Ethnic Origin, Race and Nation in the Argentine Census, 1869-1914

OTERO, HERNAN

Socio-political Histories of Latin American Statistics

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2022; p. 123 - 149

Since the beginning in the nineteenth century, statistics in general and population censuses in particular played a central role in the symbolic definition of nation states. This universal process acquired specific characteristics in the new countries of Latin America that included diverse populations, from indigenous peoples and African population of slave origin to Europeans arriving due to mass migration. Argentina is not an exception to this trend.On the basis of this general premise, the chapter examines the symbolic mechanisms by which census takers measured these populations and defined, along with other instances of the state apparatus, a certain image of the Argentine nation and has as its central objective the long-term analysis of the racial, ethnic and migratory categories of the population. To do this, it resorts to monitoring the main links of the statistical accounting process, including the inhabitants-census takers ratio, the operational definition of the categories, the construction of classifications, and the interpretation of the results.Census measurement allows us to define an interpretive matrix characterized by both its long-term stability and its performative effects on the self-perception of individuals and of Argentine society. Although the chapter concentrates on the formative period of this matrix, the changes produced since the 2001 census by the adoption of the Anglo-Saxon model of statistical ethnicization promoted by international organizations are also explored.The chapter gives particular importance to the comparison with the measurement techniques and categories used in the United States and Canada, characterized by their greater degree of ethnicity. The invisibilization of both the indigenous and afro-descendant populations and of the migratory past of the European immigrants - whose registering as such was limited to the first generation - put forward the notion of Argentina being a ?melting pot?. This concept overcomes the latent contradiction between a liberal reading of egalitarian character in the statistical sphere and a hierarchical vision of the different races, inspired by cultural evolutionism, in the interpretative sphere.The analysis focuses on the so-called period of ?liberal statistics?, ?author statistics? or ?statistical nationalization? by using the first three national population censuses (1869, 1895, 1914). The chapter is in constant dialogue with these periodizations, which are not considered contradictory.