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National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Author

Listed:
  • Loveman, Mara

    (University of California, Berkeley)

Abstract

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. "While Loveman is not the only scholar paying attention to governmental census taking, this book stands out for its theoretical depth, the remarkable mastery of historical context and agency, and its long-term historical breath. Loveman shows that rather than reflecting domestic politics or specific demographic configurations, Latin American states collected data on the kind of racial or ethnic categories that they thought would help document, to a global audience of other states, their efforts and achievements in becoming modern nations."-Andreas Wimmer, Hughes-Rogers Professor of Sociology, Princeton University Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/sociology/9780199337361/toc.html

Suggested Citation

  • Loveman, Mara, 2014. "National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199337361.
  • Handle: RePEc:oxp:obooks:9780199337361
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Telles, Edward E. & Bailey, Stanley R. & Davoudpour, Shahin & Freeman, Nicholas C., 2023. "Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Latin America," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 13195, Inter-American Development Bank.
    2. Luis Monroy-Gómez-Franco & Roberto Vélez-Grajales, 2021. "Skin Tone Differences in Social Mobility in Mexico: Are We Forgetting Regional Variance?," Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, Springer, vol. 4(4), pages 257-274, December.
    3. G. Reginald Daniel, 2022. "Multiracial Identities in the United States: Towards the Brazilian or South African Paths?," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(5), pages 1-24, May.
    4. Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez & Eduardo M. Medina-Cortina, 2019. "Skin Color and Social Mobility: Evidence From Mexico," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 56(1), pages 321-343, February.
    5. Stanley R. Bailey & Aliya Saperstein & Andrew Penner, 2014. "Race, color, and income inequality across the Americas," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 31(24), pages 735-756.
    6. Nuno Palma & Jaime Reis & Mengtian Zhang, 2020. "Reconstruction of regional and national population using intermittent census-type data: The case of Portugal, 1527–1864," Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(1), pages 11-27, January.
    7. Abigail Nieves Delgado & Jan Baedke, 2021. "Does the human microbiome tell us something about race?," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 8(1), pages 1-12, December.
    8. Rohini Somanathan, 2016. "Group Inequality in Democracies: Lessons from Cross-National Experiences," Working Papers id:11335, eSocialSciences.
    9. Andrew Francis-Tan & Zheng Mu, 2019. "Racial Revolution: Understanding the Resurgence of Ethnic Minority Identity in Modern China," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 38(5), pages 733-769, October.
    10. René Alejandro Rejón Piña & Chenglong Ma, 2023. "Classification Algorithm for Skin Color (CASCo): A new tool to measure skin color in social science research," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 104(2), pages 168-179, March.
    11. Mariangela Veikou, 2024. "Slap a Label on It—Civic Registration Categories for (Non)Citizens and the Digital Promise," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-11, September.
    12. McNamee, Lachlan, 2019. "Indirect colonial rule and the salience of ethnicity," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 142-156.
    13. Yung, Vincent & Colyvas, Jeannette, 2023. "Munging the Ghosts in the Machine: Coded Bias and the Craft of Wrangling Archival Data," SocArXiv 2dve6, Center for Open Science.
    14. Dóra Chor & Alexandre Pereira & Antonio G Pacheco & Ricardo V Santos & Maria J M Fonseca & Maria I Schmidt & Bruce B Duncan & Sandhi M Barreto & Estela M L Aquino & José G Mill & Maria delCB Molina & , 2019. "Context-dependence of race self-classification: Results from a highly mixed and unequal middle-income country," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(5), pages 1-17, May.
    15. Natasha Borges Sugiyama, 2022. "Inclusion amid ethnic inequality: Insights from Brazil's social protection system," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2022-77, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    16. Milena Ang & Yuna Blajer de la Garza, 2021. "Vulnerability, due process, and reform in modern Mexico," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 32(3), pages 346-375, September.
    17. Telles, Edward E. & Bailey, Stanley R. & Davoudpour, Shahin & Freeman, Nicholas C., 2023. "Racial and ethnic inequality in Latin America," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120677, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    18. Yasuko Takezawa & Stephen Small, 2022. "Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(3), pages 1-14, March.
    19. Braulio Güémez & Patricio Solís, 2022. "Ethnoracial and Educational Homogamy in Mexico: A Multidimensional Perspective," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 41(6), pages 2331-2363, December.

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