Down with the Count
When the census comes knocking, who will open the door?
March/April 2000
Andy Steiner Utne Reader
| Section Articles: Invasion of the Data Snatchers
Who are you? And who has a right to know? It's a debate that's gone beyond privacy into a deeper, darker dilemma. Down with the Count
When the census comes knocking, who will open the door? The Beautiful and the Demmed
You are what you buy-wherever you live Nightmare Express
How Safeway tried to sign me up-and sent me screaming out the door The Road to Invisible
A concise guide to dodging the glare and avoiding the detours that stand between you and radical anonymity |
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Like Superman, Super Censo has superhuman powers. Strong, brave, and bilingual, he has a mission: to spread the word about the U.S. Census to Spanish-speaking citizens of Cook County, Illinois.
'The Super Censo character was invented by a Chicago street theater group called Teatro Callejero,' explains Ana Maria Soto, regional census director for Cook County's Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. 'He's loosely based on a Spanish-language TV character called El Chapulin Colorado. When Latino people see Super Censo, they get it. So I guess you could say we've taken him on the road.'
Super Censo's message, which he began taking to neighborhood gatherings and festivals last summer, is straightforward. When census forms arrive, Latinos should fill them out. Being counted gives a community an identity. 'In America,' Soto says, 'identity is everything.'
A simple message, but a tough sell. While community leaders may define identity in group terms, individuals don't always see it that way. This time around, many poor people may ignore the census out of indifference or alienation, if they get the forms at all. Others will actively avoid being counted. Their response reveals a tension between the individual and the group that lies just beneath the surface of the census-and modern identity politics in general.
In many urban communities, activists claimed that the 1990 census undercounted immigrants and minorities, leading to lawsuits and calls for census reform. In Cook County, one of the nation's largest and most ethnically diverse counties, the population is estimated to be 5.1 million, but the census may have missed as many as 250,000. Critics blame shoddy counting methods and ignorance of cultural patterns, two reasons that people of color and the poor have been overlooked by virtually every American census. Whatever the cause, many say Chicago's urban communities took the hit: 10 years of diluted political clout, underfunded schools, and overflowing sewers.
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