The Myth of the Latin American Race Monolith: Notes for Future Comparative Research on Racial Inequality in the Americas

Abstract

It has become common to compare racial inequality in the United States with a “Latin American” pattern of racial inequality in which egalitarian racial ideologies mask stark socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines. However, relatively few comparative studies exist attempting to analyze variations in degrees of racial inequality in the Americas. To stimulate further research in this area, the following study analyzes census data on racial inequality in unemployment rates, educational attainment, homeownership rates, and income in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The results suggest that while Brazil is similar to the United States in displaying large levels of racial inequality in the areas measured, Cuba and Puerto Rico display significantly lower levels of racial inequality and Colombia falls in between, undermining conceptions of a monolithic Latin American racial system.

Keywords

racial inequality comparative race and ethnicity Latin America United States racism

The Latin America Race Monolith

Several years ago, a debate emerged over whether the United States, in terms of its structures of racial inequality, was “Latin Americanizing.” Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in his work advancing this thesis, argued that it was, and that this “Latin Americanization” involved “two central features: three loosely organized racial strata (White, Honorary White, and the collective Black) and a pigmentocratic logic” (Bonilla-Silva, 2004, p. 931). Bonilla-Silva's argument further attempted to prove that this thesis explained racial inequality along three types of measures: “objective (e.g., data on income and education), subjective (e.g., racial attitudes and racial self-classification), and social interactional indicators (intermarriage and residential choices).” In short, Bonilla-Silva's “Latin Americanization thesis” argued that economic inequality, discrimination, and social life among Americans were increasingly correlated with membership in the three broad racial categories he proposed, as well as with skin color. These two factors replaced a racist system that historically classified Americans into two racial categories, “Black” and “White,” according to the rules that emphasized ancestry rather than phenotype.

Accompanying this change, Bonilla-Silva predicted, would be a shift in the way American national identity was perceived. He claimed that Americans would “begin making nationalists’ appeals (‘We are all Americans’), decry their racial past, and claim they are ‘beyond race’” (Bonilla-Silva, 2004, p. 933). The complication of America's racial hierarchy, in other words, would lead to increased efforts to disguise it behind a narrative of a universal national identity.

Applying this scheme in the United States involved some major complications. It also made two important yet unexplained assumptions that had little to do with the United States: (a) that there was such a thing as a “Latin American” system of racial inequality and (b) that it was characterized by the trends Bonilla-Silva saw developing in the United States today—namely, the classification of people into three main racial categories organized in a linear hierarchy, and the greater significance of skin color than ancestry in defining these categories.

Sociologist Christina Sue, in a response to Bonilla-Silva, addressed this issue, arguing that the notion of “Latin Americanization” ran into the error of “homogenizing Latin America.” The implication that Latin America was characterized by one common system of racial categorization erased the incredible diversity in the ways “race” is conceptualized and correlated with social inequality in Latin America, not only between “Afro-America” (“the Caribbean and Brazil”) and “mestizo” America (“Mexico, Guatemala, and the South American Andes”) but also within these incredibly diverse regions (Sue, 2009, pp. 1063–1064).

The “Latin Americanization” concept has gained traction in the contemporary literature on racial inequality in the Americas (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2009; Almaguer, 2012; Biagas & Bianchi, 2016). However, little attention has been paid to Sue's important point about the implications of the thesis on understandings of racial inequality in Latin America. In the argument that follows I attempt to sharpen Sue's critique with quantitative evidence and place the “Latin Americanization” debate into a broader current literature on race in Latin America. More specifically, the corollary of the “Latin Americanization” thesis—that the “tri-racial” and “pigmentocratic” racial hierarchy is accompanied by the use of a nationalist discourse to deny its existence—is part of a budding body of literature that critiques narratives of mestizaje in Latin American nationalist discourse. Although studies in this literature usually focus on particular national histories, in concert they tell a common narrative: racism exists in Latin America, but (White) Latin American elites use nationalist discourse to pretend that it does not. Certainly, this argument brings up an important point that universalist discourses can have the harmful effect of masking inequalities. However, while critiques of mestizaje narratives, which dominate the current literature on racism in Latin America, point out that racial inequality exists everywhere in the region—which is true—they have paid less attention to the nature of racial inequality itself, particularly in economic terms, and how it varies within and between countries.

To what extent do levels of economic inequality in Latin America vary from one country to another, and how do they compare with those existing in the United States? The analysis that follows seeks to begin an answer by analyzing several key measures—educational attainment, labor force participation and unemployment, homeownership, and income—in five countries with substantial Afro-descendant populations: Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. We have limited our analysis to countries with significant Afro-descendant populations simply for want of space. If significant variation in levels of inequality in these five countries can be found, then even less can be said about a “Latin American pattern” when one takes into account what Sue calls “mestizo America.”

Our analysis finds that, indeed, just as racial categories are constructed very differently in different countries in the Americas, the degrees to which these categories correlate with socioeconomic inequalities also vary significantly. Most importantly, there is virtually no pattern among the four Latin American countries in terms of their degrees of racial inequality, and they do not seem uniformly distinct from the United States in the degree or nature of inequality either. The finding that there is no “Latin American race pattern,” and that structures of racial inequality vary tremendously between countries should not minimize the importance of White supremacy. Quite to the contrary, it should help inform efforts to dismantle it.

We conclude with a conversation on possible factors behind the heterogeneity of racial inequality in the Americas, which are all rooted in the historical political economies of the region. We hope that these preliminary findings and possible explanations might lead to further research on the political economy of race and racial inequality in the Americas, which is sorely needed.

Mestizaje and its Critics

The idea of comparing racial structures in Latin America and the United States is not new. A quintessential example of this comparison can be found in the mestizaje narratives of the early to mid-20th century. At base rejections of European and North American ideologies of eugenics and White supremacy, mestizaje ideologies offered a racial basis for universal nationhood in Latin American countries. Latin Americans, claimed the proponents of mestizaje ideology, were in essence mixed-race peoples, and it was precisely this racial mixing that offered Latin American countries their uniqueness as well as their national strength and cultural vibrancy. Perhaps, the most well-known work of mestizaje ideology is Mexican writer José Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica (1925), literally “The Cosmic Race.” Similarly, in his work Casa-Grande e Senzala (1933), Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre promoted the idea of “racial democracy,” claiming that “Brazilian society is, of all those in the Americas, the one most harmoniously constituted so far as racial relations,” not least because all Brazilians had “the birthmark of the aborigine or the negro” (Paschel, 2018, pp. 34–35).

