Assuming that a period of racial disharmony is potentially indicative of increasing salience of racial categories for social life, the issue of whether a period of racial discord is indicative of (1) a point of rapid transition in an overall trend of decreasing salience of racial categories, or (2) preliminary evidence of a general trend of the increasing importance of racial distinctiveness in social decision-making, remains to be resolved. The intent of this paper is first to ground the over-arching question of salience of racial categories in more specific traditional theory of race relations. Subsequently an example of how one can proceed to deal with the question of salience will be outlined. Generally that which is to be presented is an application of techniques to describe the form of the processes of social change. The theory that will be tested will essentially be an integration model of racial relations. The basis for application of the technique of analysis presented herein is that heretofore there has not really been a direct test of the trends predicted for and attributed to interracial relations by integration models of social change. The data looked at here are part of a two wave panel survey of the Puerto Rican labor force. The analysis is a secondary analysis of data, the first wave of which was collected in 1953-1954 and the second wave in 1967-1968. (Author/JM)