Census organizers making final push to count Kern residents
Local organizers have been gearing up for what may be the final push to get as many Kern residents registered for the 2020 census.
As of Wednesday, the deadline to complete the census has been set for Sept. 30 by the President Trump administration, according to Cindy Quezada, senior program officer at the Center at Sierra Health Foundation. Quezada — who has been at the heart of this year’s census registration efforts throughout the county — said the deadline was moved from Oct. 31 back to the end of this month to ensure the results would be ready by Dec. 31.
Quezada said an existing lawsuit could reverse the date back to Oct. 31 once again, but as of Wednesday the 2020 Census deadline remained just seven days away.
Since learning of the deadline’s change in early August, Quezada said her organization has been in an “emergency type of mode” to try and get as many residents — especially those considered “hard to count” — on board with the census.
Currently, Kern County has recorded a 63.1 percent self response rate during this year’s census, according to Louis Medina, director of community impact at the Kern Community Foundation.
Quezada said that in 2010, there was a 65.2 percent self response rate throughout the county.
“Considering all of the setbacks with COVID and a lot of the debate over whether or not the census should count undocumented people — considering all of that — the fact that we’re at 63 percent, it’s not that bad,” Medina said.
Quezada described this year’s census efforts as being “wild” and “challenging.” Other factors that have caused difficulties outside of the pandemic have included the poor air quality as a result of wildfires which has prevented census canvassers from going door-todoor, Quezada said.
She explained that many of the communities that have been considered “hard to count” have included many rural communities and parts of east Bakersfield. Some of the communities with low self response rates include Lost Hills, Maricopa and Taft, she said.
“Many of the people (in these hard-to-count communities) are immigrants, people of color, low income, people with low educational attainment,” Quezada said.
She said that in order to try to at least match 2010’s self response rate, canvassing would be needed at 113,200 households.
With all of the roadblocks they have encountered throughout the year, census canvassers have had to get creative, Quezada said.
In many of the “hard to count” communities, organizers have implemented a caravan of cars making noise to get people to come outside. Canvassers also recently added a DJ to the caravan, which she said has been “very successful.”
“In certain areas, it’s really hard to canvas, there’s a ton of dogs, locked gates, sometimes in high crime areas,” Quezada said. “There’s obstacles to coming to the door, so they’ve adapted to try to find approaches to getting people’s attention.”
Other methods that have been implemented have included a group that works with the local Sikh community to try and get their message across to the monolingual Sikh population. They have also had groups accompany Spanish-language radio stations out at the fields for local harvests.
They’ve even gone the route of creating jingles and songs in various languages. Quezada said their songs have varied from mariachi, to Punjabi, to even a trilingual rap in Spanish, English and the indigenous language of Mixtec.
“They’re all really catchy songs,” Quezada said. “There’s one in Spanish that is about the telephone number (related to) the census. It was only because of that song that I remembered that number. After this song, it’s in me now. I can’t forget it now.”
Medina explained that for every person that is left uncounted, Kern County loses about $20,000 and could potentially lose government representation.
“I encourage everyone to visit the website 2020census.gov because you can respond to the census on that website,” Medina said. “People can respond by phone too, in different languages. The census bureau has made it really easy to respond.”
Medina said that phone numbers available for the census are 844-330-2020 for English speakers, and 844-468-2020 for Spanish.