Census workers are making an unprecedented effort to count migrant farmworkers

Kiley Russell

Wednesday, March 22, 2000 | 9:56 a.m.

MADERA, Calif. - Shouting to be heard over the brassy rhythms of a traditional Mixtec Indian band, census workers in this small California farm town worked the crowd, urging wary festival-goers to give detailed descriptions of their lives to the federal government.

Several hundred mostly Mixtec Indian farmworkers were gathered to play basketball, mingle with their neighbors and listen to traditional music at a school-yard celebration in honor of Bineto Juarez, a beloved 19th century Mexican president.

The census workers - Mixtecos themselves - fanned out into the crowd, preaching the gospel according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"We're here for people to receive information about the census and help them fill out the forms," said Leoncio Vasquez, a census outreach worker for Frente Indigena Oaxaqueno Binacional, a local advocacy organization for indigenous Mexicans.

The Mixtecos are indigenous people from Mexico, many of whom came to the United States looking for work, often speaking neither Spanish nor English.

During the last count in 1990, census workers found only one Mixtec family. Officials now suspect there were at least hundreds of extended families living in the Central Valley at the time.

Since the beginning of March, Vasquez's organization and dozens like it have been going to churches, schools and migrant worker camps looking for the hundreds of thousands of rural residents who weren't counted last time census workers rolled through California's vast Central Valley.

"This is the first time the state has given any money for this kind of work before - it's $24.7 million for the entire state for things like community-based organizations, questionnaire assistance centers and ethnic media campaigns," said Amber Lopez of the California Institute for Rural Studies, which is administering some of the funds.

Nearly 840,000 Californians went uncounted in the last census and nearly half of them were Hispanic. It cost the state one congressional seat and $2.22 billion over ten years in federal funds that would have been used for things like highway maintenance and school, hospital and low-income housing construction.

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers - people who often have no addresses, no telephones, little contact with the world beyond their immediate communities and a general distrust of the government - are among the most difficult to count, said John Flores, a Census Bureau official in Fresno.

Fear of the Immigration and Naturalization Service exacerbates the problem.

"Right now I'm undecided about whether to fill out the forms," said an undocumented farmworker who would only identify herself as Theodora.

"I'm afraid the information will be used against me somehow," she said.

Theodora, 34, has seen the Spanish television ads explaining that it's illegal for the INS to receive any information gathered by census workers, but has a hard time believing it, she said.

"I want to believe that nothing will happen to me if I fill out the forms, but I still worry," said Theodora, who's been in this country for 11 years.

Officials at INS say they have suspended operations in neighborhoods where the Census Bureau is working to convince residents the two agencies aren't sharing information.

"We were informed that the INS will not be out there as long as the census is going on. Period," said Alice Rocha, a program director for Catholic Charities in Fresno.

Additionally, census workers face fines of up to $5,000 and five years in prison if they let slip any of the information they're charged with collecting, Rocha said.

Still, she's telling undocumented workers not to give out any information about themselves unless they know the person asking for it or their census identification checks out.

In 1995, the last year for which there are records, the INS estimated there were 5 million people living illegally in the United States. Probably 40 percent of them lived in California, said INS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery.

The United Farm Workers estimates that California is the on-again, off-again home to 6 million migrant farmworkers, some of whom are in the country legally, some of whom are not. But every person accounted for, regardless of their immigration status, means more dollars for the state and local governments.

For her part, Theodora plans to talk to the UFW about filling out here census forms and if they tell her it's OK, she'll probably do it, she said.