Much at Stake in 2010 Census

Elizabeth Hsing-Huei Chou
March 4, 2010

In addition to the number of seats California will recieve in the U.S. House of Representatives, data from the 2010 U.S. Census will determine how more than $400 billion is spent per year on projects and services that impact every segment of society. Clockwise: Census data plays a vital role in the distribution of public funds used for hospitals, public transit, parks, senior programs, schools and job training centers. (EGP Archives)

In an effort to reach the second most under-counted communities in the country, Census officials in East Los Angeles are facing a large task ahead of them as the 2010 Census count approaches.

Local officials say that if the East Los Angeles area, which also includes Commerce, Montebello, and Monterey Park, continues to be undercounted, it will lose out on vital funding needed to support the community.

Census workers in East Los Angeles were unprepared going into the 2000 Census, said UCLA Associate Professor Leo Estrada, resulting in an undercount of seven percent in East Los Angeles, more than twice the national percentage.

“That seven percent means money lost that could have gone to schools, the community, a sizeable amount of money that could have helped the community,” he says.

Local officials like County Supervisor Gloria Molina are concerned that outreach by the 2010 Census offices has looked more like “cheerleading” than a serious effort to tell people that it is their “civic responsibility” to fill out the form.

“I don’t think they’re doing a good job of telling people how utterly significant [the Census] is,” she says. She gives the example of funding for low-weight birth babies. “We get more dollars because they are counted. We have more low-income [households] so that’s how we get more affordable housing, more Section 8 Housing. They don’t know that,” she says.

Congressional seats are also at stake. Latino political activists like Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, NALEO, says past counts of Latino populations have resulted in more Latino political representatives for California.

The economic downturn adds another complication to this year’s Census campaign. “They weren’t planning their Census to be held during a recession,” Vargas says. There is a “disproportionate” number of Latinos who are being displaced by foreclosures and many might be living together with other families at one address, he says, so “the message needs to be: when the Census form arrives, everybody who is in your home on April needs to be on the Census form, even if they are only living there for another month or two until they’re able to find accommodations or they are just temporary people,” he says.

With less than two weeks left before Census forms are mailed out, Molina is concerned that the Census hasn’t taken “lessons learned” from past counts. “I know they’re trying to do a good job… but honestly, I don’t know if they’ve figured out how to do it,” she says.

The pace of the East Los Angeles campaign during the last Census raised “red flags” indicating problems in the count.

“Scheduling in offices fell behind early on,” Estrada says. The East Los Angeles census workers “were in the field for a very long time,” taking down data on unforeseen circumstances such as addresses that had more than one household.

“ East Los Angeles had a good [Census] office, but it was just a tough place to get the work done,” he said. For this year’s count, the Census bureau has deemed the majority of the East Los Angeles population “hard to count.”

This time around, Census officials say they are attempting to reach deep into the East Los Angeles communities, building relationships at churches, corner shops, health clinics and with community activists. They say they are also passing out handbills, advertising with local ethnic media at unprecedented levels, and trying to hire workers at the neighborhood level.

The Census is also setting up “assistance centers” and “Be Counted” centers at spaces donated by local businesses, organizations and government offices. In addition to providing help in filling out forms, these centers also provide another opportunity for people to pick up forms if one was not mailed to them.

“We are trying to do more grassroots messaging,” says James Christy, Southern California’s Regional Director for the Census bureau.

But some “veteranos” of the Census process challenge these “grassroots” efforts. “They bring in all these new people. All of them think they know what they’re doing and that they’re all going to prove to do a good job, but I’ve been around it long enough to know that’s not necessarily the case,” Molina says.

The only action she’s seen has been the “press conferences, little outreach things…,” and “giveaways” that is reaching “a very limited number of people,” she says, “A lot of moving parts, but that doesn’t mean it’s orchestrated well.”

The “nagging problem” of the census has always been with gaining the trust of the “hard-to-count” population in East L.A, she says. “They don’t believe it’s confidential. They don’t trust that the government is not going to lend out their name, that ICE is not going to come knocking on their door,” and they think “that some inspector is going to say, ‘you can’t have three families living in this house.’ There’s not that confidence as yet,” she says.

She says nothing from the Census office shows her they are keeping track of how well they are doing in combating this mistrust. “I don’t know if they have targets… like what was the return [rate of Census forms] in the first week in East LA in 1990, as compared to the year to 2000, as compared to what it is now. I don’t even know if they have those figures and statistics. You’d think it would be that kind of a campaign… ‘We’ve gotta make sure these are returned and how are we going to do it?’ I’m not really sure how they’ve planned it. I don’t even know if they have that database,” she says.

She’s also not convinced the Census office really “get” the community, and questions if they can hire the right people. “They’re going to have to send walkers into our district. They’re going to have to be Spanish speaking. They are going to have to be very aggressive people,” she says, joking that “they’re not going to be scared by a dog, they’re going to have to figure out strategies, because everybody in East L.A. has at least one dog, if not two.”

Census officials have been trying to push local hiring, but say that there are some challenges. “We are attempting to hire locally… almost neighborhood by neighborhood. It makes it harder to recruit. You’re recruiting from smaller labor markets,” National Census Director Robert Groves said at a press conference held Monday at the Boyle Height Youth Technology Center.

One of the problems with Census hiring in the past has been with high turnover rates, which Molina thinks could happen again. Christy says they have recruited enough people to fill every position, but acknowledges the worry is usually with high turnover. Their goal is to recruit 10 people per position, but he thinks this year will be better because turnover has been low among existing staff.

Groves also acknowledged the challenges, especially for communities that require bilingual census workers, but added “we are devoted to that goal, and we are doing everything possible to achieve that goal.”

Census Recruitment Coordinator Yolanda Lozcano told EGP that “hard numbers or totals were not set” for how many Latinos or Spanish speaking people they would hire, but says they are satisfied with their recruitment efforts and are ready to begin calling people in to work in the next few weeks.

The pace of recruitment and hiring signals how well a campaign is doing, Estrada says. If recruitment falls behind, “it means less people are on the street collecting data, and it’s likely other issues could arise.” He says if the Census runs into issues of recruiting enough qualified people “they still have time. They’re not going to the field until April,” he says.

Molina says she is not convinced the Census has really listened to the community, particularly to “seasoned”

participants of past Census campaigns. “They don’t listen to someone like Arturo [Vargas, NALEO Executive Director] who has been involved in the Census count like I have for the last three decades. He can tell them clearly the kind of things they should be doing, but they’re going to be negotiating with him every step of the way,” she says.

Molina has been involved with the Census since 1980 and says she doesn’t see anything “dramatically different” in this year’s campaign. “So far they’ve been very cooperative and very helpful, and I know they want to get the goal… it’s the same program that they had going on ten year ago, or 20 years ago,” she says.

Census officials like Christy maintain that this year’s campaign is operating at a much larger scale and with more attention to the cultural and language needs of the East Los Angeles area, he says. “We are in a better position to take this Census, particularly in East Los Angeles than we’ve ever been,” he adds, “I really think we’ve done a lot of planning and preparation.”