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Infrastructures Of Race? Colonial Indigenous Segregation And Contemporaneous Urban Sorting, Luis Baldomero-Quintana, Guillermo Woo-Mora, Enrique De La Rosa-Ramos

Arts & Sciences Articles

We study the impacts of a colonial segregation policy on modern-day spatial population patterns and residential sorting by human capital in Mexican cities. After the Conquest, the Spanish aimed to segregate Indigenous individuals into settlements called pueblos de indios. While the segregation policy lasted until the end of the colonial era, we use present-day census data at the block level on population, schooling and access to medical services to understand the persistent effects of pueblos on within-city structure. First, we document a spatial non-monotonic correlation between the location of the pueblos and population deagglomerations. Second, we study the causal impact …