This talk will focus on the disposability of race and non-white peoples in Latin American censuses. Colonial census officials were vitally interested in racial identities, but national governments gradually eliminated race from national censuses in the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. Over the last thirty years, black and indigenous movements have demanded the inclusion of racial data in the census; those data now constitute a rich source of information and raise new questions about black and indigenous life in the region.