This paper will show that the Census Bureau has captured Arabs and other Middle Eastern and North Africans (MENA) not only numerically as part of the “white” race but more significantly through language, ancestry, place of birth and parents’ place of birth. In terms of language, in 1910, 1920, and 1930 census-takers checked off boxes that reflected official recognitions of languages spoken at home that included Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian as well as “Near East Arabic dialects”. Since 1980, the census has coded answers to language questions in a document called the SF4, which includes similar linguistic identifiers: Arabic, Assyrian, Berber, Farsi, Hebrew and Turkish. Linguistic answers are designed to identify a household’s “mother tongue” yet often double as ethnic identifiers that point to the presence of minority populations from the region residing in the U.S. In terms of ancestry groupings, country of “last residence” (for immigration) and “place of birth” (for naturalization) were recorded by immigration authorities. Before the 1930 Census, immigrants from the Ottoman Empire were considered from Turkey and when the Ottoman Empire officially ended, new labels of Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Palestinian were used to denote “place of birth” and “place of parent’s birth” in the census. From 1980 on, the Census recorded self-provided “ancestry” in codes that derived from the 1930 “place of birth” categories thus aligning classifications of ethnicity or ancestry according with previous state-imposed categories. For example, in a 2003 Census report, “Arab population by ancestry” was defined as eighteen countries as well as Arab or Arabic, Middle Eastern and North African in addition to Berber, Alhuceman, Bedouin and Rio de Oro. Like Foucault, I believe that historical sources in the form of both linguistic and ancestry coding can shed light on contemporary issues and be part of a current intervention. Research in the archives at the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Archives at College Park, and the Library of Congress as well as in online databases are able to provide information that highlights the historical role of the official demographic records in identifying and labeling the composition and diversity of MENA groups in the United States. Such an analysis will contribute to understandings of the precursors to an identified MENA designation in the 2020 U.S. Census.