An in-depth study of a rural Hispanic community in New Mexico forcefully reveals the causes of deepening inequality and strained access to essential infrastructures and services.

Built to Exclude intervenes in assimilationist literature to contend that racialization and structural racism-not culture or a lack of assimilation-continue to shape inequality for Hispanic and Latine communities in Northern New Mexico. Montañez illustrates the impact of structural racism, geographic isolation, and institutional neglect on Taos County, New Mexico-and their worsening during the COVID-19.

Using data from interviews, participant observation, and regional reports, this book zeroes in on racialized inaccessibility that undermines Hispanic and Latine populations and impacts the community's ability to react to modern threats. Montañez examines an overreliance on social capital to focus on the real impact that a lack of infrastructure has on these under-resourced communities. In so doing, she presents a strong challenge to existing ideas about rural disaster preparedness.

While Hispanic and Latine families who have called Taos County home for centuries are systematically displaced, a growing and wealthier white community grapples with the barriers to modern living that people who consider the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as ancestral land say is not dysfunction, but a way of life.

Vital to understanding the persistent barriers that Hispanic and Latine people face in the United States, Built to Exclude argues that the barriers to equality for Hispanic and Latine Americans are baked into the way the United States has governed and racialized people of “Hispanic origin” from the beginning.