The decennial census is a foundational infrastructure of US democracy: census-produced numbers go on to impact the distribution of political power through congressional apportionment and redistricting and the allocation funding for federal programs. They shape policy decisions and substantiate instances of racial inequity. They are numbers that construct racialized population and project American futures. The census has also been anti-democratic given its history of undercounting, erasure, and surveillance, and the ways census data has been taken up in projects of population intervention that have sought to construct a White, settler-colonial, nation. In 2020, the census involved a highly publicized struggle over citizenship data and political exclusion, as the Trump administration sought to cut undocumented immigrants, and other non-citizens, from the count, threatening to produce an undercount with spiraling impacts on equity that could travel as far as census counts do.

This study is centered in Chicago, IL, and beyond the Census Bureau, which has been well-studied by other scholars, turning instead to an unexpectedly wide cadre of census professionals—from policy leaders and civil rights advocates to service providers and community organizers—who took up the challenge of making everyone count amidst the layered political and health crises. Amongst census insiders, the term “enumerator” typically refers to those hired by the Census Bureau to knock on the door of households that have not yet self-responded during a given follow-up phase. I extend the application of the term to this group of professionals who, I argue, were no less integral to the political and interpretive work of counting. Accordingly, this dissertation asks a set of questions about who counts—who is counted and who is doing the counting—taking counting to be both the literal activity of enumeration and the broader project of making people count.

Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research, this study tracks census counting as a political process that in 2020 in Chicago relied on community-based professionals as much as on bureaucratic mobilization and centers the everyday labor of counting when the contradictory politics of census implementation were thrown into stark relief. I explore the construction of counting as a problem of trust, organized around the figurations of the “trusted messenger” and the “hard-to-count.” I elaborate the labor of enumeration and its dilemmas, including leveraging trust and framing the census, considering how counting reconfigured enumerators, and their labor, as outside of the state. Additionally, I show how, understanding the Trump administration as invested in producing invisibility, enumerators reframed counting as entailing a positively inflected visibility—truth, recognition, and even resistance. Faced with the dilemmas of 2020 census counting amidst the Trump administration policy onslaught, enumerators labored to reaffirm a faith in numbers and in the ostensibly democratic infrastructure of census counting, often in spite of their uncertainty and critiques. This dissertation opens up the implementation of counting in 2020 in Chicago as a focal point for contention over the future and present of American democracy.