Sayad in Nuova Spagna e il pensiero di Stato: migrazioni, immaginario coloniale e costruzione nazionale fra teoria e storia

Abstract

This article examines the formation of the “state thought” in early modern New Spain through a critical engagement with key concepts developed by the sociologist of migrations Abdelmalek Sayad, particularly the border between national and non-national and the colonial imaginary. In dialogue with decolonial approaches to the historical continuity of colonial forms of power, the article mobilises Sayad’s categories as analytical tools for historical enquiry, in order to illuminate how processes of classification, exclusion, and political subordination were embedded in the very construction of colonial order and its later national rearticulations. Focusing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain as an early case of settler colonialism, the article reconstructs the production of Indigenous peoples as subjects simultaneously represented as vulnerable and dangerous. This double representation emerges across missionary discourse, administrative practices, and creole intellectual production, including the works of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, understood here as exemplary of a broader creole project of historical appropriation and national construction. The celebration of precolonial Indigenous antiquity is shown to coexist with the delegitimation of coeval Indigenous populations, portrayed as politically incapable and dependent. From this perspective, the article suggests a structural continuity between the colonial production of Indigenous populations as internal outsiders and the modern construction of migrants as non-national subjects within contemporary state orders, highlighting the persistence of the colonial imaginary well beyond the formal end of colonial rule.