title: Demographic knowledge and nation-building: the Peruvian census of 1940.
abstract: The demographers who organized the 1940 census of Peru portrayed the increasingly mixed-race Peruvian population as indicative of the breaking down of cultural barriers to the emergence of a robust Peruvian identity, a process that, they claimed, would lead to greater national development. This paper analyzes the ways in which demographers constructed cultural heterogeneity as a potential national asset. This reveals how scientific knowledge of miscegenation affected the formation of a nationalist project in the second half of the twentieth century, and also how demographers' ideological commitments to socialism shaped scientific practice.
authors.affiliation: Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. raul.necochea@utoronto.ca
authors.forename: Raúl Necochea
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: López
mesh_terms: D019352:Censuses / Q000266:history*; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D003710:Demography / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D010568:Peru; D044469:Racial Groups / Q000266:history*; D012933:Social Identification