Telemundo’s Más Sabe El Diablo To Trick Latinos Into Participating In The U.S. Census

In an effort to get secretive, mysterious Latinos to come down from their dilapidated tree houses and participate in the U.S. census, Telemundo novela Más Sabe El Diablo will feature a storyline that sees actress Michelle Vargas landing a job as a census worker, going from door to door teaching the show’s other characters how to fill out the census form by deciphering those strange symbols - called letters - sprinkled all over them. 

It’s important for Latinos to participate in the census in order to get proper funding for schools, communities and special programs, but many are hesitant to do so for a variety of reasons, a major one being the fear that the government will use the census-taking as a means of looking into people’s legal status. 

Michelle Vargas explains this in a poorly-translated soundbite:

They think that the government’s gonna show them who has papers and who not has papers. So I’m gonna show that it’s easy, confidential, and very important.

We’re previously aired our personal grievances with (non-Latino) groups using telenovelas as a means of marketing to Latinos, but we’re inclined to think this tactic might work in getting predominantly Spanish-speaking Latinos to participate in the census. Then again, when a maid falls in love with her boss on a novela, it doesn’t directly correlate into upward mobility among Latin American social classes. We guess we’ll wait and see how it turns out.

Telemundo to help Latinos with census [Marketplace]