At the core of the mestizaje argument was an implicit comparison with the United States: they are racist and racially unequal; we are a mixed-race people incapable of having racial inequality or racism. It was under this logic that Brazil's military dictatorship in the late 1960s and 1970s accused Black political movements of “importing racism from the United States” (Paschel, 2018, p. 40). A similar logic would lead Puerto Rican psychologist Tomás Blanco to declare in 1948 that compared with the violence of racial segregation and discrimination in the United States, “our prejudice is innocent child's play.”¹

Under these comparisons with racial inequality in the United States lay the fact that mestizaje narratives formed a part of fundamentally nationalist ideologies. Thus, historian George Reid Andrews points out that La raza cósmica was published soon after the triumph of the Mexican Revolution, while Casa-Grande e Senzala came in wake of a nationalist military revolt in Brazil that installed a regime of “labor-based populism” (Andrews, 2004, pp. 165–166). The connection between the mestizaje narrative and nationalist populism existed in Puerto Rico as well, despite its colonial situation. Luis Muñoz Marín, who went on to found the left-populist Partido Popular Democrático in 1938 and became the first elected governor of Puerto Rico in 1949, wrote in The Nation in 1925 that “Perhaps the island should be of interest to the American people chiefly as a laboratory experiment in racial ethics, as there you find the nearest approach to social equality of this sort… Lynching and the humiliation of Negroes by statute are unthinkable… Jim Crow cars would seem as freakish as a man with two thumbs on one hand and eight fingers on the other… White, Negro, and mulatto lawyers, physicians, journalists, poets, politicians, philosophers lead a common professional and spiritual life” (Muñoz Marín, 1925, p. 379).

Many scholars have rightly pointed out that narratives of mestizaje have often served to disguise racial inequality in Latin America, rather than to promote equality. Paschel points to how, as in the previously mentioned example of Brazil under the military dictatorship, mestizaje ideas have been used to discredit independent Black political organization in Brazil and Colombia, sometimes with the claim that such an organization is itself racist (Paschel, 2018, pp. 46–48). With respect to Cuba, Sawyer and Clealand have argued that Cuban revolutionary ideology, while acknowledging a racist past, has largely claimed that the revolution “solved” the problem of racism, thus making difficult efforts to organize around issues of racial justice (Sawyer, 2006, pp. 21–28; Clealand, 2017, pp. 101–122). Similar arguments have been made with respect to Puerto Rico. Rodríguez-Silva, for example, traces the early development, in the wake of the abolition of slavery in 1873, of a Puerto Rican national ideology that saw the island as a multiracial yet homogenous nation and viewed any discussion of racial division, even with the aim of drawing attention to the issue of racism, as “antinational” (Rodriguez-Silva, 2012, p. 3).

Despite their disagreement on the role of ideas of racial mixing—in serving to combat or to disguise racism—both the earlier narrative of mestizaje and the more recent critique of it share two common features: first of all, their focus is not so much on analyzing socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines, but rather on more abstract conceptions of “racism” and “prejudice,” and also more concretely on the relationship between race and political organizing. Thus, Tomás Blanco's study addresses not the issue of racial inequality, but rather the issue of racial prejudice. Conversely, Rodríguez-Silva focuses on racial ideologies in Puerto Rico, while Sawyer and Clealand present survey research on racial attitudes among White, Black, and mixed-race Cubans, and discuss the difficulties the latter two have had in organizing politically around issues of racism, but all three focus less on socioeconomic inequalities.

The second commonality between mestizaje narratives and their critiques is that, while constructed with reference to particular cases, both kinds of literature paradoxically end up flattening regional particularities in Latin America vis-à-vis racial inequality. Mestizaje narratives, although developed as part of particular nationalist discourses, tended to argue that “racism” was a phenomenon limited to the United States, absolving all of Latin America in the process. Conversely, the mestizaje critique, when taken in concert, gives the distinct impression that racial inequalities in Latin America are not different in degree or nature to racial inequality in the United States; they are simply better hidden. Hence a recent article, denouncing Puerto Rican-based scholars who tell their U.S.-based counterparts that “racialization works differently here in Puerto Rico,” claims that “there is no such thing as a ‘less violent’ form of anti-Black racism” (Lloréns, 2020). Aside from the simple fact that different constructed racial hierarchies in different places have required different levels of violence to enforce them at different times, the implication of such statements is that, simply put, there is an abstractable “White supremacy” or “anti-Black racism” that is fundamentally the same in all places of the Americas.

Since such work focuses on “discourses,” “scripts,” and “ideologies,” it is easy to ignore concrete and often large variations in levels of socioeconomic inequality along racial lines—in educational attainment, income, household ownership, and the like. Relatively few contemporary studies exist documenting such racial inequalities. A notable exception to this rule is the work of Telles, which points out that racial inequality in Brazil along a number of socioeconomic indicators is just as large, if not larger, than in the United States (Telles, 2004, pp. 107–138).

Yet even the socioeconomic studies that do exist tend not to pay much attention to national or regional variation. For example, recent research on “pigmentocracies” in Latin America, which measures the skin tone of respondents in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using an artificially constructed color palette and then links these ratings with various socioeconomic statistics, finds “color differences in all eight countries that we examined, despite remarkable social, political, and historical differences. Progressively darker persons consistently exhibited greater educational penalties” (Telles et al. 2015, p. 54). This despite the fact that, although the authors did indeed find that lighter skin color was correlated with higher status on various statistics, the degrees of these correlations varied markedly. In Peru, for example, those in the lightest categories of skin color—according to the palette—had an average of 20% more years of education than those in the darkest categories, while in Guatemala the lightest-skinned had 100% more years of education than the darkest skinned (Telles et al., 2015, p. 49).

Indeed, the mere finding that White supremacy exists everywhere in Latin America is not nearly sufficient, nor should it be a surprise to anyone familiar with Latin American history and political economy. As historian C.R. Boxer wrote 60 years ago—with respect to racial prejudice, not racial inequality—“Modern Portuguese writers who claim that their compatriots never had any feeling of colour prejudice or of discrimination against the African Negro unaccountably ignore the obvious fact that one race cannot systematically enslave members of another for over three centuries without acquiring a conscious or unconscious feeling of racial superiority” (Boxer, 1963, p. 56).

It would be unlikely, after 400 years of colonization and slavery of Indigenous and African peoples by European elites, for White supremacy not to exist in the Americas. But it is also true that the political economies of colonization and slavery varied widely in the Americas, and thus patterns of racial inequality are unlikely to be uniform, even within Latin America.² An understanding of these political economies is crucial in dismantling White supremacy. The following analysis briefly summarizes the diversity of racial inequalities between Afro-descendants and “Whites” in Latin America by comparing disparities in educational attainment, labor force participation, homeownership, and income in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States as measured by national census surveys.

