38 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY JUNE 2018
others not at all, particularly those who are poorer, move
often, or fear the government. The 2010 census, the most
accurate to date, overcounted white residents by nearly 1
percent while failing to count 1.5 million people of color, in-
cluding 1.5 percent of Hispanics, 2.1 percent of blacks, and
4.9 percent of Native Americans on reservations, the Census
Bureau later concluded. Mexican immigrants were especially
undercounted because the bureau didn’t know where they
lived or because multiple families lived in one household.
That’s why Quezada and Sanjuan were in Fresno, where
70 percent of residents are people of color, 20 percent are
immigrants, and one-third live in poverty, making it one of
the hardest places in the country to count. Only 73 percent
of residents in the east Fresno neighborhood they were
canvassing mailed back their census forms in 2010—if they
ever received them in the first place.
Quezada and Sanjuan are both immigrants, but with
very different backgrounds. Quezada, who is in her late
30s, fled war-torn El Salvador with her family in the 1980s
after her father got a university research job in California.
She has a doctorate in biology from the California Insti-Jorge Sanjuan
pulled back a chain-link fence,
and Cindy Quezada squeezed
through the gap. They stepped over two rotting mattresses and an
old tire and peered into a backyard. The neighbors eyed them sus-
piciously. “You guys with ice?” one teenager asked.
Quezada laughed and shook her head. It was a sunny January after-
noon, and she and Sanjuan had spent the past three hours crisscrossing
the alleys of a Fresno, California, neighborhood with small one-story
bungalows and Mexican restaurants, looking for sheds, garages, and
trailers serving as makeshift homes. They weren’t out to harass the
immigrants living there; they were there to count them.
Quezada and Sanjuan were working with the Central Valley
Immigrant Integration Collaborative, a network of organizations
embarking on a pilot program to identify “low-visibility housing” in
Fresno in preparation for the 2020 census. The Constitution requires
the executive branch to tally “the whole number of persons in each
state.” But every 10 years, the census counts some people more than
once—such as wealthy Americans who own multiple homes—and