LAUSR

M ichael Rodríguez-Muñiz’s Figures of the Future is an incredibly original and innovative book that delves into the role of politics in crafting our understandings of population change. The central thesis of the book is that demographic projections are inherently political, embedded in particular social contexts, and shifting across time. Focusing specifically on Latinos, Rodríguez-Muñiz shows how Latino civil rights organizations have attempted to translate numbers into power, highlighting their increasing demographic figures with the hope for the collective power that this could create. But long-standing political backlashes that cast Latinos (and other racialized minorities) as a political threat due to their increasing numbers make the politics of numbers particularly challenging for this population, as they are constantly undertaking attempts to rebrand and revision Latino population growth in a positive light. Figures of the Future draws on an extensive range of materials from 7 years of ethnographic fieldwork. This research involved participant observation in Latino political conventions, voter registration drives, and public forums, as well as interviews with eighty participants, including political leaders, activists, volunteers, and elected officials who work in the realm of Latino civil rights issues. Finally, Rodríguez-Muñiz’s amassed an impressive range of primary documents, including print media, policy reports, infographics, and images used by Latino political activists. The first section of the book, titled “Past,” consists of two chapters. The first, “Demographic Futures Past,” sets the groundwork for understanding the historical and current politics of the fear and hope produced by the Latino demographic. Reaching back to writings from the eighteenth century, RodríguezMuñiz details what he terms the long-standing “white demodystopia,” where white political figures have continually constructed fear around the increasing presence of non-white populations. In the 1970s, during fears of a population boom, Latinos became targets of increasing xenophobia with continued coverage