Abelardo Rea by April 1, 2000, the day the U.S. Census Bureau conducted its once-a-decade head count, had already been living in the United States for nearly 14 years, having entered the country illegally in 1986 after leaving his native Michoacan, Mexico.
He settled in Southern California for a time and then moved to Park City to make cakes, pastries and espressos at a bakery and, to earn a few more dollars each week, man a gas station.
Like many of his countrymen who arrived in Park City in the 1990s, drawn to the city’s expanding job market during the heady boom years, Rea found a place to live in Prospector, joined in a four-bedroom house on Monitor Drive by his sister, her family and a couple of friends.
They had taken different routes from Mexico, but each had made it to the United States and then found their way to Park City in time to be counted in the census, the tally used by Congress and the Statehouse to make critical decisions such as how congressional and legislative districts are drawn and how government funding — more than $400 billion each year from Washington, D.C., alone — is split between communities.
Rea says the census takers, though, never sent his household a form on which he could declare himself and the others as living in Park City. Nobody from the Census Bureau later stopped by to see if the Monitor Drive house was occupied, he says. The Rea family and the others in the house, eight in all, would not be counted on April 1. They were a group of native Mexicans who would remain on the fringes of life in the United States as they toiled away in their jobs, despite the efforts of the Census Bureau to conduct an accurate tally in which people are counted regardless of their immigration status.
“It makes you feel like you’re really nobody to some of these people,” Rea says. “It makes you feel they’re OK with or without you around.”
It is a scenario that likely repeated itself across Park City that year. By 2000, the city had become a popular place for Mexicans like Rea to settle as they carved out their lives in the United States. Aspen Villas, a work force housing development on Kearns Boulevard with easy car and bus access to large employers, became one of the attractive spots for them to live. Spanish-speaking students, meanwhile, a group that before was so small as to be virtually inconsequential in the local schools, posed new challenges to teachers and administrators at institutions like McPolin Elementary School.
Still, though, the census in 2000 counted just 2,406 people in Summit County who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino, 8.1 percent of the county’s population. Of those, 1,448 told the counters they lived within the Park City limits, a long day’s drive from the border crossings in Southern California and Arizona.
Activists at the time looked at the numbers with disbelief, saying that the count missed a major bloc of the area’s largest minority group. Perhaps up to 2,000 other Latinos who were living in Park City or outlying Summit County were not included in the Census Bureau’s count, one activist declared when the results were released in 2001. Rea, who would later become a leader in the local Latino community, says now as many as eight out of every 10 Latinos living in Summit County in 2000 might have been missed in the count.
“If I were born in the United States, I’d probably be more furious about it. It makes me feel uncomfortable, but not in the way I want to scream,” Rea, now 43 years old, says. “We’re kind of used to being treated that way.”
‘Afraid of the census’
Throughout the 2000s, the Census Bureau has calculated population estimates that show the number of Summit County people identifying themselves as Hispanic or Latino, a grouping that includes people whose lineage descends from Mexico, South America, Puerto Rico or Cuba, has risen at a steady clip. There were 4,207 tallied in the 2008 estimate, a 75 percent increase since the census was taken in 2000.
The census takers are well into their preparations for the 2010 count, pledging that there will be further steps taken next year to ensure an accurate count of the Latinos in the U.S. Census Bureau research after the 2000 tally showed that, nationally, .7 percent of the Hispanic people or Latinos living in the United States were missed in the head count, approximately 250,000 people.
Meanwhile, the research showed, just 69 percent of Hispanic or Latino households returned the census forms mailed to them, compared to a return rate of 80.8 percent for white households. If an initial form is not returned, the Census Bureau sends a second one. Should the second one not be mailed back, the census workers head into the neighborhood in an attempt to count the people living at the address.
“There are people who are afraid of the census,” acknowledges Todd Hansen, the top-ranking census official in Utah and the figure who will oversee the counting in the state next year, adding, “Many people come from a country (where) the government is the bad guy.”
The Census Bureau has prepared a bilingual form for the 2010 count, asking questions in English and Spanish, that will be more widely available than previously. A Census Bureau spokesperson says the bilingual forms will be sent to households in areas known to have large populations of Spanish speakers. It will be the first time the bilingual forms — 13.5 million of them in 2010 — will be mailed directly to the households. In the past, someone had to request a form to receive one. The Census Bureau also is expanding partnerships with community organizations representing minority groups.
“I think the Census Bureau is trying harder than it has in the past,” says D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer with the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C., not-for-profit institution that closely tracks immigration as one of its subject matters.
Cohn, who has followed census trends for 20 years as a journalist and a researcher, though, says it is difficult to predict whether the counters in 2010 will be more successful in tallying Latinos. She says, as an example, the recession has forced many people out of their homes and into living situations with friends or relatives who might not mark the dislocated people down on census forms as residents of a household.
Cohn, meanwhile, says there continues to be distrust between some immigrants and the federal government, another factor that could dampen the response to the census even though laws prohibit census takers from providing information culled from individuals during the counting to outside government agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Workers face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if they unlawfully disclose information, according to the Census Bureau.
The Census Bureau does not inquire about citizenship or whether someone is living in the United States legally. An immigrant, nonetheless, could be hesitant to divulge even basic information fearing they will draw attention to themselves, Cohn says.
“They might be concerned that telling the government who they are and where they’re living could get them deported,” she says.
An illegal crossing
Rea left his homeland as the sun was setting on May 5, 1986, trekking from a field outside the border city of Tijuana with five other men intent on illegally entering the United States that night. He handed over $300 to the man leading the group, a so-called coyote by trade who could navigate them through the hinterlands between the two countries. Leaving behind an accounting job in Mexico, Rea made it to the United States, to San Ysidro, Calif., by early the next morning. He went to Los Angeles and later, in 1995, to Park City after visiting a brother who already had moved to the growing mountain town.
His life is striking in its contrasts with his days in Mexico. Living in a three-bedroom duplex in Prospector with his wife, who is also from Michoacan, and one of his children, Rea still enjoys cooking dishes from his native country. He stocks the kitchen with rice, beans, pork and beef. There are also bananas, oranges and corn flakes on the shelves. In a nod to the country where he now lives, cans of Coca-Cola are also kept in the Rea household. The music of Ana Gabriel, a singer from Mexico, plays in the background.
It took 18 years before federal immigration officials granted Rea citizenship in the United States, an event that was celebrated among Latinos and in the wider Park City community, after issuing him a permit to work in the country in 1992 and declaring him a permanent resident in 1997. He first voted in an election in the state Democratic primary in 2008, selecting Barack Obama in both the primary balloting and again on Election Day. He remembers the importance he felt afterward, as poll workers handed him a sticker to wear signifying he had cast a ballot.
Long before that, in the 1990s, Rea was a pivotal figure in the early bridge-building years between Latinos and Park City’s whites. City Hall officials tapped him as they began learning Spanish, and he says the late Paul Sincock, then a member of the Park City Council, encouraged Rea to broaden his work, resulting in the founding of an advocacy group known as Conexion Amigo. The influence of the group has subsided in this decade, but it was a foundation for work by advocates well after the census was taken in 2000.
Rea, now working at a sandwich shop in Park City, intends to be counted on April 1, 2010, saying he will seek out census workers if they do not provide a form for his household. Nearly 10 years ago, Rea remembers, he was aware the census was occurring, but its importance to him was not as it is today, as a citizen of the United States. Even so, Rea says, he would have marked himself and his family down as living in the United States had he been given the opportunity in 2000.
“I expected someone to come over and visit us. Nobody did,” he says. “I didn’t make a phone call and say ‘I’m here.'”