THE U.S. CENSUS AND THE CONTESTED RULES OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION IN EARLY TWENTIETH - CENTURY PUERTO RICO

Résumé 0

"Official census results for many Latin American countries in the early twentieth century show gradually whitening national populations. Puerto Rican censuses in this period reveal a similar whitening trend. In Puerto Rico, uniquely and counter-intuitively, such statistics were generated by the U.S. Census Bureau, an agency institutionally committed to a restrictive definition of whiteness. Using new data from the 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rican censuses, this article analyzes the administrative practices that underlay Puerto Rico's whitening census results. Juxtaposition of (1) the U.S. Census Bureau's official enumerator instructions; (2) Puerto Rican enumerators' de facto classificatory practices, and (3) Puerto Rican census supervisors' post-enumeration edits of enumerators' work, reveals that census-taking was a site of active contestation over the demarcation of racial boundaries in Puerto Rico under U.S. colonial rule. Puerto Rican enumerators often departed from their official instructions in reporting the race of fellow Puerto Ricans, and they did so much more in 1920 than in 1910. Supervisors, meanwhile, worked to enforce the Census Bureau's classificatory rules through posthoc "correction" of enumerators' work. The intra-agency struggle over the racial classification of Puerto Ricans in the census resulted in a de facto rejection of the Census Bureau's criteria for defining whiteness coupled with a tacit acceptance of the United States of America's systematic privileging of whiteness."