The Data and the Categories

The analysis that follows is based on census samples aggregated by the University of Minnesota's Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series (Minnesota Population Center et al., 2019; Ruggles et al., 2020). As mentioned previously, we have confined ourselves to countries with large Afro-descendant populations. Moreover, we are interested primarily in inequalities between those who identify with census racial categories linked to African ancestry and those who identify as “White.” Our choice of comparison countries is limited by the fact that the only Latin American countries for which information on racial identification is available in IPUMS are Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay. Of these, only in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico do those identifying as Afro-descendants constitute 10% or more of the population. Therefore, we have chosen to focus on these countries.

The analysis focuses specifically on the most recently available nationally representative 1% samples from each country. For the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico, these are the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) and its Puerto Rican counterpart, the Puerto Rican Community Survey (PRCS), which use the same questionnaire and variables. For Brazil, it is the 2010 national census, for Colombia the 2005 Census, and for Cuba the 2012 census, the most recent data sets available. The varying dates of the samples are obviously a factor to take into consideration when analyzing the data; however, they should matter less given that what concerns us here is not so much absolute figures as relative levels of inequality along racial lines in each of the countries.

That race is a social construct is a truism; it follows that the way that racial categories have been constructed and delineated in censuses varies widely across the Americas. The countries selected here are no exception. Cuba presents the simplest system of racial classification in its census; here, there are only three options in the question on racial identification: Black (negro), White (blanco), and mulato/mestizo. In the Hispanic American world, the term mulato has historically referred explicitly to people of mixed European and African ancestry.³

Brazil has used four categories of racial identification continuously on its census since 1950: “Black” (negro), “White” (branco), “Brown” (pardo), and “Yellow” (amarelo), the latter referring to people of East Asian descent; an “Indigenous” (indígena) category was added in 1991. Unlike the term mulato in Cuba, the term pardo does not refer explicitly to ancestry, but rather to skin color—it roughly translates as “Brown.” The term serves as a placeholder for a variety of skin color-based ascriptive categories which also cover people of Indigenous ancestry. Nevertheless, the term pardo most closely resembles the Cuban term mulato in referring predominantly to people of both European and African descent (Telles, 2004, pp. 79–81).

The Colombian census of 2005 lumped into one broad category a variety of Afro-descendant groups with distinct histories and cultures, a decision that was the product of struggles between competing definitions among social movements and the state (Paschel, 2013, pp. 1554–1556). Thus, although in the 2005 Colombian census questionnaire members of two specific Afro-descendant groups—the palenqueros, or descendants of the historical maroon community of San Basilio, as well as raizales, the inhabitants of the archipelago of San Andrés (Paschel, 2018, p. 251n23)—were allowed to specify these identities, the 2005 Colombian IPUMS data only records four categories: “Black,” “White,” “Indigenous,” and “Other.”⁴

The United States—and Puerto Rico, which partakes in the U.S. census and uses the same categories of racial identification, although it has a separate equivalent of the ACS—presents the most complicated system of racial classification. The 2018 ACS and PRCS offered 15 possible checkboxes for racial identification: “White,” “Black or African American,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” 11 different “Asian/Pacific Islander” subgroups, as well as “some other race.” In addition, a second question on “Hispanic origin” asked the respondent if they were of “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” with specified checkboxes for “Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” “Cuban,” and “another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.” In Puerto Rico, perhaps unsurprisingly, categories developed by the U.S. federal government were difficult to apply, as evidenced by the fact that 15.5% of respondents to the 2018 PRCS identified as “some other race” compared with only 3.7% in the 2018 ACS (most of whom also identified as “Hispanic” on the Hispanic origin question).

The complexity of census categories of racial identification makes the task of cross-country comparison of inequality along the lines of these categories difficult. Nevertheless, all of the countries examined here have two common categories on their censuses: “Black” and “White.”⁵ Needless to say, the ways these categories are operationalized varies significantly among the countries.

The question of “mixed-race” categories is even more complicated. The Colombian census data does not include any such separate category. As mentioned previously, the Cuban category mulato explicitly and the Brazilian term pardo implicitly have referred historically to people of mixed African and European ancestry. The U.S. census does not include an explicit “mixed race” category; however, it does allow respondents to identify with more than one race, and IPUMS allows us to identify the specific combinations of racial identification among respondents. Thus, we have included as a separate category, in both Puerto Rico and the United States, all of those who identify as Black and at least one other race.

We also decided, with respect to the mainland U.S., to treat “Hispanic” as a “racial” category on par with all the other “races” in the census. There have been important debates in the United States regarding the possibility of doing the same on the census questionnaire.⁶ This also follows the common practice of specifying “non-Hispanic Blacks” and “non-Hispanic Whites” in studies of racial inequality in the United States, with the understanding that identification as “Hispanic” carries with it an additional set of complexities rooted in American history. In Puerto Rico, we have not separated Hispanics as a separate “race,” since 98% of respondents in the 2018 PRCS identified as such.

Taking all these caveats into consideration, we have chosen to compare inequalities along racial lines between the five countries in the following way. For Brazil, we have kept “White,” pardo and “Black” as standalone categories, while combining all other categories of racial identification into an “all others” category. For Colombia, “Black” and “White” have been kept, while all other categories have been combined as “all others.” The Cuban data have not been modified at all, since, as mentioned previously, it only contains three categories of racial identification. In the United States, those who do not identify as “Hispanic” and identify as either “White,” “Black,” or “Black” and at least one other race have each been kept in distinct categories, while all others, including all of those who identify as “Hispanic,” regardless of their reported racial identification, have been placed in the “all others” category. In Puerto Rico, the categories are the same as for the mainland U.S., but Hispanics have not been separated as a separate racial group and placed in the “all others” category for the reasons given above.

This process creates a maximum of four racial groups for each country: “Black,” “White,” some variation of a “mixed-race” Afro-descendant category, and “all others.” We believe that this scheme maximizes comparability while keeping intact, as much as possible, the census categories as they have been given to us. Despite the claims of “pigmentocracy” scholars that artificially constructed color palettes correlate more closely with socioeconomic inequalities than census categories, the latter are usually the product of complex historical processes and social contestation and are thus important to study in their own right.⁷ It is useful, then, in our view, to examine how these categories correlate with socioeconomic inequalities, and whether these inequalities vary from one country to another.

