SOMERTON, Arizona – It’s a Thursday night in Somerton, Arizona, and parents and students huddled in a middle school gym are roaring for the school’s wrestling team with decibels testing the eardrum.
The young wrestlers are seventh and eighth graders and will be among the first to attend the city’s first public high school, approved by local officials a few weeks ago after years of lobbying. The predominantly Hispanic community has grown so much over the past ten years that it is also building a new elementary school.
But the Census Bureau says Somerton actually lost 90 residents during that time, bringing its official population to 14,197, not the 20,000 the mayor expected.
“So we’re trying to figure out where those numbers are coming from because they don’t make any sense at all,” said city manager Jerry Cabrera, who cited 853 new homes over the past decade as evidence of growth.
An accurate census is critical to the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars and determines how many seats in Congress each state has.
However, an Associated Press review found that Hispanic and black populations in the latest census figures fell below recent estimates and an annual survey by the Census Bureau in many places, suggesting some areas have been overlooked.
The trend in the proportion of the black population was most evident in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states, including Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. For the Hispanic population, it was most noticeable in New Mexico and Arizona.
In Somerton, about 200 miles southwest of Phoenix near the Mexican border, community leaders were incredulous.
“That’s not true. These aren’t real numbers, you know. You don’t know our church. You haven’t done what had to be done to count our people and it’s just ridiculous. It can’t be,” said Emma Torres, executive director of Campesinos Sin Fronteras, an organization that works for farm workers, the group has been heavily involved in promoting the census.
Most Somerton residents use post office boxes. The majority are Spanish-speaking farm workers and many do not have reliable internet access.
Community leaders say they are used to an undercount, but the idea that they have lost residents is unfathomable.
Here, where an annual tamale festival to raise money for college students draws thousands of visitors, local schools are over-capacity as enrollments rose nearly 12 percent from 2010-19. And after years of taking students to Yuma at least 10 miles north, Somerton finally reached the threshold of its own high school.
While counts are nothing new and no census is perfect, there is “strong evidence” that the 2020 census is worse than it has been for decades, Paul Ong, professor of public affairs at UCLA, told his own analysis of the lot Angeles County This month concluded that Hispanics, Asians, and other residents were under-counting.
“The big impact is that the redistribution process will be skewed, our undercounted neighborhoods will be underrepresented, and the population that is undercounted will fall short of federal spending allocations,” Ong said.
The Associated Press analysis has reservations. The Census Bureau says the census numbers should be viewed as more accurate than the agency’s American Community Survey or the ancient population estimates. In addition, the American Community Survey has margins of error and population estimates are processed to place some individuals who identified themselves as “another race” in the 2010 census into more traditional racial categories such as white, black and Asian.
Bureau officials say it is too early to speculate on whether individual parishes have been under counted. The full extent of whether the Bureau of Statistics overlooks certain populations or overcounts others won’t become known until early next year when they release the results of a survey that measures how well they did their job by counting every U.S. resident.
Black and Hispanic communities have been under-counted in the past, and 2020 has been due to the COVID-19 pandemic that scared people into interacting with strangers and natural disasters that made it difficult for census takers to reach some residents , greater concern about an undercount. There have also been attempts at political interference by the Trump administration, including a failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form.
The AP review found numbers that suggest some communities have been overlooked.
Outside of Baton Rouge, in West Feliciana Parish, La., For example, the 2020 census figures show the black population at 23.4 percent, but the 2020 population estimates and the 2019 American Community Survey put it at 44 percent. The area is home to the Louisiana State Penitentiary with 5,500 inmates, and group accommodations such as prisons, dormitories, and nursing homes were among the toughest places to count people during the census due to COVID-19-related restrictions.
In the counties along the Colorado and New Mexico border, the census population was 4 to 7 percentage points lower than the estimates and surveys.
The Census Bureau said in a statement that tribal, state, and local governments may request a revision of the numbers if they believe the census numbers are inaccurate, but that does not change the numbers used for redistribution or the congress seats are used.
“Despite a pandemic, natural disasters and other unforeseen challenges, the 2020 census results so far are in line with the general benchmarks,” the statement said.
Cabrera said the city is pulling data to show the 2020 census was wrong and plans to appeal.
Somerton Mayor Gerardo Anaya is concerned about the city’s share of state revenue. He says Somerton’s sales tax revenue, school enrollment, and building permits have all increased in recent years. Developers keep building.
As in many Latino communities, the Somerton pandemic had an overwhelming impact. Latinos were almost twice as likely to be infected and more than twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than white people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Few people in Somerton have home-based jobs. Anaya says there was a point last summer when the Somerton zip code had the highest infection rate in Arizona.
“This time it was just chaotic here in the summer. We all had family members who were hospitalized or dying or contracted with COVID. So it was very scary, ”said Anaya.
Back at the Somerton Middle School Cobras home, Principal Jose Moreno bragged about his town’s close community, where wrestling is a source of pride. Moreno paced up and down the gym and joined the cheers as the boys battled the San Luis Scorpions.
Moreno said reaching the threshold for a high school means local educators can continue to work with children they have taught from kindergarten through eighth grade.
“I take on the challenge, really, by trying to carry on the traditions we have here in middle school, in the city, in the things we cherish. So you have the feeling of trifles here and you know that we definitely want to keep that, ”said Moreno.
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