Abstract
The chapter starts with Colombia’s 2005 Census, which broke new grounds in ethnic-racial counting. It then reviews how authorities and experts measured racial demography and mixedness from colonial times through the twentieth century, focusing on census and survey practice, and touching on citizen identity cards. In 1991, Colombia was constitutionally defined as pluriethnic, and census and survey practice shifted accordingly, with a key milestone being the 2005 Census. The data produced by this shift are critically reviewed, noting when and how mixedness is measured. The chapter ends with an assessment of recent attempts in genomic science to measure mixedness in terms of genetic ancestry, and it emphasizes the difference between genetic profiles and social identities.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Purity of blood’ was defined in fifteenth-century Spain to mean being without raza de judío o moro (Jewish or Moorish ancestry) and was gradually extended in the Americas to include indigenous and African ancestry. Purity of blood was needed to access certain opportunities (the clergy, universities, certain guilds) and to testify to noble status, which was vital to elite marriage arrangements (Martínez 2008).
- 2.
Clergy were also counted separately.
- 3.
In 1892, a partial special census of indigenous communities was carried out (DANE 1998, p. 19).
- 4.
People living in areas identified as predominantly indigenous were subject to a special questionnaire that asked about indigenous language speaking, a procedure that had also been adopted for the 1985 census.
- 5.
Pueblo means village, community, or town, but also nation or people (in the sense of both nation-state and ethnic group).
- 6.
San Andrés and Providencia are Colombian island territories off the coast of Nicaragua, which were settled in the nineteenth century by white English-speakers and their slaves. The islands’ native inhabitants (raizales or rooted ones) are traditionally anglophone and mainly black.
- 7.
Palenque de San Basilio is a village not far from the Caribbean port city of Cartagena. Historically, it was a maroon community and remains culturally and linguistically distinctive to this day. Some of its members have been influential in the Afro-Colombian social movement.
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Wade, P. (2020). Colombia: The Meaning and Measuring of Mixedness. In: Rocha, Z.L., Aspinall, P.J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22874-3_10
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