Collecting ethnic and racial data in censuses and surveys: Latin American experience. The cases of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru

This paper aims to analyze the experience of four Latin-American countries with different traditions and methodological perspectives on the gathering of ethnic and racial statistics of black and indigenous populations, but also of white, mestizo and Asian populations, in particular after the significant appearance in the four societies of the multicultural ideology since the mid-eighties in the 20th century until today. The choosing of these four national societies to present the Latin American experience has to do with the particular interest in the different types of ethnic-racial statistics between the four societies, which allows to have a relevant view of these type of statistics in the region, this is without saying that this is giving an account of all the countries in the region. Anyhow, we take the three societies with the major population volume in the region (Brazil, Mexico and Colombia) and with differentiated ethnic-racial patterns: Brazil has a tradition of statistics by skin color and according to the 2010 census it shows that more than half of its population self-recognized as black under two historical categories (preta and parda). On the contrary, the other three countries have built their statistics under the ethnic paradigm of the indigenous groups.