Abstract
Demographic statistics about the racial make-up of the nation regularly garner public attention in the United States, and even Census Bureau classification procedures can make headlines. Journalists and op-ed writers amply covered the introduction of multiple-race self-identification on the 2000 census and have already begun to weigh in on the potential inclusion of a “Hispanic or Latino” checkbox on the 2020 census race question. Despite the attention they attract, however, such revisions are basically tweaks to a question that has inhabited the census continuously since its inception in 1790, in pretty much the same format for the last 150 years.
Much more sweeping changes have transformed census-taking in Latin America, as Mara Loveman makes amply clear in National Colors. In particular, she introduces three striking empirical puzzles that deserve serious attention from scholars of race, ethnicity, demography, scientific knowledge, nation-building, and historical and comparative sociology. First, when the Iberian empires gave way to the independent Latin American nations we recognize today, why did these new states mostly retain the old colonial census approach of enumerating people by race, even as they rejected so many other imperial trappings? Second, why did the overwhelming majority of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin American countries give up racial classification in the mid-twentieth century? And finally, in yet another sea change, why did the same nations return to official ethnoracial enumeration by the early twenty-first century?
Loveman’s answers to these questions are groundbreaking because she eschews the usual national case-study approach to understanding official classification schemes. Instead, she recognizes that focusing solely on Bolivia or Argentina would miss a continent-wide movement that helps explain the changes of statistical regime. Equally important, she brings in international actors as a crucial part of the story, whether in the guise of international statistical congresses, multilateral development organizations, potential immigrants, race scientists, or an imagined community of arbiters of national progress and modernity. This widening of the scope is accomplished through an extraordinary analysis of ethnoracial classification in 19 Latin American nations over more than two centuries, grounded in census questionnaires and reports as well as a wide range of elite commentary on enumeration and race from within and beyond the western hemisphere.
In a project as ambitiously wide-ranging as this, it is not surprising that the attention to detail and depth of historical research that characterizes so much of National Colors is not evenly distributed throughout. This is particularly apparent in the attention the author pays to cultural beliefs about human difference. In her earlier chapters, Loveman very effectively draws on wonderfully rich material like the colonial castas paintings and the writings of early national figures to illustrate how actors other than census-takers thought about the nature of indigeneity and blackness. As she moves forward in time, however, that cultural backdrop seems to vanish, and we are left with little but census reports and international organization plans to surmise how Indians, Afrodescendants, and Asians were seen in Latin American societies. In my view, this thinning of the data leaves open important questions. For example, how did indigenous people come to be seen as “members of collective units” (p. 61), demarcated by cultural practices, while Afrodescendants were associated with bodily difference; and how old or sustained was this distinction in the popular imagination? What kind of ideological contortions had to pave the way from a colonial belief in the indelible stain of blackness to a late nineteenth-century hope that European immigration could whiten it away? And finally, what was significant about a new, twentieth-century embrace of mestizaje as a desirable end state, when the mestizo was envisioned as “more European-like than not” (p. 232)? To be fair, these kinds of questions, more than detracting from the quality of the work, speak to its richness; Loveman gives the reader so much well-written, clearly organized, and impressively researched material that any gaps provoke a sincere, engaged curiosity about what seems to go unanswered. And because the book provides so much food for thought about Latin Americans’ conceptualizations of ethnoracial difference, it is difficult not to want more exploration of the cultural past and its reverberations today.
For example, Loveman cites a Panamanian census advertisement entitled “Proudly Afrodescendant” in which five individuals declare themselves either “black” or “Afrodescendant,” with the last announcing as she shimmies, “I can’t resist the beat of the drum…that doesn’t lie: I’m black.” What does being black mean in this national census spot? The speakers vary in their somatic features, dress, and language (one speaks English), so they appear neither phenotypically nor culturally homogeneous. Is “Afrodescent” then a Latin American version of the U.S. one-drop rule—an essence that is awakened by the call of a drum?
This passing resemblance between U.S. and Latin American classificatory norms illustrates one of the most fascinating questions raised by National Colors: the prospect of a pan-American convergence in ethnoracial classification regimes. Although this book focuses on Latin America specifically, Loveman locates it within a broader inquiry “into how, why, and with what consequences the meanings of race, national identity, and the relationship between them differ across the Americas” (p. xiii). The parallels between North America, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America are deeply resonant both historically and today. Our nations share not only a foundational demographic past of European imperialism, indigenous subjugation, and African enslavement, but also a close historical involvement with emerging folk and scientific notions of race, especially as they informed taxonomic and census representations.
This common past was highlighted when the Caribbean nations of Barbados, Bahamas, and Jamaica joined Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and other members of the Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos as signatories to the 2008 Cartagena Declaration promoting an Afrodescendant agenda for the entire Americas. And, as my own research shows, the Western hemisphere’s embrace of census racial classification distinguishes us from much of the rest of the world. Finally, the contemporary movement of people and ideas across the Americas brings their approaches to ethnoracial classification even closer together. National Colors chronicles a new Latin American embrace of census categories and questions that would not be unfamiliar to North Americans; and, at the same time, Loveman rightly notes that the U.S. census has become more Latin American—that is, open to recognizing mixture or mestizaje—by permitting individuals to check more than one race box (as is true in Canada as well).
U.S. discourse and policy on racial classification and affirmative action have had an impact in Brazil, while sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva detects a “Latin Americanization” of U.S. race relations. And the major presence of people of Latin American origin in the United States is at the heart of current Census Bureau planning about how best to enumerate the population by race and ethnicity in the 2020 census. Indeed, accurately counting the very groups that have become newly visible on Latin American censuses—namely “Afro-Latinos” and “Central or South American Indians”—is a key concern for U.S. census officials. It is precisely this fascinating panorama of interplay across national borders among “terms people use and the concepts they invoke as they do things with categories” (p. 38) that Mara Loveman’s National Colors opens up before us.