The Race To 2020: Inside The Fight To Make Sure Colonia Residents Are Heard

How several folks are In America? The 2020 census might have the ability to tell you — unless it’s improperly conducted, in which case entire communities could miss out on millions of dollars in resources over the next ten years, and may be rendered all of the more invisible to the people elected to define them.


Knowing the society of states and counties plays a major role in the excellent class of life in communities, including how public funds are spent, from roads and schools to hospitals and emergency services, and even the variety of seats each state gets in Congress. Yet how the census bureau obtains that data next year has been widely contested, especially given President Donald Trump’s threat to collect data on everyone's citizenship status, which goes against the census’s broad directives. The question was ultimately blocked in the courts.


The census is always pretty accurate: According to independent research, the census’s estimation is likely within 0.01 percent of the particular total. However accuracy and fairness aren’t the same thing, and according to the Census’ own report, the people who run the risk of being rendered invisible are always minorities. Non-Hispanic white people were overcounted by nearly 1 percent; Black people were undercounted by about 2 percent; and Hispanic people were undercounted by 1.5 percent. So it’s no wonder that the largely Latinx people who reside in the small unincorporated townships that dot the U.S.-Mexico border are notoriously undercounted — a grave misstep that affects everything from the streets they live on to the collection of polling places made accessible to them throughout each election.


In 2010, the Census Bureau counted 775,000 people in Hidalgo County, Texas. Yet county officials thought the particular population could have approached nearly 845,000 people — meaning up to 70,000 people were effectively failed to notice for a decade, according to Texas Monthly. Several of these people reside in colonias, a term that insinuates “neighborhood” in Spanish, and refers to rural areas in back of the municipal boundaries of the nearest cities and towns.


Colonias aren’t just located in Hidalgo County: More than 250,000 people who stay in colonias across the state weren’t counted in the last census, Texas Monthly announced. Because of that undercounting, residents lost access to the $400 million dollars that should have been allotted to them for generic public services like street lights, paved roads, and increased funding for schools, according to the Hidalgo County 2020 Census Initiative.


In part, this is because of the lack of access — from dirt roads making travel more tough to not being able to find colonias on several maps, there really are barriers from the outdoors world to count the people who live there. These are issues that the Cameron County Elections Department encounters as they attempt to keep up with the individual needs of colonia residents and would-be voters. And, since colonias are for now away from the city limits, representation matters deeply for the residents who live there, as they don’t have the same infrastructure and services that are accessible in cities.


“There’s no reason why [colonias] shouldn’t [get the same resources],” Abraham Diaz, who works for the community advocacy sort LUPE (La Unión Del Pueblo Entero), told MTV News correspondent Yoonj Kim. “We pay the same quantity of taxes.”


This is one reason why voter turnout is so crucial — particularly in a state with races as close and contentious as Texas. It’s segment of an elected official’s job to make sure their constituents are heard, a task that is all of the more critical if the census doesn’t do that work. Yet as soon as colonia residents miss out on resources, that could contain polling locations or statistics about measures and candidates — and not showing up to vote has just as much an impact on elections as voting does.During the 2018 midterm elections, 53 percent of registered voters in Texas showed up at the polls, meaning that 46.3 percent of the voting-eligible population made their voices heard; by contrast, voter turnout for the Democratic primary was at just 11 percent. That insinuates there really are still plenty of people who need to be reached before 2020, and given Texas does not let for online registration, activists often need to bring the paperwork to the people.


Though pundits and politicians often paint the state as being reliably red, that might be changing: Republican Ted Cruz beat Democrat Beto O’rourke by a mere 2.9 percent in the 2018 election for Senate, and then some politicians hope that including voters in underrepresented places like the colonias might shift the makeup of the state’s representative pool, and that Texas’s 38 electoral votes could go to a Democrat in the upcoming Presidential election. The last time that happened was 1976, as soon as the state voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter over Republican Gerald Ford.


“South Texas is going to be key in turning Texas blue,” Jessica Cisneros, a lawyer and candidate running for Congress in Texas’s 28th district, told Kim. “We're going to be able to see an increase in voter turnout. It's not going to be eleven percent this time, because there's a big collection of Latinx populations who are going have the ability to vote for the opening time.”


Whether or not Texas votes for Republican or Democratic representatives, voting is more and more critical for people who stay in colonias. To make fundamental change in their communities, they require to be seen and heard. Both the  census and the voting booth will support make that happen — and the race is on to empower those people next year.