ABSTRACT
The conquest and the colonial period drew together Europeans, indigenous peoples, and African slaves with quite different racial and cultural backgrounds. Unlike in North America, where many make rigid distinctions based on skin color and other overt physical traits – what is known as phenotype – these differences are less rigid in LAC, where phenotype alone is not the determining factor in racial or ethnic identities and classifications. This chapter explores the multiple meanings of, and overlap between, race and ethnicity. I begin by first reviewing how anthropologists and other social scientists have theorized race. After explaining the intrinsic ambiguity and elasticity of colonial racial taxonomies, I focus on how questions on race have become less meaningful in national censuses, and how those on ethnicity/ethnic background, increasingly more important. This background is important for understanding, in the subsequent section, the remarkable rise of indigenous movements, as in Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia. Using Mexico and Brazil as examples, I then explore how the “new genetics” has led to a revival of racialized thinking and analyses. I conclude this chapter by probing the construction of the “Hispanic/Latino” category by the US Census Bureau.
