Statistics, generated by censuses, represent knowledge of society and environment used in
the government of complex hierarchical societies. In this article we discuss the changing
ways that censuses have reflected and constructed corporeal and cultural difference in
Mexico. We show that shifts in conceptualizing and identifying racial and ethnic groups in
Mexico are associated with larger social dynamics, and our history of these determinations
is organized according to a series of periods—colonial, mercantile; Porfirian; revolutionary; …

Foucault stimulated much of the recent historiography of statistics by outlining the
connections between statistics and the art of government in modernity. 5 Statistics generates
the data, analytical techniques, and terrain of intervention for government, which has
gradually permeated the state and its functions since the eighteenth century, and has
identified new objects of analysis and new planes of intervention such as the economy and
population. Understanding and managing epidemics, commodity flows, or the social groups …