ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Delia Quiros (from left), Melissa Cruz, 4, and her father, Pedro Cruz, visit the grocery store and restaurant Azteca de Oro in Vinton.

Photos by ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Basilio Flores hosts a Latin music show five days a week on WTOY-1480 AM. He has begun talking about the census on the air.

Anabel Calderon Bonachea (from left), Ana Minza Bonachea Moreno and Dorgis Farinas Reges just moved to Roanoke a month ago from Cuba.

Pedro Cruz has gotten the message.

The 31-year-old welder from the Mexican state of Jalisco who has lived in Roanoke for 10 years is among those identified by the U.S. Census Bureau as "hard to count": Hispanic and Asian immigrants, black males ages 17 to 44, young unmarried people, the poor, the homeless.

These are the people who cause the decennial population count to skew low. And when census numbers are off, so are things that follow from them, including congressional districting and $300 billion in annual federal funding.

"The only thing I know is that we have to make ourselves counted," Cruz said in Spanish. That message reached Cruz through public service announcements Spanish-language television network Univision is blasting to its viewers through April.

He says he wants to fill out the census because the television is telling him the government uses the information to allocate money. And that's important to him as his daughter, 4-year-old Melissa, a preschooler at Fallon Park Elementary School, grows up in the public school system.

Cruz's awareness will come as a relief to the U.S. Census Bureau, which is in the midst of a massive campaign to get the word out to people like him.

"One thing they all have in common is mistrust of government," said Linda Edwards-White, a census partnership specialist for the Roanoke region.

In 2000, 70 percent of the country completed census forms and mailed them back in a timely fashion. In Virginia, it was 72 percent, but in Roanoke, just 66 percent put the form back in the mail. Roanoke County had the highest response in the region at 79 percent, while Radford had the lowest at 61 percent.

To boost those numbers this time around, the census is turning to people who have the trust the federal government lacks.

Edwards-White and others in her role are charged with setting up Complete Count Committees in every locality they can. The committees -- including one in Roanoke that has already met twice -- are made up of people who know the local population and terrain and have a better chance at persuading skeptics to complete that 10-question form that will land in their mailbox about March 15.

The message: The census is nothing to be afraid of. All personally identifiable information gathered is confidential and can't be divulged for 72 years, even to other government agencies.

Immigrants are among those most likely to distrust the government, and it often stems from their past experience with government in their home country, said Beth Lutjen, director of the Refugee and Immigration Services office in Roanoke and chairwoman of the city's Complete Count Committee.

Iraqis who have arrived in the past year or so, for example, "come from such an unsettled part of the world that it may be a little unsettling to be counted," Lutjen said.

But much of the focus nationally has been on Hispanics, especially undocumented ones.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., introduced a bill that would have required the census to ask people if they are U.S. citizens, based on his belief that congressional representation should be of citizens only. Opponents feared that would keep many from completing the form and hinder an accurate count. The bill was defeated in November.

Conversely, there's also a push by some Hispanic clergy for Hispanics to boycott the census to leverage immigration law reforms they seek.

A 2008 study by the Pew Research Center estimated there are 11.9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, three-fourths of them Hispanic.

Those who work with Hispanics in the Roanoke area say it's hard to say how many are here. Estimates range from 5,000 to 12,000 or more, said Vivian Sanchez-Jones, school community liaison for immigrants for the refugee office.

Sanchez-Jones doesn't know of any efforts to boycott the census in Roanoke, but worries that left to their own, few Hispanics would fill out the form.

"If you're undocumented, you're not going to want to be counted," said Cruz, the welder from Mexico. "People think that if you fill out the form, they'll share it with immigration, and they'll come looking for you."

Sanchez-Jones plans to work through Hispanic churches, which are trusted organizations, to hold potlucks to expose Hispanics to the census. She believes if they see the form and practice filling it out, most Hispanics will respond when the real form arrives.

The form is available in six languages, with help materials available in 59 languages.

"Even if they get the form in Spanish, it doesn't necessarily mean they know how to fill out the form," Sanchez-Jones said.

She's also having posters made for Hispanic shops to display, and a Hispanic advocacy group, Avancemos Roanoke, will go door to door in places where Hispanics congregate. They'll also hand out literature at Happy's Flea Market.

She's also working with a Harrisonburg-based Hispanic newspaper to get the word out, and with Basilio Flores, who hosts a Tuesday-through-Saturday Latin music show on WTOY-1480 AM in Roanoke.

"We have to educate people and give them the correct information," Flores said. "The census is about information, and people don't want to give it out because they think the government is going to use it against them, even though that's not the case."

The efforts address not only fear, but in some cases, sheer ignorance of the census.

"It looks like junk mail," Lutjen said. "They may not know what it is and just throw it away."

Dorgis Farinas Reges, 40, came from Cuba about a month ago with his wife and two children. Although the Cuban government does a census, Farinas Reges hadn't given a thought to the same in the United States.

"No, I don't know anything about that," he said in Spanish.

Once told about it, though, Farinas Reges said, "We'll fill out the form, no problem. If it'll help our children's schools get more money, there's no reason not to."

That's a message members of Roanoke's Complete Count Committee want to hear, because in many cases, their work depends on it.

Roanoke distributes about $2 million in Community Development Block Grant funds annually, money also allocated based in part on census counts.

"The higher the count is, the better our chance of maintaining our fair share of those funds," said Roanoke Planning Director Tom Carr, whose department is represented on the committee by B.T. Fitzpatrick.

Roanoke Human Services Director Carol Tuning, another committee member, supervises the city's Homeless Assistance Team, which is funded by a grant the amount of which is based on a formula that includes census counts.

"If people are not counted," Tuning said, "we lose money on the community."

Lutjen often seeks grants for her agency to serve particular ethnic populations.

"This comes around every 10 years," Lutjen told her committee last week, "so we have to live with what we do for 10 years."

matt.chittum@roanoke.com 981-3331 jorge.valencia@roanoke.com 981-3349