Racial census undercounts in Latin America lead to denied state resources and legal standing

Evidence

So race in post-abolition Latin America has factored centrally and more or less self-consciously into the project of nation-building. Nations either were articulated by leading national(ist) intellectuals as “a new race” (Freyre, for example, concerning Brazil, or Vasconcelos’s “La raza cosmica” in the case of Mexico) or as incorporating all members of the population, regardless of race, into the national body. The nation, in this formulation, was to be raceless (as in Jose Marti’s conception in the Cuban case). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1210 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The real innovation of the census-takers of the 1870s was, therefore, not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification. Precolonial rulers in the Malayo-Javanese world had attempted enumerations of the populations under their control, but these took the form of tax-rolls and levy-lists. Their purposes were concrete and specific: to keep track of those on whom taxes and military conscription could effectively be imposed – for these rulers were interested solely in economic surplus and armable manpower. Early European regimes in the region did not, in this respect, differ markedly from their predecessors. But after 1850 colonial authorities were using increasingly sophisticated administrative means to enumerate populations, including the women and children (whom the ancient rulers had always ignored), according to a maze of grids which had no immediate financial or military purpose. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 652 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Only five Latin American states census by African-descended self-classification; Refusing to count by race masks ongoing structural racial restriction; Latin American marginalization of blackness operated informally through class rather than legislation (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Latin American nations were deliberately constructed as raceless or new-race projects #complicates (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1210
• Quantifying censuses broke with precolonial counts that served only taxation and conscription #complicates (0.74) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 652