Racial and Ethnic Identities in Mexican Statistics (original) (raw)
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(2022) Socio-Political Histories of Latin American Statistics
2022
This book brings together recent research on the sociopolitical history of Latin American statistics from the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. Reflecting the influence of social constructivism in the social sciences, it sheds new light on the historical emergence and development of both statistical reasoning and practices within a region traditionally seen as a passive consumer of foreign-produced theories and methods. By analysing the processes of institutionalisation of statistics in different national spaces, from Mexico to the Southern Cone, these studies show the unique ways in which Latin America adapted and used this modern tool of government and social classification to build political regimes and scientific arenas. The early enthusiasm for enumerating reality, the regular production of statistics and censuses, and the role of the region in the global transformation of this knowledge are some of the aspects reviewed to grasp the contingent dynamic of these dialogues and appropriations. Thus, Socio-political Histories of Latin American Statistics seeks to offer new insights into the divergent regional trajectories of this discipline, advancing towards an understanding of statistics and its past from a truly global perspective.
Revista De Historia Comparada, 2014
The aim of this paper is to analyze the experience of four Latin-American countries with different traditions and methodological perspectives on the gathering of ethnic and racial statistics of Afrodescendant and Indigenous population groups. A particular emphasis is made on the appearance of the multicultural ideology in the four societies, since the mid s, and in the th century until today; and on its relation to the previous frame of reference based on the ideology of miscegenation. The four societies exemplify to a fair extent the variability within the Latin American and Caribbean region on the collection of statistical data for ethnic and racial groups. We also introduce the extent to which we believe the development of the methodologies is related to the particular historical context, as grounded in long term patterns of relation between the races and ethnic groups. We take the three societies with the biggest population volume in the region (Brazil, México and Colombia), plus the Peruvian case, all of them with differentiated ethnic-racial patterns.
In Panama, one century separates 1911 1 , the year in which the young Republic carried out its first population census, from 2010, the date of the most recent census 2 . During this period ten censuses have been carried out. All of them have categorised the national population according to racial and/or ethnic characteristics, making possible a historical analysis of how such differences are conceptualised and integrated into national statistics. The account offered here starts from the premise that socio-cultural classification categories of this sort are not the product of moral and cultural differences per se, but are rooted instead in political and ideological principles (Stolcke, 2008: 20). Censuses help to constitute racial discourse (Nobles, 2002: 43) and, as Panama's experience also shows, their study reveal the relationship between racial ideas, censustaking and public policy. Panama's official classifications thus cannot be separated from the history of the state's relations with racialised and ethnicised groups, specifically with the indigenous peoples and the descendants of African slaves who have lived within its present borders for centuries. In the indigenous case, these relations are characterised by contradictory government policies and by failure on the part of indigenous peoples to organise at a national level.
(2022) Socio-Political Histories of Latin American Statistics: A Bibliographical Essay
Socio-Political Histories of Latin American Statistics, 2022
This chapter scrutinises the existing academic research that focuses on the socio-political history of Latin American statistics. Its aim is to produce an account, a report, or inventory that assesses the contribution that since the end of the twentieth century the study of Latin America has made to the global knowledge on the history of quantification as well as to the role of statistical reasoning in the development of representations about the social and economic world. This assessment makes visible the thematic and methodological diversity of the studies on Latin American countries, with special emphasis on the research on the social and political history of statistics.
Ethnicity and race data collection at some Latin American countries census
XXVII IUSSP International Population Conference, 2013
This research compares four Latin American countries that have implemented changes in the way ethnicity categories are arranged within the census and how it is related to each countries own political and legal process. An important remark for this study is that ethnicity is considered here as encompassing indigenous and afro-descendant as much as other minority population whose distinctive cultural and socio/political characteristics are not homogenously mixed with the remaining population but exactly because of its outstanding diversity should be considered as a population within a population. The chosen countries are Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, and the reason for choosing these countries is based on their similar ethnicity legal tools (laws, decrees, bills) and different in depiction of ethnicity in official data. So far analysis has shown that the official discourse on ethnicity has a major impact on how it is depicted in the census questionnaires and what kind of data is generated.
In Language Practices and Processes among Latin Americans in Europe, edited by Rosina Márquez-Reiter and Adriana Patiño-Santos, 1–24. Routledge.
This chapter examines the classification of Latin Americans and Latinxs in Western Europe censuses from epistemic, discursive, and policy perspectives: who is included and who is left out in tabulations of Latinxs and Latin Americans; how census classificatory practices reflect and bolster particular constructions of ethnoracial, national, and Latinx identities; and how these classification schemes emerge from but also limit public policies. I frame the absence of ethnoracial classification in the majority of Western European censuses as a triple denial: the denial of ethnoracial and cultural diversity within the nation-state, the denial of the impact of European colonialism, and the denial of racism. I examine how the lack of ethnoracial classification in general, and the lack of a Latin American or Latinx category even in the few places that do have ethnoracial classification, invisibilize Latinxs, impacting access to public resources and obscuring inequities. The shifting classification of Latinxs in the US census is provided as a point of comparison.