Nos han contado*

The sticker on our door means we have been counted.

It is census time here in Mexico and from May 31st until June 25 everyone is being counted. Well, as many as they can find anyway. The young woman census taker came to our door yesterday. It was really hot so I checked her ID and invited her inside to sit while we answered the questions.

There were not a lot of questions, our first names, ages, where we were born, if we had been here in 2005, if we spoke one of the indigenous languages, what kind of floor we had, number of rooms in the house and whether we had a list of amenities in the house. Our options for flooring included dirt, concrete, tile, wood and since our tiles are also made from concrete (the traditional Yucatan pasta tiles) we come in the pure concrete floor bracket. We had all of amenities listed in the question; septic tank, inside water faucet, flush toilet, refrigerator, electricity, telephone, TV, and internet. I felt like a conspicuous consumer after that question.

After that, I gave her a bottle of cold water to take with her, she gave us a pamphlet with previous census information and put a sticker on our door so other census takers would know we had been counted.

One of the interesting facts in the booklet she left is that in the 2005 census, 33 of every 100 people over the age of 5 in the state of Yucatan spoke one of the indigenous languages, almost all of them Yucatec Maya. There were a very few who spoke Chol, Tzetlal or one of the Zapotec languages.

Also in 2005, 57% of the population was under the age of 30 and 83% of the population lived in one of the urban areas of the state. It will be interesting to see the changes in the last 5 years.

*it just so happens that this is one of the verb forms that we’ve been practicing in my Spanish class so I just had to use it. It means ‘we have been counted’.