UCLA

Since the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century, people of African descent in Latin America have experienced different forms of demographic visibility in colonial and republican censuses: visible under the Spanish imperial rule, invisible after independence and much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and visible again during the last thirty years. Why did the majority of the Afrodescendant population in Latin America disappear from the censuses after independence and reappear again after the 1990 census round? To answer this question, the dissertation focuses on Mexico and Colombia as two different cases in the institutionalization of ethnoracial categories of people of African descent in Latin America. Whereas Blackness in Mexico was institutionalized as an element extrinsic to the national imaginary of the population, in Colombia, Blackness was conceived as an intrinsic component of the national demography. The dissertation suggests that the statistical representation of people of African descent was neither the demographic fate of the under-politicized accounts that reify the numeric representation of the population nor the demographic instrument of the over-politicized accounts that fail to recognize the limitations of numeric manipulation. Instead, the demography of Afrodescendant populations in Mexico and Colombia is conceptualized as a relatively uncontrolled translation of the objectified outcomes of past and present political struggles that are then embedded in census words and numbers. Using a mixed-methods research design that combines data from archival sources, published materials, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observations, the dissertation develops two comparisons: an intra-imperial comparison of the official categorization of Blackness in the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Viceroyalty New Granada during the late eighteenth century, and an inter-national comparison of recent episodes of census politics in Mexico and Colombia during the last thirty years. The first comparison shows how the intra-imperial politics of extraction and coercion shaped the demographic representation of Afrodescendent populations, with enduring consequences for the future independent nations. The second comparison demonstrates how the configuration of the political space of categorization struggles in Colombia and Mexico shaped the demographic representation of ethnoracial inequalities affecting people of African descent in each country.