The results presented in the following section attempt to analyze these inequalities along four measures that are available on most of the censuses used. The first is educational attainment according to IPUMS's International Recode, which divides respondents into four categories—“less than primary completed,” “primary completed,” “secondary completed,” and “university completed.” The second is the labor force participation rate and unemployment rate. The third is homeownership—available in all of the countries except Cuba—as measured by whether a respondent recorded that the dwelling in which they lived was owned by one of the members of their household. The final measure is earned income—defined as the combination of wage income and the income derived from a farm or a business—which is only available in Brazil, the United States, and Puerto Rico.

The data sets are confined to respondents of working age, defined as those between 25 and 64 years old. We have also limited our samples to the native-born to focus on the effects of racial inequalities produced or reproduced domestically—that is, within the boundaries of the countries studied. In the United States, “native-born” was defined as being born in one of the 50 states, while in Puerto Rico it was defined as being born on the island. Furthermore, all of the results are divided by sex. This is particularly important when analyzing labor force statistics, which are markedly different according to sex given the different labor force decisions faced by females in patriarchal societies where they must shoulder the majority of household work.

The Appendix provides detailed information on the racial breakdowns of the entire 1% samples, the samples limited to the native-born of working age, and the weighted (i.e., nationally representative) samples (Tables A1 to A3).⁸ In Colombia, 82% of all native-born working-age respondents in the 1% sample identified as “none of the above” (White/mestizo) while 10% identified as “Black.” In Cuba, 63% of native-born working-age respondents identified as “White,” 10.6% as “Black,” and 26.4% as mulato. In Brazil, 48.6% identified as “White,” 7.8% identified as “Black,” and 42% identified as pardo. In the United States, 80% identified as “non-Hispanic White,” 10.7% identified as “non-Hispanic Black,” and 0.33% identified as “Black” and at least one other race. In Puerto Rico, 67% identified as “White,” 12.4% identified as “Black” and 4.6% identified as “Black” and at least one other race, while over 16% identified as another racial category, with the vast majority picking “some other race.”

Table 1.

Secondary Education and University Completion, Native-born Aged 25 to 64 Years.

Country	Educational attainment	White		Black		Mulato/Pardo/Black and 1+ races		Other
Country	Educational attainment	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
Brazil 2010	Secondary completed	44.87%	49.03%	27.81%	32.98%	27.65%	32.84%	40.19%	44.57%
	University completed	15.83%	19.73%	4.22%	6.93%	4.86%	7.36%	16.63%	18.09%
	n	238,449	255,891	42,131	37,563	212,423	215,554	6,778	7,936
Colombia 2005	Secondary completed	36.91%	39.05%	29.99%	31.18%	—	—	14.46%	14.59%
	University completed	11.42%	11.59%	6.34%	7.17%	—	—	3.05%	3.03%
	Unknown	0.51%	0.28%	3.33%	2.07%	—	—	6.34%	5.00%
	n	69,868	72,652	8,733	8,682	—	—	4,824	4,753
Cuba 2012	Secondary completed	59.60%	61.77%	58.11%	67.06%	55.72%	62.27%	—	—
	University completed	14.92%	19.35%	12.72%	19.46%	11.02%	17.93%	—	—
	n	19,548	20,041	3,545	3,124	8,246	8,371	—	—
Puerto Rico 2018	Secondary completed	83.74%	89.09%	81.27%	90.08%	79.06%	88.30%	82.17%	87.04%
	University completed	25.86%	36.78%	17.81%	28.31%	20.83%	34.90%	21.19%	33.79%
	n	3,741	4,398	754	756	271	294	947	1,009
United States 2018	Secondary completed	94.70%	96.11%	89.15%	92.43%	92.75%	95.48%	89.53%	91.53%
	University completed	35.22%	40.25%	17.16%	25.61%	26.71%	34.44%	24.67%	30.33%
	n	521,978	528,255	66,588	71,052	3,447	3,831	80,251	82,274

Table 2.

Labor Force Statistics, Native-born Aged 25 to 64 Years.

Country	Labor force statistics	White		Black		Mulato/Pardo/Black and 1+ races		Other
Country	Labor force statistics	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
Brazil 2010	Labor force participation rate	86.07%	64.57%	84.20%	64.09%	83.39%	58.98%	82.35%	62.40%
	Unemployment rate	4.99%	8.32%	7.56%	13.64%	8.77%	14.38%	10.12%	13.48%
	n	238,449	255,891	42,131	37,563	212,423	215,554	6,778	7,936
Colombia 2005	Labor force participation rate	81.37%	42.99%	75.24%	38.72%	—	—	62.78%	24.45%
	Unemployment rate	5.11%	4.76%	6.88%	7.97%	—	—	3.98%	5.29%
	n	69,868	72,652	8,733	8,682	—	—	4,824	4,753
	% unknown	1.08%	0.80%	3.25%	2.02%	—	—	6.74%	5.86%
Cuba 2012	Labor force participation rate	83.28%	48.31%	84.43%	61.01%	83.40%	52.37%	—	—
	Unemployment rate	2.95%	3.23%	2.84%	2.68%	3.27%	3.54%	—	—
	n	19,548	20,041	3,545	3,124	8,246	8,371	—	—
Puerto Rico 2018	Labor force participation rate	68.36%	53.89%	63.72%	52.33%	69.96%	59.62%	64.83%	54.56%
	Unemployment rate	11.78%	12.82%	15.64%	13.91%	7.99%	8.29%	16.54%	16.98%
	n	3,741	4,398	754	756	271	294	947	1,009
United States 2018	Labor force participation rate	83.86%	74.16%	71.12%	74.59%	78.90%	78.61%	82.41%	74.91%
	Unemployment rate	3.36%	3.10%	8.08%	6.75%	7.56%	6.54%	5.24%	4.90%
	n	521,978	528,255	66,588	71,052	3,447	3,831	80,251	82,274

Table 3.

Homeownership, Native-born Aged 25 to 64 Years.

