NEW MEXICO—One of my census assignments was to count a local pueblo, and I received plenty of advice before I got there. I was told I shouldn’t look anybody in the eye because it’s disrespectful, and that I wouldn’t be trusted because I’m a white, blonde girl.
All that was the furthest from what I experienced. After all the hype about me not being trusted, I got to the pueblo and talked to the nicest people. They offered me water or candy and would ask me to come in. One lady even opened up her gate for me to drive in, then got out lawn chairs to sit for the interview.
They were so welcoming. The majority of the population was Native American, with very few Hispanics and whites.
Enumerating a pueblo was very different from enumerating in a secular housing area. If people were home, they actually answered their door! Nobody hides from you, and they were very forthright in answering all of your questions for themselves or even their neighbors. If they knew the information, they gave it to me, and most of the time, they knew.
And one thing is nobody I interviewed said or acted like they hated the U.S. Government, which was different than my other assignments.
The hardest part was finding addresses. Many of the homes were not marked, and the residents themselves didn’t know even their own physical address because they picked up their mail at the post office. But if you knew a name, they could tell you where that person lived. There also wasn’t any order to the house numbers. You’d be looking for residence No. 41, and you’d find No. 39, and No. 43, with nothing in between except a disheveled, probably vacant trailer half a mile off the road with only a fence and 6-foot weeds in between.
So I would call the Tribal Office and ask them who the owner of the property was and then go back to the neighborhood with a name. That was how I found many addresses. If someone wasn’t home, there was always somebody around who’d lived there for thirty years and knew everyone. So I had plenty of proxies that would give me a full interview and I could close the case. Of the many residences I went to, only one person wouldn’t talk to me.
One time I was looking up and down the street for an address and I went to every single residence and knocked and couldn’t find anybody home, and finally I came upon this lady sleeping on the porch of an old dilapidated house. Her dogs woke her up with their barking. I asked her about the address I was looking for. She told me the house belonged to her niece, then gave me all the information I needed so I didn’t have to go to the niece’s house. And even most of the dogs on the reservation were gentle—they mostly ran free. If they were chained or fenced in, then they probably weren’t nice.
Most of the residences were small adobes or trailers. The yards were all mostly dirt, without grass. The actual pueblo itself was about a square mile, and it looked and felt like a small town, with a church and large open space where they held their ceremonies in the center. All of the houses were basically stacked on top of each other. There were no backyards, only front yards with narrow dirt roads in between. And there were no street lights, so you couldn’t be there after dark.
Also confusing was that the Tribe does its own census. On my first day, half the houses told me they had already done the census because the Tribal census was done a month earlier. But the Tribal Census doesn’t count the population, it counts property ownership.
I had so much fun there. I really enjoyed it.
--JR
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