LOS ANGELES – Groups pushing for robust Hispanic participation in the 2010 census are enlisting a new corps of foot soldiers in their battle to reach that hard-to-count demographic: tech-savvy, smart-phone-toting young people.
The “Be Counted, Represent” campaign offers music downloads and a chance at concert tickets to cell phone users who share their e-mail addresses and phone numbers with organizers and forward information about the census to their friends.
Principal organizers Voto Latino and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund stress in their messages that undercounted areas risk losing funding for transit, infrastructure and other needs, as well as political representation.
They hope those messages promoting participation in the count will zip throughout the social networks of the young who can persuade reluctant parents to fill out and return their census forms.
“You’re looked at by many, many, many people as being powerful when it comes to money that they can line their pockets with,” actress Rosario Dawson, a Voto Latino co-founder, told teenagers gathered recently in the library of a predominantly Latino high school in the Los Angeles area. “When it’s money that can line your pockets, no one ever says anything. But we’re saying something.”
The Census Bureau estimates that nearly 3 percent of the country’s Hispanic population, or about 1 million people, were not counted in the 2000 census, compared with about 1 percent of the general population.
The campaign seeks to improve those numbers by offering a package of 25 music downloads created for a young Hispanic audience to cell phone users who share their zip codes, e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers with the program’s organizers.
