Abstract
Ethnic and socio-racial statistics constitute an essential aspect of the definition of nation in Latin American societies from the colonial period to the present. Based on the operational design of Argentina’s first three national population censuses (1869, 1895, and 1914) and a theoretical and methodological approach focused on both conceptual history and on the socio-political history of statistics, this chapter explores the measurement uses and forms of socio-ethnic, racial, and migration categories. A long-term view of this history highlights the political, ideological, and scientific foundations that guided the statistical construction of the Argentine population in each historical moment, the plurality of actors involved, and the conflicting interactions between forms of measurement, discourses, and demographic evidence.
This chapter is an updated version of the article “Estadística censal y construcción de la Nación. El caso argentino, 1869–1914,” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani, nº 16–17, 1998, 123–149.
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Notes
- 1.
See Hervé Le Bras (1988), Dora Marucco (1996), Silvana Patriarca (1996), Margo Anderson (1988), and Schor (2009) for further information on these countries. Regarding the role of censuses as makers of an image of the nation in Latin America see Hernán Otero (2018). The supremacy of imperial powers gives particular interest to Southeast Asia and colonial India, analysed by the influential text by Benedict Anderson (1983) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), respectively.
- 2.
In Argentina at the time, indigenous populations were referred to as Indians, while the word black instead of Afro-Argentine was used. These terms are employed in this chapter to reflect the perceptions of the period under analysis.
- 3.
- 4.
For a comparison with other Latin American countries see Mara Loveman (2014).
- 5.
The ‘conservative tendency’ of statistical systems derives, according to Joshua Goldstein (1990), from the need to obtain comparable results over time, making it difficult to incorporate new topics and forms of measurement. The technical staff who designed the national population censuses of the period included Diego G. De la Fuente (superintendent of the first national census, director of the 1881 census of the Province of Buenos Aires, and president of the 1895 Census Commission); Gabriel Carrasco (director of the 1887 census of the Province of Santa Fe, and member of the 1895 Census Commission); Alberto B. Martínez (member of the commission of the 1887 census of the City of Buenos Aires, director of the 1890 census of the Province of Córdoba, member of the 1895 Census Commission, and president of the 1914 Census Commission); and Francisco Latzina (director of the 1887 census of the City of Buenos Aires, and member of the 1914 Census Commission). On the range of activities carried out by the census takers, see Otero (2006), Claudia Daniel (2011), and Hernán González Bollo (2014).
- 6.
The population of the country quadrupled between 1869 and 1914.
- 7.
Although De la Fuente did not indicate the method for calculating the indigenous population, it is evident that it results from multiplying the number of men of war by a constant factor of 4 or 5 people. By 1914, the census-takers considered that the indigenous population figures from the first two censuses were much lower than reality or even simply “arbitrary” (Argentina 1916, I, 67; IV, 501, author’s translation).
- 8.
Legalism is defined as the measurement process based on the legal categories established by the state and not on the observed social practices. This trend had important effects, for example, on the measurement of marital status (Otero 2006).
- 9.
“As almost the entire Argentine population is Catholic, the census-taker will only ask the question about religion when he has reason to believe that the individual is not Catholic” (Argentina 1898, II, CXXI, author’s translation). The conversion of Indians to Catholicism established by the constitution could not but reinforce this trend.
- 10.
- 11.
The issue was an important topic of debate as Sauze’s thesis shows (L. Sauze, Las tribus salvajes ante el derecho internacional, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1873, referenced in Biagini 1995, 69).
- 12.
International emigration was not contemplated. Naturally, the logic of the classification meant that Indians abroad were not Argentines, as were the Argentines abroad, who were estimated or counted in the three censuses (Otero 2006).
- 13.
The omission of the race category in 1869 was an important decision since colour was recorded by the Statistical Registry and by the censuses of both the city and the province of Buenos Aires until the 1880s. Race was also accounted for in contemporary censuses in the United States and Brazil.
- 14.
With few exceptions (Uruguayans, Spanish, French, and Italians), the number of foreigners accounted for in the 1887 census of the City of Buenos Aires was smaller than that of the black population.
- 15.
George Andrews (1989, 94, author’s translation) argues that the disappearance of the black population was not the consequence of higher mortality but the result of several factors: the loss of their proportional weight in the face of the migratory avalanche and the “hypothesis of statistical transfers” since official sources would not have reflected “exactly the racial realities of the city.” This would have made possible, according to the author, a whitening in two phases: self-identification of blacks as mixed-race to escape race prejudice followed by the transfer of the mixed-race population to the white category.
- 16.
On the differences between social Darwinism and cultural evolutionism see Lilia Schwarcz (1993). In the Brazilian case analysed by the author, the predominance of social Darwinism gave rise to a fairly generalised view of missigenaçao (miscegenation) as one of the main ills of the population, a pessimistic view that contrasts with the optimism Argentine census-takers had concerning the so-called melting pot.
- 17.
Despite its underreporting, the share of indigenous peoples in 1914 was 4.7 per thousand inhabitants, while the Scandinavians amounted to 0.6 per thousand.
- 18.
Argentina (1898, II, tables XVIII y XVII, respectively).
- 19.
The lack of information on the size of the properties, the concept of ‘average ownership’, and the lack of consideration of the age of Argentines and foreigners contributed to artificially increasing the proportion of successful foreigners (Otero 2006).
- 20.
On the logic of the Japanese system, still present in the 1987 census, see Goldstein (1990).
- 21.
“Legajo de Entrada y Salidas de Pasajeros, 1841–1860,” Archivo General de la Nación (author’s translation).
- 22.
Referring to the 1910 US census, Alberto B. Martínez stated that “the question about the colour or race of the inhabitants, and the place of birth of the father and mother of the registered person in the United States census are not important to us because, happily, we do not experience either a worrying racial question nor are our ethnic roots still so deep that they impose on us the need to investigate the origin of foreigners” (Argentina 1916, I, 41, author’s translation).
- 23.
The question on language is not secondary. As the National Indigenous Census illustrates, a significant share of indigenous peoples from the provinces of Chaco and Misiones did not speak Spanish as late as 1965. The same conclusion can be reached if the regions that practice bilingualism are considered; for example, the wide area where guaraní was spoken.
- 24.
- 25.
The shares of people who self-identified as indigenous and Afro-descendant in the 2010 Argentine census were 2.4 and 0.4%, respectively, much lower than those of other countries in the region. On the reincorporation of these categories from the 2001 census, see Luis Angosto Ferrández et al. (2012) and, above all, Loveman (2014), who proposes a long-term view for Latin America as a whole, while also paying attention to the influence of external factors, which are more difficult to perceive in the case studies.
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Otero, H. (2022). Ethnic Origin, Race, and Nation in the Argentine Censuses, 1869–1914. In: Lanata-Briones, C.T., Estefane, A., Daniel, C.J. (eds) Socio-political Histories of Latin American Statistics. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87714-9_5
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