Official Ethnoracial Categorization in the Dominican Republic

My current research project seeks to understand what motivates census planners of the Dominican Republic to include and exclude ethnoracial categories from the Dominican national census. As such, the purpose of the research trip was twofold: to collect archival data on documents pertaining to the planning of the Dominican national census and to interview key informants of the census office about the planning of the national census. Although I have traveled to the Dominican Republic on numerous occasions in the past, this is the first time I traveled to this country for research. Overall, I was able to conduct two interviews and was able to access some archival documents pertaining to the planning of the Dominican census for the 2010 census round. I was hoping to collect more archival materials, and especially from previous years, but the Dominican census office only started to properly archive these documents in 2010. To scholars studying the census in Latin America, I suggest contacting the census office weeks in advance of your trip and communicating clearly the kinds of documents you are looking for. It also takes some time to schedule interviews with census officials, so initiating contact before your trip can accelerate the recruitment and interview process. Finally, the findings of this research will be used to write my MA thesis. I have plans to return to the Dominican Republic in December 2019 to finalize data collection.