Making it Count
In a pandemic, the in-person outreach became a challenge for census advocates who'd planned on a busy summer of visits to crowded parks and festivals. Photo courtesy of LUPE
as the 2020 united states census approaches its end date, latino activists in south texas continue heroic efforts against fear, silence and a pandemic to make sure everyone gets counted.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to the 2020 United States Census was this year’s horrific restrictions on normalcy that COVID-19 brought to Americans´ lives. This one thing left promoters and organizers of the census without one of the most vital tools it uses every decade to survey the nation: face-to-face meetings.
In normal times, census takers would have six months to go from door to door to households that did not complete the self-response forms mailed earlier this year. Activists would have been able to promote the census after religious services, at bazaars, concerts and supermarkets -- key places where Latinos congregate.
But 2020 has been very different and the census count was only on the streets and in homes for two months.
Activists in south Texas have nonetheless taken on the marathon task of counting every person possible. They know that what’s at stake is the flow of funds for at least 16 federal programs over the next 10 years. This is why census takers went the extra miles in this difficult year to poll residents in a swath of Texas where 25% of the state’s population lives, yet more than 60% of the households do not have access to the Internet.
From Medicaid to CHIP, including child care programs and housing, the census also determines the number of seats in Congress and the number of electoral votes in each state, as well as resources for highways, schools and hospitals. Even in a pandemic, work assistance programs, services for the disabled and government stimulus checks go out to households and agencies based on census data.
According to a study by the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, Texas receives a little more than $400 billion in federal funds per year, thanks to the census numbers obtained in 2010. An undercount of just 1% would mean the state would lose $300 million per year over the next decade.
Data from the Texas Demographic Center in Houston, show that, since 2010, Hispanics have accounted for 53% of the total population growth.
Despite this strong presence, the undercount in these communities is rampant and promoters, in recent weeks, have doubled efforts to get more people to fill out the census questionnaire.
The census count must end on October 5. According to federal data, only 62% of Texas households have so-far completed the self-response census on-line, slightly under the national average of 66.4%.
Despite barriers throughout 2020, three census activists worked tirelessly to help Latino families respond.
Juanita Valdez-Cox (center), executive director of La Unión del Pueblo Entero, during a zoom call with locals who promoted the census in San Juan, Texas, with the campaign "Yo cuento" -- "I count." Photo courtesy of LUPE
Juanita Valdez-Cox takes her census message to the fields.
Juanita Valdez-Cox, the voice of 2,000 immigrant families
The shout Yo cuento! -- I count! -- replaced Loteria! among players of Censo-Lote, an imitation of the Mexican board game in community centers across the Rio Grande Valley. For a year now, activists of LUPE (La Unión del Pueblo Entero) used the Censo-Lote board game, with its colored cards and educational descriptions to promote the census in one of the poorest and most undercounted border areas in the country. This is where about nine of every 10 residents is Latino.
“Instead of the lottery images, all the Censo-Lote cards taught about the Census, what it means for our areas every 10 years and the importance of counting 100% of us,” said Juanita Valdez-Cox, executive director of LUPE, speaking from her home in Donna, Texas, just eight miles from the Mexican border. The 72-year-old Valdez-Cox, who has fought tirelessly for the rights of Hispanics for 40 years, worked side-by-side with the emblematic leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers.
“Families played the Censo-Lote at home, under a tree, in a park,” Valez-Cox said. “Then, by the third week of March, the coronavirus hit and we thought, what do we do now?”
Since then, Juanita and an army of LUPE volunteers have fanned out across four counties on the Texas-Mexico border (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Wellesley), where 2,000 immigrant families live. They’ve employed a number of creative tools to promote the 10-year census.
To follow social distancing, they caravanned through neighborhoods promoting the self-response phase of the census with loudspeakers and big plastic sign boards on their cars. They brought WiFi hotspots to rural areas, where community leaders trained by LUPE helped families respond to the online version of the survey, on tablets that some schools provided to children. They held children’s drawing contests, honoring kids whose art showed their family being counted; and schools that counted the largest number of families in their group received $1,000 scholarships.
When people go to pick up bags of food at churches and food banks, volunteers leave census pamphlets, in English and Spanish. An immigration lawyer answered questions via Zoom weekly, broadcasts that featured census messages.