Country	Tenure of dwelling	White		Black		Mulato/Pardo/Black and 1+ races		Other
Country	Tenure of dwelling	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
Brazil 2010	Owned	75.34%	76.79%	72.76%	75.50%	74.11%	75.81%	77.76%	77.38%
	Not Owned	23.98%	22.99%	26.03%	24.15%	24.99%	23.94%	21.51%	22.34%
	Not in universe (niu)	0.68%	0.22%	1.21%	0.36%	0.90%	0.25%	0.73%	0.28%
	n	238,449	255,891	42,131	37,563	212,423	215,554	6,778	7,936
Colombia 2005	Owned	57.98%	59.63%	59.87%	61.03%	—	—	76.96%	78.35%
	Not Owned	40.03%	38.48%	37.22%	36.15%	—	—	20.67%	19.28%
	Unknown	2.00%	1.89%	2.91%	2.82%	—	—	2.37%	2.36%
	n	69868	72652	8733	8682	—	—	4824	4753
Puerto Rico 2018	Owner	72.42%	70.53%	69.35%	69.32%	63.30%	65.13%	62.50%	62.46%
	Rented	25.57%	29.16%	28.87%	30.66%	34.67%	34.65%	35.90%	37.54%
	N/A	2.01%	0.31%	1.78%	0.02%	2.03%	0.22%	1.60%	0.00%
	n	3741	4398	754	756	271	294	947	1009
United States 2018	Owned	73.13%	74.54%	45.42%	43.36%	44.28%	42.74%	57.63%	57.65%
	Rented	24.80%	24.81%	45.78%	55.39%	49.07%	55.90%	38.48%	41.49%
	N/A	2.06%	0.65%	8.79%	1.25%	6.65%	1.36%	3.89%	0.86%
	n	521978	528255	66588	71052	3447	3831	80251	82274

Table 4.

Earned Income by Percentile, White Males = 100, Native-born Aged 25 to 64 Years.

Country	Sex	Race	p25	p50	p75	p90	p95
Brazil 2010	Males	White	100	100	100	100	100
		Black	73	74	60	42	43
		Brown/Pardo	73	74	60	42	43
		Other	73	93	100	104	100
	Females	White	73	78	75	63	71
		Black	71	51	41	31	31
		Brown/Pardo	58	50	43	31	36
		Other	73	69	75	73	79
Puerto Rico 2018	Males	White	100	100	100	100	100
		Black	97	90	92	81	75
		Black and 1+ other	77	95	98	76	70
		All others	92	88	91	92	104
	Females	White	89	94	91	76	83
		Black	86	96	90	66	60
		Black and 1+ other	77	82	91	63	70
		All others	94	90	85	71	75
United States 2018	Males	White	100	100	100	100	100
		Black	65	67	67	63	56
		Black and 1+ other	71	73	73	70	70
		All others	74	77	78	73	73
	Females	White	66	73	70	67	63
		Black	57	58	56	52	49
		Black and 1+ other	57	64	61	59	53
		All others	57	64	61	59	55

Results

Education

Illustrated in Table 1 are the rates of secondary education and university completion in each of the four countries, broken down by sex and racial identification. One initial pattern is of note: females had higher rates of university completion among all categories of racial identification in all countries. The size of the female advantage in university completion ranges significantly—in Puerto Rico White and Black females had rates of university completion that were over 10% higher than their respective male counterparts, while in Colombia the female advantage in university completion was considerably smaller.

Cross-country patterns more or less end there. There is a considerable variation in levels of inequality in education completion according to racial identification. The worst case of racial inequality in education is not the United States, but rather Brazil. Here almost 16% of White males and 20% of White females reported having completed university in 2010, while only about 4% of Black males and 7% of Black females did. In other words, the rate of reported university completion among White males was 5 times that of Black males, while for females the comparable rate was almost 3 times. Notably, pardos in Brazil displayed very slightly higher rates of university completion than Blacks but displayed levels much closer to Blacks than to Whites.

The United States and Colombia also displayed sharp racial inequalities in university completion, though smaller than Brazil's. In the United States, 35% of White males and 40% of White females had completed university in 2018, as compared to 17% of Black males and over 25% of Black females. It is also of note that—although this category was much smaller in relative terms than the pardo category of identification in Brazil—those who identified as “Black” and some other race in the United States fell squarely in between Blacks and Whites in terms of university completion rate. In Colombia in 2005, White males and females displayed rates of university completion that were about 50% higher than their Black counterparts of the same sex.

Cuba and Puerto Rico, on the other hand, displayed significantly lower levels of inequality in university completion according to categories of racial identification. In Cuba in 2012, White males had a higher rate of university completion than Black males, but Black females had a slightly higher rate of university completion than White females. Also notable was that in Cuba those who identified as Black had consistently, although only slightly, higher rates of university completion than those who identified as mulato. In Puerto Rico, the female advantage in university completion seems more significant than racial inequalities. Thus, White females had a higher rate of university completion than Black females, but Black females displayed a higher rate—28.3% versus 25.9%—than White males.

Puerto Rico and the United States also stand out from the rest of the countries in that the percentage of people who have completed both secondary and higher education is significantly higher than in all the other countries, likely a product of higher rates of economic development. In both countries, the percentage of the population that had completed at least secondary school in 2018 was over 80%. However, Puerto Rico displays lower racial inequality in secondary education completion than the United States; curiously, in 2018, the race/sex combination with the highest secondary school completion rate in Puerto Rico was actually Black females, at 90% (the same is the case in Cuba, where the figure is 67% among Black females). Conversely, Colombia and Brazil display similarly low overall secondary school completion rates, but Colombia has less inequality according to racial identification in this metric.

In short, the only pattern in terms of inequality across all the countries in terms of educational attainment is females’ consistently higher rates of university and secondary school completion. There also seems to be a pattern of higher rates of educational attainment among those who identify as White relative to those who identify as Black or mixed-race, but the cross-country variation in levels of disparity can be immense. Thus, in Brazil, the percentage of White males with a university degree was 5 times that of Blacks, while at the other pole, in Cuba, a slightly higher percentage of Black women reported having a university degree than White women. There seems to be no cross-country pattern in terms of the relative position of mixed-race Afro-descendants. In Colombia, they are not a separate census category; in the United States, they are a very small fraction of the population but are squarely in between Whites and Blacks in terms of educational attainment; in Brazil, they display slightly higher rates than Blacks in the context of very large racial inequality; and in Cuba, they do slightly worse, and in Puerto Rico slightly better than Blacks in the context of relatively low racial inequality.

