Ricardo de Sampaio Dagnino

Latin America has tried to cope with ethnicity and race issues since the beginning of the colonization process till current days, therefore, how to collect this information is also a sensible point on census matter. Additionally, different countries build their racial and ethnical identity based on different criteria. From that we built an analysis of the criteria used by the last two Censuses round of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador in South America. For that, initially, census criteria used to represent ethnic and racial categories in those four countries were assembled into a comparative table. Following it were assessed the constitutional and law changes concerning ethnical and racial issue, alongside the social movements/civil society demands for the same period. It made possible seeking the changes on census criteria for ethnic and racial data collection within and among those countries, highlighting the differences on how each country officially deal with their population diversity, as much as the legal disposition and census criteria intertwining changes. The results lead us to the main argument of the text: racial and ethnical data are a product of constitutional disposition reviews motivated by social demands and political relations in a very controversial environment.

In this paper a method for increasing the resolution of census data is tested and presented, by aggregating the data onto a regular grid. The methodology consists of (1) the aggregation of households, represented by their geographical coordinates obtained by the 2007 Population Count, carried out by the Brazilian Census Office (IBGE) and, (2) the unbundling of the data by census tracts on the basis of proportionality. The grids obtained were used to estimate the resident population of 114 conservation units in Brazilian Legal Amazon, all of them instituted in or before 2006. The intention was to test this methodology on territorial units that follow neither the official political-administrative boundaries of states and cities, nor the boundaries designed by IBGE for collecting data. The methodology also contributes to the study of populations living in protected areas, due to the scarcity of population estimates in the conservation units. The results showed a population of 325,398 inhabitants in the selected units, 297,693 of whom were in units for Sustainable Use and 27,705 in Permanent Protection units. Adjoining areas have an estimated joint population of 1,020,237. Despite the limitations involved in using the 2007 Population Count, the aggregating of data into grids would seem to be a promising methodology in view of the improvements in IBGE's use of geotechnology. The grid minimizes problems that come up in the use of administrative units or census data and may represent an approach that can be applied usefully in demography and other areas of knowledge.