Race, 'culture,' and mestizaje: The statistical construction of the Ecuadorian nation, 1930-1950

This article analyzes two statistical projects carried out in Ecuador: social reformer Dr. Pablo Arturo Suarez' 1934 study of peasant and worker living conditions, and the first national census of 1950. These projects are analyzed to reveal the cultural and political conceptions of those who produced them, anxieties about the prospects for national development, and new categories of social identity under construction. They were instrumental in constituting specific notions of the nature of the national population, in which problems of race were simultaneously accentuated and denied. As such, they were part of the process of constructing a national ideology of mestizaje in Ecuador.