In the shadows of a Shinto torii (gateway) in São Paulo's ‘Japanese’ neighbourhood rests the city's first burial ground for enslaved Africans. Recently unearthed, the gravesite is one of the few visible remains of the Liberdade neighbourhood's significance in São Paulo's ‘Black zone’. This article excavates the history of the nearby Remedies church, the headquarters of Brazil's Underground Railroad and a long-time museum to the enslaved. The 1942 demolition of the Remedies church, I argue, comprised part of a spatial project of forgetting centred on razing the city's ‘Black zone’ and reproducing São Paulo as a non-Black, ethnically immigrant metropolis.

This article analyses efforts by the state of Oaxaca to mark its border from 1856 to 1912. State officials hoped to demarcate a permanent border along the frontier as a way to delineate a peaceful ending to on-going boundary disputes, some of which allegedly dated to pre-Columbian times. The activity of marking Oaxaca's boundary effectively represented a literal process of Mexican state formation. Oaxaca officials attempted to negotiate the state's jurisdictional limits in cooperation with other federations as well as with their own citizens as they located the parameters of the state and the limits of its authority during the era.