In the introduction I contend that Mexican and U.S. geographies are the effect of visualizing indios and Indians in landscape. If national boundaries and the way in which we visualize national geographies are derived from the racializing of space through the figure of the Indian, then "racial geography" is not simply a term for describing a given effect in space in racial terms. It is a technology of power indexing a series of techniques used to produce space in racial terms. Using critical geography, I examine in the Introduction the use of Indians/indios in maps, literature, architectural sites and landmarks, Fredrick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis," Walter Prescott Webb's Great Plains, and Octavio Paz's theory of mestizo origins derived from Malinche/la chingada as a series techniques used to produce racial space: a racialized "way of seeing" national geographies and cultures as presumably natural or politically derived, especially as they are visualized along the divide of the Mexico–U.S. border.