Tally Ho! Oxnard Census Crew on the Hunt

Robert Mendoza: By profession, an Oxnard housing inspector but by inclination, a salesman’s salesman.

On these gray days, he sets up shop in trailer parks and at strip malls, pitching the joys, the ease, the promise, the civic boon, the psychological boost of filling out your census forms.

“You can’t talk ‘cause your beans are cooking?” he asks a nervous woman at the threshold of her mobile home. “OK, let’s go turn the beans off and take a look at these forms.”

In Oxnard, they’re not leaving the count up to the feds, who, after all, have no more to gain from accuracy in Oxnard than they have in Orlando or Oshkosh.

In 1990, a pre-census government estimate of the city’s population turned out to be nearly 10% less than the total rung up after city workers beat the bushes. In one program alone, that meant at least $4 million in federal funds that would have been lost.

Not taking any chances this go-round, the city has dispatched decorated RVs, bearing Mendoza and other employees, to taco places and hair salons, banks and soccer fields, to churches, thrift stores, butcher shops and, on paydays, to the supermarkets where workers queue up to cash their checks.

Not long ago, a woman wheeling a cart full of garbage bags through the lanes of a trailer park told Mendoza she had no time, no time at all for the census because she had all this trash to throw away.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, commandeering the cart. “I’ll take the trash and you take the forms. It’s just five minutes!”

On Friday, balloons festooned the RV as Mendoza and his crew worked a tired mini-mall near Ormond Beach. They wore bright blue T-shirts that said, “Yes, We Count!” in English, Spanish and Tagalog, the Filipino language.

Mendoza explained the carnival-like spinner he’d set up: Flick it to the blue segments, and you get passes to the Santa Barbara Zoo or coupons for a burger and fries at McDonald’s; hit the red, and you get the big enchilada--a pair of tickets to a Dodgers game or a Galaxy soccer match, depending on your sporting mood.

Within minutes, a 23-year-old city worker named Beatriz Zamudio hauled in the first customer, a man on a mountain bike who had pedaled over to look around.

“This is my duty as a citizen of the United States of America,” said Greg Velasquez, who described himself as a gardener, a part-time firefighter and a professional backpacker. “I would have done it even without the Dodger tickets.”

The crew has learned to work a crowd.

“I love the little kids,” said Zamudio, who organizes teen programs for the city. “I tell them, ‘Go bring me a family and I’ll give you a water bottle. Bring me two families and I’ll give you tickets to Lazerstar. Now, go!”’

Some families come for help with the forms they received in the mail. Others say they’ve lost the forms, tossed them or simply don’t know about the census.

That’s hardly surprising. Oxnard is a town where many immigrants, legal and illegal, pack into houses by the dozen. Landlords who receive the forms might list themselves but won’t likely ask the eight field workers sharing the living room for their middle name and date of birth. The crowding record this census season: 38 in a tract house--a number that emerged only after a worker kept prodding: “Well, is there anyone else who lives there?”

The city crews have come upon some sad stories as they help the uncounted count.

There are fathers who don’t know the ages of the children who live with them.

“You don’t know?” Mendoza asks. “Use my cell phone. Call home!”

There are poor people crammed into garages and sheds, and better-off people who can’t read well enough to figure out the forms.

And there are misunderstandings upon fears upon suspicions.

At a park, there was the angry soccer player with his irrefutable street logic: “Why should I fill this out?” he asked. “They’ll only use it to build more jails.”

There was the landlord who warned his tenants, Mixtec Indians from Mexico, that they’d be deported if they filled out the forms.

“He probably didn’t believe that the information wouldn’t go to code enforcement or to the INS,” said Karl Lawson, the city official directing Oxnard’s campaign. “But these men were brave enough to come to us anyway. They wanted to be counted.”

Lawson figures that the effort has uncovered at least 4,000 people who would have escaped notice otherwise.

Mendoza and his crew found their share on Friday.

Flagging down cars in the parking lot, they asked: Do you want to help with the census? You can get Dodger tickets!

Mendoza, who once peddled fruit and vegetables door-to-door, has an ear for such technique.

“As we said in the old days, that’s the hook!”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.