(27 Aug 2021) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4341358
It's a Thursday evening in Somerton, Arizona, and parents and students packed inside a middle school gym are roaring for the school's wrestling team at decibels that test the eardrum.
The young wrestlers are seventh and eighth graders who will be among the first to attend this town's first public high school, approved just weeks ago after years of lobbying by local officials.
Somerton, which is roughly 96% Hispanic, has grown enough over the last decade that it's also building a new elementary school.
But the Census Bureau says Somerton actually lost 90 residents during the that time, putting its official population at 14,197 people, not the 20,000 that the mayor expected.
"It does not make sense why the census would show that we had lost about 90 residents," said City Manager Jerry Cabrera, who cited several new subdivisions and 1,000 new utility hookups as evidence of growth.
An accurate census is crucial for the distribution of hundreds of billions of federal dollars, and it determines how many congressional seats each state gets. But a review by The Associated Press found that in many places, the share of the Hispanic and Black populations in the latest census figures fell below recent estimates and an annual Census Bureau survey, suggesting that some areas were overlooked.
For the share of the Black population, the trend was most visible in 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. Arizona was expected to gain a congressional seat but didn't.
In Somerton, in the largely agricultural Yuma County, community leaders were incredulous.
"This is not true. This is not real numbers, you know. They don't know our community. They did not do what needed to be done to count our people, and it's just ridiculous," said Emma Torres, the executive director of Campesinos Sin Fronteras, an organization that advocates for farmworkers. The group was heavily involved in promoting the census.
Somerton is about halfway between the U.S.-Mexico and California-Arizona borders. Most residents use post office boxes. A majority are Spanish-speaking farmworkers, and many lack reliable internet access.
Community leaders say they are used to an undercount, but the notion that they lost residents is unfathomable.
Here, where an annual tamale festival to raise money for college students attracts thousands of visitors, elementary schools are over capacity. And after years of having to bus students at least 10 miles north to Yuma, Arizona, Somerton finally met the threshold for its own high school.
While there is nothing new about undercounts, and no census is perfect, there is "strong evidence" that undercounts in the 2020 census are worse than in past decades, said Paul Ong, a public affairs professor at UCLA, whose own analysis of Los Angeles County this month concluded Hispanics, Asians and other residents were undercounted.
"What that means politically is that they will lose out in the political redistricting, where we draw electoral districts. They will lose out in terms of funding," Ong said.
The full extent of whether the statistical agency missed certain populations, or overcounted others, will not be known for sure until early next year, when it releases the results of a survey used to measure how good a job it did counting every U.S. resident during the 2020 census.
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