How Everyday Forms of Racial Categorization Survived Imperialist Censuses in Puerto Rico (1st ed. 2021)

Synopsis

This book examines the history of racial classifications in Puerto Rico censuses, starting with the Spanish censuses and continuing through the US ones. Because Puerto Rican censuses were collected regularly over hundreds of years, they are fascinating “test cases” to see what census categories might have been available and effective in shaping everyday ones. Published twentieth-century censuses have been well studied, but this book also examines unpublished documents in previous centuries to understand the historical precursors of contemporary ones. State-centered theories hypothesize that censuses, especially colonial ones, have powerful transformative effects. In contrast, this book shows that such transformations are affected by the power and interests of social actors, not the strength of the state. Thus, despite hundreds of years of exposure to the official dichotomous and trichotomous census categories, these categories never replaced the continuous everyday ones because the census categories rarely coincided with Puerto Rican’s interests.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9783030825188

Related ISBNs:

9783030825171

Publisher:

Springer International Publishing

Date of Addition:

10/31/21

Copyrighted By:

The Author

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Social Studies, Philosophy, Politics and Government, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.