Paper short abstract:

Striping away ambivalence by configuring race and ethnicity as stable categories discretely bounded for the purpose of rule is one of the most obvious outcomes of the census. Nevertheless, the Census 2010 introduced a novelty in racial ascription: the option of being —“some other race”. Hence, we will examine how enumerators and respondents dialogically utilized this category to construe Portuguese speakers as “some other race”.

Paper long abstract:

All national census, particularly the American, play a pivotal role in substantiating

boundaries of identity by quantifying its internal racialized others. In so doing, the statistical production of racial and ethnic categories remains the most political aspect of census design. While most anthropologists have analyzed the effects of the census in inventing, reinforcing, and excluding certain racial and ethnic identities from the national imaginary; rarely have they actually conducted ethnographic observations on how the census itself is answered.

Particularly, rarely do we question what cultural and linguistic patterns shape contact between respondent and enumerator thereby affecting respondent's answers contributing to the counting or miscounting of the nations' others? Furthermore, how are answers about race and ethnicity decided when respondents do not understand the census categories? This paper will be based on ethnographic research about the enumerating process during US Census 2010 in Southern New England, specifically targeting Portuguese monolingual households. This research was integrated into a larger national project entitled Observing Census Enumeration of Non-English-speaking Households in the 2010 Census, which was sponsored by the research division of the US Census bureau.

Striping away ambivalence by configuring race and ethnicity as stable categories discretely bounded for the purpose of rule is one of the most obvious outcomes of the census. Nevertheless, the Census 2010 introduced a novelty in racial ascription: the option of being —"some other race". Hence, we will examine how enumerators and respondents dialogically utilized this category to construe Portuguese speakers as "some other race".