Todos Contamos : Mapping the Statistical Visibility of the African Diaspora in Twenty-First-Century Latin America

This article provides a comparative analysis of the taxonomies and categorical frameworks used to identify Afro-descendant populations in Latin America across the 2010 and 2020 census rounds. These rounds mark the first time in the region’s postcolonial history that all countries included at least one ethno-racial question targeting Afro-descendants. The results suggest that most national statistical offices elicit responses from Afro-descendants through a multicultural approach to enumeration, including questions on ancestry, cultural customs, and group belonging. Conversely, many of these ethnic -based question formulations paradoxically employ racial categories to classify Afro-descendant responses, such as negro, mulato, and moreno. These findings suggest that the growing statistical visibility of Afro-descendants in the region is partly shaped by negotiations between national statistical offices and stakeholders over categories that render Afro-descendant populations identifiable to the state as distinct ethno-racial groups. These negotiations have significant implications in a region where census classifications often serve as a basis for securing identity-based collective rights and legal protections under a “new Latin American constitutionalism,” in which Afro-descendants seemingly must rearticulate their relationships with the state from “a rubric of race to one of ethnicity.”