This paper draws from a section from the chapter I had intended to share (“Divisions of labor”), and does some of the groundwork for another chapter that I’m only just beginning to think about (“Translation and solidarity”). Overall, the book is structured around the building of an important new leg of the camino real or royal road in colonial Mexico, and the conflicts and fantasies that emerged along and around it as a result. I’d be interested to hear people’s comments about the arguments about race and comparative racialization as method; about early modern imperial logistics as a framework; about the relation between infrastructure and indigenous labor; and about the translation of techniques from the northern “frontier” to the colonial "core."