“We’re a high coronavirus infection area and for many undocumented people who cannot access federal aid, we where the ones raising funds for them,” Valdez-Cox said. “It is said that farmworkers are essential, but there were no face masks or gloves for them…When we gave them these products or prepaid cards for paying rent or electricity, in return we asked them to bring us a list of ten people they counted for the census.”
For all the creative ideas, work on the ground has not been easy. This part of Texas has the state’s highest number of unincorporated communities, where there is no local government. Many of these neighborhoods lack such basics as public street lights, municipal sewage systems and access to the Internet.
Homes here got individual postal addresses just a few years ago -- a God-send for first responders. Valdez-Cox was raised in one of these communities, Colonia Seca, was born with the aid of a partera -- a midwife. She remembers that “we even had to steal the water. We didn’t have parks or streets, and we got sprayed with pesticides on our land.”
Today, she says, the minimal improvements in the quality of life in border communities has happened thanks to the farm workers' fight.
“Recently we’ve been strongly campaigning for Internet connections. Hidalgo County has approved $18 million for these neighborhoods, where schools will be the allies,” she said. “The children, these days, sit outside a McDonalds or a Burger King to get a signal for their homework. Now we’re going to be vigilant so that money doesn’t get squandered.”
Despite connectivity issues, the LUPE organizers used Facebook, Whatsapp and Messenger to share educational campaigns via community leaders tasked with counting at least 10 families.
Many families on the border are of mixed status. That is, members are citizens, legal residents or undocumented, all under the same roof. This complexity -- and the fear of exposing undocumented relatives -- are among the reasons, census analysts say, that many avoided participation.
“Since 2016, the government has been blocking our people from being counted … they tried to include a citizenship question in the census and LUPE sued them,” Valez-Cox said. “I myself went to testify in the Maryland Federal court and we won … but for many areas the damage had been done.”
Most residents of Starr County have decided they do not want to be counted by the census. The self-response rate there has remained a pale 37%. And in towns like Laguna Vista in Cameron County, participation has not passed 30%.
“We are still making thousands of phone calls to the most complicated areas,” Valdez-Cox said, referring to marathon phone-bank sessions her team of 43 people has maintained. They have also recorded television commercials with local church and community leaders, in which they speak not only about the Census, but also the November elections. “There isn’t a thing that we haven’t tried, and we’re going to keep at it until the last minute.”
Nestor Lopez speaks during a community event in February in McAllen, TX, before the pandemic started. The meetings had been key to a campaign by the Hidalgo County Judge's Office's to promote the 2020 Census.
Nestor Lopez, the early promoter
Every Friday through the pandemic, students from different Hidalgo County school districts set aside their sports rivalries in favor of a common challenge: beat the big cities by collecting the most census responses.
They called the 13-week campaign “Friday Night Lights ISD Challenge.” The office of the Hidalgo County judge assigned high school football players to compete in one-on-one match-ups for getting questionnaires completed. In the playoff finals, Hidalgo ISD beat the team from Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD.
“This helped us to count in small communities that are not part of a city, but of a district,” said Nestor Lopez, an analyst for the Hidalgo County Judge's Office, which led the census campaign in this part of the border. “The students accepted the challenge enthusiastically, because there was no school at this time.”
Lopez, only 27 years old, led a team of seven people. Their census campaign started “earlier than almost anywhere else in the United States,” near the end of 2017. Back then, leaders of from education, government, and community groups -- and even the news media -- joined to push a single message emphasized by Lopez: “a well-done count allows us to provide services to an exact number of people… nowadays the federal and state aids are calculated for a very low number (of population) versus who really leaves here.”
Even though Hidalgo County is similar in geographic size to Harris County, home of the Houston metropolis, it has just a quarter of the population, some 250,000 people. Many in Hidalgo County live outside the jurisdiction of a city. According to census data, 92.5% are Hispanic. The vast geography of 22 jurisdictions in Hidalgo meant census takers mostly knocked on doors in cities like McAllen, but not unincorporated areas like Perezville.
In many of these communities there is little or no Internet access, and language barriers make census interviews more difficult.
The pandemic magnified the problems: Plans to help people fill out census questionnaires in churches, parks, bookstores, libraries, were replaced by civil employees, wearing face masks and gloves, bringing Internet hotspots to school events, where families gathered for pandemic supplies and food.
