How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification

Abstract

According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Rico's whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a “surplus” of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shifting-an expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

More than a Million New American Indians in 2000: Who Are They?

“…Social theorists describe how group boundaries are constructed, negotiated, maintained, and moved by people and institutions both inside and outside of the group (Alba and Nee 2003;Barth 1969;Loveman and Muniz 2007;Omi and population (as shown here) will not make misleading comparisons between the two populations.…”

“…More educated people give more complex responses to ancestry questions (Lieberson and Waters 1993), though welleducated Latinos can be unlikely to report Latino origin (Duncan and Trejo 2011) and may be perceived as non-minority by others (Loveman and Muniz 2007). Unfortunately, we cannot separate these dynamics.…”

A resurgence of black identity in Brazil? Evidence from an analysis of recent censuses

“…7 Following previous studies of racial reclassification in Brazil, the residual method is used below to make inferences about the number of individuals that have changed their racial self-identification over their life course between two consecutive censuses. This technique has been used to investigate racial and ethnic reclassification in different societies, such as in the study of preference for whiteness in Puerto Rico (Loveman and Muniz 2007), the growth of the Irish and Native-American populations in the United States (Hout and Goldstein 1994;Passel 1976Passel , 1997, and the decline of the Mexicanorigin population in that same country (Alba and Islam 2009).…”

Introduction: Race, Genetics, and Disease

“…Sociologists have argued that race and ethnicity should be conceptualized in relational, processual, dynamic, and disaggregated terms (Blumer, 1958) and have studied race and ethnicity as cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, contingent practices, or political projects (Omi & Winant, 1994;López, 1996;Davis, 2001;Brubaker et al, 2004). Several studies have examined differences in race classification schemes between countries or cultures or within a particular nation over time (Telles, 2004;Loveman & Muniz, 2008). Within STS, for example, Bowker & Star (1999) have examined the many inconsistencies between official and practical interpretations of race classifications in apartheid South Africa.…”