The Minimization of Indigenous Numbers and the Fragmentation of Civil Society in the 2010 Census in Ecuador

Abstract

This article takes a historical approach to understand how ethnicity and race have been measured in the 2010 census in Ecuador. The history of census taking in Ecuador reveals a strategy of social control through the minimization of indigenous numbers. This strategy does not only originate in the state, but also within the indigenous group that has not revealed itself for a number of reasons such as well-founded suspicion, discrimination, and its associated effects of identity hiding or shedding. In addition, international organizations and the Ecuadorian state have favored the visibility of other minority groups to further lessen the importance of indigenous claims in a context in which the indigenous movement has been the main organized constituency resisting the government's development policies. The article also shows a shift around the year 2000 from Latin American understandings of difference to lighter neoliberal concepts of race, some of them of North American influence.

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