Labor Force Statistics

Table 2 illustrates key labor force statistics—labor force participation rate and unemployment rate—according to race and sex. In terms of labor force participation, gender divisions again seem to be more consistent than ones according to racial identification. Males display higher labor force participation in all categories of racial identification in all countries, except in the United States. Here, females who identify as Black have a labor force participation rate that is slightly higher than that of their male counterparts—74.6% versus 71%—while females who identify as Black and as some other race have a labor force participation rate that is about equal to that of males who do so. Here the immensely disproportionate rate of incarceration among Black males in the United States likely plays an important part.⁹

Among males, only in the United States, and to a lesser extent Colombia, does there seem to be a large difference in labor force participation according to racial identification. In Brazil, White males have slightly higher rates of labor force participation than their Black and mixed-race Afro-descendant counterparts. In Cuba, there is not much variation in labor force participation rates according to racial identification, while in Puerto Rico those who identify as “Black” or “Other” display rates that are about 5% lower than those who identify as “White” or “Black” and some other race. Among females, those who identify as White have slightly (0.5%-4%) higher rates of labor force participation than those who identify as Black in all countries except Cuba, where Black females display a much higher rate (56% vs. 43%), and the United States, where the difference is much smaller (about 0.4%). Mixed-race females display no consistent cross-country pattern. In Brazil, females who identify as parda have a lower labor force participation rate than both Black and White females; in Cuba those who identify as mulata display a rate in between those for White and Black females, but closer to White females; and in Puerto Rico, the trend is opposite of that in Brazil—Black and White females have similar rates of participation, and females who identify as mixed-race have a significantly higher rate.

In terms of unemployment, there is also a significant variation in both gender and racial inequality. Again, Brazil and the United States stand out as having the most severe racial inequality on this measure. The largest inequality in the unemployment rate is found in the United States, where Black males and females display unemployment rates over 2 times higher than their respective White counterparts; those who identify as mixed-race, of both sexes, show similarly high unemployment rates. In Brazil, the unemployment rate among Blacks is about 50% higher than the rates among Whites for both sexes. In Cuba, there is little variation in the unemployment rate; rates are uniformly low for both sexes and all categories of racial identification. In Puerto Rico, unemployment rates do not follow any “intuitive” pattern of racial inequality: those who identify as Black and some other race have the lowest unemployment rate while those who identify as “Other” have the highest.

Homeownership

Table 3 illustrates the rate of homeownership, as measured by whether respondents recorded that the dwelling in which they lived was owned by one of the members of their household. There does not seem to be a significant difference according to sex in rates of homeownership in any of the categories of racial identification in any of the countries. Moreover, rates of homeownership do not seem to vary according to racial identification in Brazil, Colombia, or Puerto Rico—note that data are not available for Cuba—with the exception that, in Puerto Rico, those who identify as Black display similar rates of homeownership as those who identify as White, but those who identify as Black and some other race, as well as those who identify as any other category, display significantly lower rates—about 60% versus 70% for Whites and Blacks.

Only in the United States is there a large difference in rates of homeownership between those who identify as White and those who identify as Black or Black and some other race. Here the gap in homeownership is on the order of 30%; 75% of those who identify as White live in home-owning households, while only about 45% of those who identify as either Black or Black and some other race do.

An interesting indicator to note is the “N/A” category in the United States and Puerto Rico. In both cases, a significantly higher percentage of males is counted under these categories than females. This is because those living in group quarters—and thus living in housing that is neither owned nor rented—are counted in these categories. This could include individuals in the military—in which males are disproportionately represented—but it also includes incarcerated individuals, who are also disproportionately male. Among males who identify as Black or Black and some other race in the United States, the “N/A” proportion is very high—almost 9% and 7%, respectively—compared to males who identify as White, at about 2%. Indeed, this would correspond to the racial disparity in incarceration rates in the United States in 2018, when the rate was 5 times higher among Black males than White males (see note 7 above). It would also explain the fact that the percentage of Black females who live in rented dwellings is significantly higher than for males, but the rates of homeownership are approximately the same for both sexes. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, a higher percentage of White males are in the “N/A” category than Black males, but only slightly so—2% versus 1.8%.¹⁰ Caution should be taken in taking these figures as directly representative of racial disparities in incarceration, but they would seem to confirm previous studies finding lower racial disparities in incarceration in Puerto Rico than in the mainland United States.¹¹

Income

Table 4 tries to capture some key information about racial inequality in income. It compares inequality in earned income—that is, the sum of wage, farm, and business income—among employed native-born 25- to 64-year-olds by income percentile. Here the income at a given percentile in the income distribution of a particular race–sex combination is given as a percentage of the figure at the corresponding percentile in the income distribution for White males, with the assumption that this group would display the highest incomes as the “dominant” or “privileged” group in racial and sexual hierarchies. Indeed, in only one of the cases does any other race–sex combination exceed White males in income at any given percentile (males who identify as “Other” in Puerto Rico at the 95th percentile). This finding would confirm theses—such as those studying “pigmentocracies”—that White supremacy is the norm throughout the Americas in terms of economic inequality. However, the key finding here, as for the previous statistics, is that there are very large variations between the three countries along the lines of both sex and racial identification.

Here it useful to take inequalities along the median as a starting point. It would seem that inequalities along both racial and gender lines follow a similar pattern in Brazil and the United States. In both countries, there are large gender and racial inequalities that compound in an “intersectional” fashion. In both countries, the median Black male and the median White female make about 70% to 75% of the median White male. The median Black female, in contrast, makes about 51% of the median White male in Brazil and 58% in the United States. The two countries differ in the position of those who identify with an “intermediate” racial category. In Brazil, those who identify as pardo fare equally poorly as those who identify as Black; in the United States, those who identify as Black and some other race consistently fall in between those who identify as Black and those who identify as White, although still seem to be closer in income to those who identify as Black. The overall pattern for Brazil and the United States in terms of income, then, follows that of the previous indicators, where they display the sharpest levels of racial inequality.

In Puerto Rico, in contrast, both gender and racial inequalities in income are much smaller than in the United States and Brazil. The median Black male makes 90% of the income of the median White male, the median mixed-race male 95%, the median White female 94%, and the median Black female 96%. Here, then, unlike the United States and Brazil, gender and racial inequalities do not seem to compound; the median Black female makes more than the median Black male and about the same as the median White female.

It is interesting to note, finally, how gender and racial inequalities in income evolve across the income distribution in the three countries. In the United States, the size of these inequalities is remarkably consistent throughout the distribution. In Brazil, in contrast, inequalities have a marked tendency to increase as one goes up the distribution; in Puerto Rico, they also increase, but less markedly. In Brazil, a Black male in the 95th percentile of his race–sex income distribution makes 43% of the income of a White male in the same position of his respective distribution; in Puerto Rico, the comparable figure is 75%.

Explaining Heterogeneity

A cursory examination of key socioeconomic data in the United States and four Latin American countries with large Afro-descendant populations—Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico—yields the finding that a categorization placing the United States on one end and “Latin America” on the other hides key heterogeneities in the structure of racial inequality in Latin American countries. If any consistent pattern is to be observed from the data above, it is that Brazil and the United States belong to one group characterized by higher levels of inequality, while Cuba and Puerto Rico belong to another group characterized by lower levels of inequality and Colombia fits somewhere in between. Yet even here the pattern is not entirely consistent. For example, Colombia stands with the United States in its lack of a significant “mixed-race” ascription as a major separate category of identification on the census.

