Making Ethnicity Count: Bureaucratic Experimentation and the Inclusion of Ethnoracial Categories in Peru’s Census

Alonso Burgos Cisneros, Johns Hopkins University

National censuses translate social realities into standardized statistical classifications, but ethnoracial categories are socially and politically contested. This study examines how Peru’s state statistical agencies institutionalized contested ethnoracial categories through bureaucratic experimentation, an iterative process of piloting, testing, and refining categories in household surveys that legitimizes contested categories and facilitates their inclusion. When racialized social movements push for recognition and elites guided by colorblind ideologies resist ethnoracial inclusion, agencies may channel contested claims into technical procedures. This transforms political demands into statistical evidence and generates a negotiated feedback loop. Social movements, other state agencies, and multilateral organizations can mobilize the resulting data for advocacy, program design, and policy interventions, producing outcomes not fully anticipated by the state. These efforts depend on agencies’ technical capacity, skilled personnel, autonomy from the central government, and support from multilateral organizations and alliances with social movements. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous and Afro-Peruvian leaders, state officials, and multilateral representatives, along with documents, media sources, and longitudinal survey data (ENAHO 2004–2024), I trace four phases. Early advocacy by Afro-Peruvian movements (1990–1993) failed to include ethnoracial questions in the 1993 census. ENAHO pilots between 2000 and 2011 refined questions, but the 2007 census still excluded them. During the 2013–2017 Institutionalization phase, agencies and social movements included a self-identification question in the 2017 census. In the post-census period (2018–2024), external actors mobilized these categories, producing unintended consequences: Afro-Peruvian identification increased, Indigenous identification fluctuated, the state institutionalized colorblind categories such as mestizo, and both Afro-Peruvian and Indigenous movements gained limited political representation despite greater visibility. These findings show that bureaucratic experimentation legitimizes contested categories and facilitates their inclusion, producing official knowledge that is co-produced, negotiated, and actionable, and offer insights into how such processes can support the institutionalization of other socially and politically contested classifications.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 205. Racial Classification, Census Politics, and Jim Crow