Recent scholarship suggests that the production of population knowledge throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be read as a vehicle of (re)producing colonial/metropolitan orders. In such corpus, modalities of difference, such as race, are posited as technologies of governing and heuristic instrument in the colonies as well as in the metropolis This research aims at contributing to this scholarship by exploring the population categories used in the first population surveys in the Spanish Americas throughout the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries.