National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America |
National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America
Oxford University Press
2014-07-07
400 pages
22 b/w line illus., 4 b/w halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199337354
Paperback ISBN: 9780199337361
Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
- The first comprehensive history of census-taking and nation-making in nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries.
- Argues that the relationship of individual states to the international system of states plays a decisive role in shaping how states classify and count citizens on their censuses.
The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers approvingly highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America.
Through a comprehensive analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around mid-twentieth century, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national development. As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers viewed national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.
Table of Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Introduction: Ethnoracial Classification and the State
- 2. Classifying Colonial Subjects
- 3. Enumerating Nations
- 4. The Race to Progress
- 5. Constructing Natural Orders
- 6. From Race to Culture
- 7. We All Count
- 8. Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index