This fact undermines another aspect of the “Latin Americanization” thesis—the notion of a tripartite “racial system” with categories organized in a hierarchy. Moreover, insofar as some countries analyzed here demonstrate three significant racial categories under which the vast majority of respondents identify, these categories are not necessary socioeconomically salient. This is most clearly the case in Brazil, where, although pardo and “Black” are both significant categories of racial identification, they are not significantly different in socioeconomic terms; there seems to be an equally large gap between both groups and Whites in the areas analyzed here.

What are the causes behind the heterogeneity described so far? And in particular, why does racial inequality, as defined by census racial categories, seem consistently larger in Brazil and the United States than in Colombia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico? Any answer to this question must be historical and rooted in political economy; below we offer some possible explanatory conjectures that might serve as suggestions for future research.

One possible answer, or partial answer, is that the differences are rooted in the diverse characteristics of slavery and freedom before abolition. Table 5 illustrates the relative populations of enslaved people and free Afro-descendants around 1800. Here three patterns stand out. First of all, the United States stands out in that its population of free people of color was truly miniscule. Conversely, in Colombia and Puerto Rico by 1800 free Afro-descendants already far outnumbered the enslaved. Brazil and Cuba had substantial populations of free Afro-descendants, but the enslaved still outnumbered them. That Puerto Rico and Colombia's Afro-descendant populations were mostly free earlier could have important consequences for racial inequality, insofar as in these two countries Afro-descendants simply had more time to accumulate intergenerational wealth.¹² It also seems that free Afro-descendants became remarkably integrated into mainstream society, at least in Puerto Rico, even before abolition. In his chapter on residential patterns in colonial San Juan, part of a broader study of Puerto Rico's free people of color, Kinsbruner (1996) demonstrates a remarkable degree of residential integration—not only within neighborhoods and blocks but even within households—during the 19th century compared with U.S. cities. Nevertheless, he still finds that of San Juan's four major neighborhoods, in only one were rates of homeownership among free people of color comparable to those among Whites (Kinsbruner, 1996, pp. 53–80).¹³

Table 5.

Free and Enslaved Populations, 1800.

Country	Enslaved, %	Free Afro-descendants, %	Whites, %	Total
Brazil	37	30	30	1,942,000
Cuba	35	19	46	600,000
Puerto Rico	15	40	44	162,000
Colombia	8	31	26	787,000
United States (1790)	18	1.50	80	3,800,000

Sources: Andrews (2004, p. 41) and Bergad (2007, pp. 27, 113).

Yet this argument would obviously not distinguish Brazil from Cuba, where slavery was equally important in relative terms in the 19th century yet where racial inequality remains much lower today. Here the Revolution of 1959, despite its effort to prevent independent Black political organization, has been credited with causing significant advances toward greater socioeconomic racial equality. As de la Fuente explains, on the one hand, the Revolutionary government frowned upon explicitly Afro-Cuban cultural expressions and was hostile to efforts by Cuban Blacks to organize along racial lines, whether politically or culturally. It nationalized Black social clubs and opened them to the general public just as it did with exclusive White clubs, and it dismissed—at least initially—the Afro-Cuban religion Santería as part of an “assault on religions in general” (de la Fuente, 2001, pp. 271–275, 280–285, 290).

On the other hand, the revolutionary government strove to give proportional representation to Blacks in the Communist Party and in mass organizations, and its programs of economic redistribution and universal education and healthcare disproportionally benefitted Blacks. Thus, in Cuba by the 1980s, unlike in Brazil or the United States, Black people had an average life expectancy and rates of high school and university completion that were similar to those of Whites. Afro-descendants were roughly proportionally represented in the field of medicine, and efforts were made (although slowly) to increase their representation to an almost proportional level in the Central Committee of the Communist Party (de la Fuente, 2001, pp. 309–313).

Nor would the relative pre-abolition sizes of free Afro-descendant populations explain the particularly low level of racial inequality seen in Puerto Rico, even compared with Colombia, which had an equally large free Afro-descendant population in relative terms. Here it is possible that the nature of slavery itself had something to do with the difference. Historian Andrés Ramos Mattei, for example, has argued that in Puerto Rico under the extremely exploitative conditions of slavery on sugar plantations, the enslaved were paradoxically able to develop skills that, after abolition, made many of them uniquely placed in the labor market. Thus, the British consul would remark in 1875, two years after abolition, that “in fact in the process of sugar making, the more skilled ‘liberto’ [freedman] is generally employed within the boiling house while the free labourer does the rougher task of cutting and carrying the cane” (Ramos Mattei, 1982, p. 114).

Puerto Rico did not experience a communist revolution in the 20th century. It is possible, however, that the island did experience some other kind of social transformation in the 20th century, analogous in scope to the Cuban Revolution, that produced similarly lower levels of racial inequality. Existing research suggests that American colonialism may have actually leveled socioeconomic inequality between Afro-descendants and Whites in Puerto Rico to some degree. Education is a particular case in point. Bobonis and Toro, for example, demonstrate that there was a massive expansion in education during the beginning of American colonialism in the early 20th century and that the racial gap in literacy began to shrink during this period, which may have been a result of a decentralized school funding structure biased toward coastal sugar-producing areas, where a majority of non-Whites resided (Bobonis & Toro, 2007, pp. 38–39, 44, 46, 51–53, 58–60).

It is possible that public policy achievements under the period of relative self-government, which originated in the 1940s and was consolidated in 1952 with the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado, may have also contributed to the equalization of socioeconomic conditions between Whites and Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the insular government, dominated by the Partido Popular Democrático and with the assistance of large amounts of federal aid, made a series of massive social investments. A land reform law in 1941 mandated the resettlement of landless workers on small plots, such that by 1965 almost 65,000 families—400,000 people—had been settled on plots in organized rural communities. In addition to building public housing projects for renters, Puerto Rico's Urban Renewal and Housing Corporation also funded the construction of houses in slum areas and built rent-to-own housing projects, which combined accounted for half of the new housing units constructed during the early 1960s (Wells, 1969, pp. 174–175). Achievements were similarly impressive in education; between 1950 and 1964, high school enrollment among students aged 16 to 18 years increased from 28% to 50%, and university enrollment increased by 166% (Wells, 1969, pp. 176–177). To the author's knowledge, no racial discrimination existed in these public programs comparable to, say, redlining in the United States. It is possible, then, that the comparably low levels of socioeconomic inequality along racial lines in Puerto Rico are a product of something like a New Deal without redlining.

