Collecting ethnic and racial data in censuses and surveys: The latin american experience in the cases of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru

The aim of this paper is to analyze the experience of four Latin-American countries with different traditions and methodological perspectives on the gathering of ethnic and racial statistics of Afrodescendant and Indigenous population groups. A particular emphasis is made on the appearance of the multicultural ideology in the four societies, since the mid 80’s, and in the 20th century until today; and on its relation to the previous frame of reference based on the ideology of miscegenation. The four societies exemplify to a fair extent the variability within the Latin American and Caribbean region on the collection of statistical data for ethnic and racial groups. We also introduce the extent to which we believe the development of the methodologies is related to the particular historical context, as grounded in long term patterns of relation between the races and ethnic groups. We take the three societies with the biggest population volume in the region (Brazil, México and Colombia), plus the Peruvian case, all of them with differentiated ethnic-racial patterns.