ABSTRACT
During the past few decades social movements organized around social identities based on ethnic and racial categories have surged to the front of national politics in Latin America. Categories such as blanco, negro, mestizo, indigena (to name only a few) are deployed, learned and contested in the context of all kinds of concrete struggles over land, community, autonomy, memory, and more. One key arena in which these cultural battles are played out is the census. Censuses are made by rulers to count people, places and things over which they rule and for arranging the disposition of things (people, objects, social relations) within territories.1 Knowledge of land tenure, production, able-bodied men and the like is useful to those who hope to collect taxes, raise armies, fight opponents both within the group and without and otherwise take advantage of the human and natural resources of the world. Such knowledge, when public, serves to generate ideas among the very people who are counted. Furthermore, the taking of censuses is a public display of the reach and grasp of government, for a state must already be consolidated enough to deploy a large number of agents in the job of surveying, questioning, describing, and recording. Censuses thus both contribute to, and demonstrate, power.2 It is no wonder, then, that the categories measured by the census are hotly contested.3
