from the very modern epistemologies and ontologies that contemporary Indigenous autonomy movements resist.’

4 For a detailed analysis of a Mesoamerican text that deploys this ‘double dialogue’, see Navarrete (2004).

5 For an elaboration of the concept of arrivant, see Byrd (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel P. Gámez

Daniel P. Gámez is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at The University of British Columbia in Unceded Musqueam Territory. He studies the long historical and racial transformations of subaltern and Indigenous politics in Abya Yala (Latin America), as well as the processes of imperial urbanisation carried out during the first two centuries of colonial rule, with an emphasis on the racial and political effects they have to this day.