64 research outputs found

    Broker Fixed: The Racialized Social Structure and the Subjugation of Indigenous Populations in the Andes

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    Responding to calls to return racial analysis to indigenous Latin America, this article moves beyond the prejudicial attitudes of dominant groups to specify how native subordination gets perpetuated as a normal outcome of the organization of society. I argue that a naturalized system of indirect rule racially subordinates native populations through creating the position of mestizo “authoritarian intermediary.” Natives must depend on these cultural brokers for their personhood, while maintaining this privileged position requires facilitating indigenous exploitation. Institutional structures combine with cultural practices to generate a vicious cycle in which increased village intermediary success increases native marginalization. This racialized social structure explains my ethnographic findings that indigenous villagers continued to support the same coterie of mestizos despite their regular and sometimes extreme acts of peculation. My findings about the primacy of race suggest new directions for research into indigenous studies, ethnic mobilizations, and the global dimensions of racial domination

    Racialized Architectural Space: A Critical Understanding of its Production, Perception and Evaluation

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    Academic inquiry into the concept of space as racialized can be traced back to at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century with sociologist W. E. B. Dubois’ promulgation of the “color-line” theory. More recently, numerous postmodern scholars from a variety of fields have elucidated the various ways in which physical space (i.e., the built environment), as a social product, embodies racialized ideologies exhibited and reproduced by segregation, economics and other social practices. The dialogue on race and space has primarily been limited to the urban scales of city, neighborhood, community and street. Socio-spatial research that centers around race rarely addresses this phenomenon at the scale of architecture – the individual building or a particular development. Such a failure to critically examine the role of the architectural product in the creation and reproduction of socio-spatial and socio-racial inequality yields the field of architectural practice exempt and blameless in its tangible contribution to the psychosocial and geospatial marginalization of communities of color, as in, for example, the case of gentrification. This paper attempts to illustrate the fact that architecture, like all of the built physical environment, is not ahistorical, apolitical – and certainly not race neutral – but, as a social product, is also understood clearly within these contexts, and its psychological and social impacts and outcomes must be examined with a racially critical lens, particularly in heterogeneous urban communities
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