How does state form give life to the dispersed sentiments of fear and aspiration that are engendered in contemporary disputes concerning culture and place? What role do visual technologies and projects play in the governance and production of difference? In modern Mexico, the notion of nation has often been invoked to explain the force that ideals of moral community and cultural affinity have acquired in modern Mexico. Visual projects for the construction of national types and racialized ideals of identity have played a central role in our analyses of these dynamics of national and regional identity formation. Yet less attention has been paid to the administrative and legal forms through which the governmental state engages difference as politics and as a site of governance. Taking the state of Oaxaca as its ethnographic ground, this paper explores how recent legal and visual projects forwarded by the Oaxacan state unsettle the languages of identity and place that underwrite both ideals of 'national' belonging and locality, and the state's own territorializing project. This lecture is part of the Anthropoloy Reading Group sponsored by CLACS