By focusing, however, crudely on several socioeconomic measures, this brief study has found some surprising patterns among the four countries studied. In particular, the overall finding that Brazil and the United States seem to display higher levels of racial inequality, while Cuba and Puerto Rico display comparably lower levels and Colombia falls in between, begs the question of how much one can speak of a “Latin American” pattern of racial structures and inequalities counterposed to an Anglo-American one. Indeed, a tendency to see Latin America as monolithic in its structures of racial inequality and stratification can be seen both in studies that seek to project American racial structures onto Latin America and those that reject such projections. This tendency is also a constant presence in debates over whether racial structures are being “Latin Americanized” in the United States. The notion that there exists a “Latin American” type of racial structure seems inadequate. Future comparative research incorporating these nuances and rooting itself in concrete socioeconomic conditions in addition to attitudes, narratives, and discourses, would be a welcome contribution in the broader study of racial inequality.

Footnotes

Appendix

Notes

References

Almaguer

. (2012). The Latin Americanization of race relations in the United States. DuBois Review, 9(1), 227–233.

Andrews

G. R.

(2004). Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. Oxford and New York: University Press.

Bergad

L. W.

(2007). The comparative histories of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. New Approaches to the Americas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Biagas

D. E.

Bianchi

A. J.

(2016). The Latin Americanization thesis: An expectation states approach. Social Forces, 94(3), 1335–1358.

Blanco

(1948). El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico. (2nd ed.). San Juan, PR: Editorial Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños.

Bobonis

G. J.

Toro

H. J

. (2007). Modern colonization and its consequences: The effect of U.S. educational policy on Puerto Rico’s educational stratification, 1899-1910. Caribbean Studies, 35(2), 30–76.

Bonilla-Silva

. (2004). From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27(6), 931–950.

Bonilla-Silva

Dietrich

D. R.

(2009). The Latin Americanization of U.S. race relations: A new pigmentocracy. In Glenn

E. N.

(Ed.), Shades of difference: Why skin color matters (pp. 40–60). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Boxer

C. R.

(1963). Race relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

10.

Clealand

D. P.

(2017). The power of race in Cuba: Racial ideology and black consciousness during the revolution. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

11.

de la Fuente

(2001). A nation for all: Race, inequality, and politics in twentieth-century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

12.

Departamento Nacional de Estadística (Colombia). (2005). Censo general 2005: Cuestionarios. Retrieved from https://international.ipums.org/international/resources/enum_materials_pdf/enum_form_co2005a.pdf

13.

Gramlich

(2020). Black imprisonment rate in the U.S. has fallen by a third since 2006 (FactTank: News in the numbers). Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://pewrsr.ch/2zc6PKi

14.

Kinsbruner

(1996). Not of pure blood: The free people of color and racial prejudice in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

15.

Klein

H. S.

Vinson

(2007). African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. (2nd ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

16.

Lloréns

. (2020). ‘Racialization works differently here in Puerto Rico, do not bring your U.S.-centric ideas about race here!’ Black perspectives (AAIHS-African American Intellectual History Society). Retrieved from https://www.aaihs.org/racialization-works-differently-here-in-puerto-rico-do-not-bring-your-u-s-centric-ideas-about-race-here/.

17.

Loveman

(2014). National colors: Racial classification and the state in Latin America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

18.

Mahoney

(2010). Colonialism and postcolonial development: Spanish America in comparative perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.

19.

Minnesota Population Center, Institute of Geography and Statistics (Brazil), National Administrative Department of Statistics (Colombia), & Office of National Statistics (Cuba). (2019). Integrated public use microdata series, international: Version 7.2 (Brazil 2002, Colombia 2005, Cuba 2002). Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS.

20.

Muñoz Marín

(1925, April 8). Porto Rico: The American colony. The Nation, 120(3118), 379–382.

21.

Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información (Cuba). (2012). Censo de población y viviendas: Instrucciones para uso del Enumerador. Retrieved from https://international.ipums.org/international/resources/enum_materials_pdf/enum_instruct_cu2012a.pdf

22.

Oliver

M. L.

Shapiro

T. M.

(2006). Black wealth, white wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality. (10th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

23.

Paschel

. (2013). ‘The beautiful faces of my black people’: Race, ethnicity and the politics of Colombia’s 2005 census. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(10), 1544–1563.

24.

Paschel

(2018). Becoming black political subjects: movements and ethno-racial rights in Colombia and Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

25.

Prison Policy Initiative. (2004). Racial disparities in incarceration by state, 2000. Retrieved from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/statepopulations.html.

26.

Ramos Mattei

. (1982). El liberto en el régimen de trabajo azucarero de Puerto Rico, 1870-1880. In Ramos Mattei

(Ed.), Azúcar y esclavitud (pp. 91–129). Universidad de Puerto Rico.

27.

Rodriguez-Silva

I. M.

(2012). Silencing race: Disentangling blackness, colonialism, and national identities in Puerto Rico. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

28.

Ruggles

Flood

Goeken

Grover

Meyer

Pacas

… United States Census Bureau. (2020). IPUMS USA: Version 10.0 (ACS 2018, PRCS 2018). Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS.

29.

Sawyer

M. Q.

(2006). Racial politics in post-revolutionary Cuba. New York: Cambridge University Press.

30.

Shapiro

T. M.

(2004). The hidden cost of being African American: How wealth perpetuates inequality. Oxford University Press.

31.

Sue

(2009). An assessment of the Latin Americanization thesis. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 32(6), 1058–1070.

32.

Telles

E. E.

(2004). Race in another America: The significance of skin color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

33.

Telles

Flores

R. D.

Urrea-Giraldo

. (2015). Pigmentocracies: Educational inequality, skin color and census ethnoracial identification in eight Latin American countries. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 40, 39–58.

34.

United States Census Bureau. (2017). 2015 National Content test race and ethnicity analysis report (Version 1.0). Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/2020-census/planning-management/final-analysis/2015nct-race-ethnicity-analysis.html

35.

Urrea Giraldo

Viáfara López

C. A.

Viveros Vigoya

(2014). From whitened miscegenation to tri-ethnic multiculturalism: race and ethnicity in Colombia. In E. Telles & Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (Ed.), Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, race, and color in Latin America (1st ed.). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

36.

Wade

. (2009). Defining blackness in Colombia. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 95(1), 165–184.

37.

Walmsley

(2018). World prison population list (world prison brief). Institute for Criminal Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. Retrieved from https://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/wppl_12.pdf

38.

Wells

(1969). The modernization of Puerto Rico. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.