“It’s not ideal because due to social distance we can’t be in front of someone helping them, but the hotspots had shown good results”, Lopez said. “The federal workers can knock on doors with regulations that are different from ours”.
Anti-immigrant messages from politicians resonate here, eroding trust in government by those without legal status, even though the citizenship question was not on the questionnaire. “Many people prefer not to participate because these are large families of up to 12 people and if one undocumented tio lives there, they won’t open the door to take any risk,” Lopez added.
His office doubled efforts to counteract the fear with presentations for parents and students, and multimedia and radio spots, some voiced by pastors and celebrities, in English and Spanish.
“When we tell a parent that if we don’t count their 3- or 4-year-old child now, the next opportunity won't be until he or she is in middle or high school, and in the meantime they’ll be losing resources for their education, that has a positive effect,” Lopez said..
Another huge challenge for census takers is the mobility of border residents. Many live in Mexico, but work in the United States. Many live north of the border, but routinely cross into Mexico on business or to visit family. There are also “Winter Texans” who spend the winter season -- and up to six months -- living in warmer border counties.
“Each case is different, but people should be counted where they live most of the time, even if it’s only five months of the year. There are people who divide their time in three places,” Lopez said. “If someone has a house here, they will surely need government resources.”
Possibly the greatest challenge his office faced was the local impact of the pandemic. The coronavirus has devastated these communities with a high number of infections and deaths. Many people simply put the census down on the priority list as they dealt with the virus’ threat. But Lopez persisted, pushing a message of inclusion and public health.
“If we don’t get counted we won’t receive the resources for emergencies like the COVID-19,” Lopez said. “How are hospital systems going to get the money to recover after this? A few weeks ago we got hit by hurricane Hanna. Without exact numbers, the government won’t know how to distribute emergency aid,” he concluded.
Julie Bazan, executive director of the Area Health Education Center of the Mid-Rio Grande Border Region.
Julie Bazan and an army of young volunteers
On many Saturdays this summer, a caravan of cars decorated with Census materials paraded through different neighborhoods in the counties of Webb, Dimmit, La Salle, and Duval. A census office served people in Laredo with a drive-thru in which volunteers helped people fill out questionnaires, taking into account COVID-19 rules on social distancing.
Virtual Zoom meetings became the norm for census leaders from 35 counties in south Texas. Families took up the census challenge, in which each person who completed a questionnaire committed to counting ten families in their community. All these census-count strategies were deployed in the Texas border region by Julie Bazan, Executive Director for the Area Health Education Center of the Mid Rio Grande Border Region (AHEC).
Her four-person team and some 100 high school and university student volunteers became “the voice of our community,” Bazan said.
“If one day you can sit down with a young adult to talk about something useful, that person will share it with thousands of their contacts…their self-esteem is transformed because they feel more prepared to answer any question,” Bazan added. “Today they feel they have the authority to speak about the Census.”
In the unincorporated communities of the 35 counties in AHEC’s census territory, 92% of the population is Hispanic. But only between 56% and 68% were counted in the 2010 Census. Bazan says a participation rate of 80% is possible, if her team can succeed in dispelling myths about the survey: many Hiispanic families have said they believe census takers will ask for the deeds to houses, or for tax returns, or will sell life insurance while they’re in the house.
There is also skepticism about what results from the census itself. “There are people who think it is garbage, and that their communities won’t receive more than the leftovers from the Federal government,” Bazan said.
“But (the census) provides us with services that we all need,” she added. “(In Laredo) there are only two hospitals. If we had adequate funding there would be more places to address the current health crisis.”
Bazan spoke with countless families in her effort to overcome community fears about engaging with census workers. She reminded them that the census answers “are more protected than money in any financial institution.”
“Congress approved a law stating that any person who discloses information about the census could receive a fine of up to $250,000,” she said.
With the clock on the 2020 Census winding down, Bazan summed up the motivation for her team, why it was worth all the work to overcome so many unusual barriers to the count:
“We have to keep on counting ourselves … When it is over, we won’t have another chance to change the numbers for another ten years, and that is a long time ahead.”
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Jenny Manrique is a freelance reporter who has covered human rights in Latin America and the United States for two decades. She covered immigration for the Dallas Morning News and national politics for Univision. Her work has been published, in English and Spanish, in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and CNN, among others. Follow @jennymanriquec on Twitter.