Though the 2010 Census is still six months away, community organizers are already starting to mobilize Latinos uptown, relying on their secret weapon: pastors.

“Our community is very rooted in church,” the Rev. Raymond Rivera of the Latino Pastoral Action Center said at the kickoff of the “Ya es hora ¡Hagase contar!” (It’s time, make yourself count!) campaign in New York this month. “The average Latino is going to go to his pastor before anybody else.” Rivera said the campaign could count on his network of 1,000 local churches for support.

Latinos have traditionally been undercounted because of the high number of undocumented immigrants who fear that answering the questionnaire will bring a visit from a U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

And Uptown is one of the hardest-to-count areas: on average all neighborhoods from Harlem to Inwood received “hard-to-count scores” of 73 to 117, on a scale from 0 to 117. In plain English, explained a census worker, a number that high says no one lives there because no one sent the census forms back in 2000. Although some groups are actively opposing compliance with the census, several community leaders launched the campaign to get a complete count of Latinos in the 2010 Census.

According to the Census Bureau, New York City’s net undercount in 2000 was close to zero. But this average means that parts of the city were well counted while others were overcounted or undercounted.

The NALEO Educational Fund, a national non-partisan organization of Latino elected officials, spurred the national coalition, joining with Spanish-language TV and radio outlets and community groups focusing on justice, immigration and politics. All the organizations in the coalition raise money on their own, and can take advantage of New York State’s Complete Count Grant Program, which has made $2 million available. The media partners provide editorial programming, campaign spokesperson Julissa Gutierrez said.

The campaign supplies bilingual information through its web site, a hotline and all its local partners. It hopes that a community-based effort independent from the Census Bureau or any other governmental agency will prove more effective in achieving a complete count.

But the campaign faces opposition from the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders. Its New Jersey leader, the Rev. Miguel Rivera, has called for a boycott of the census. “Before you count, you have to legalize” is his motto. He asked that Latinos around the United States not fill in the census forms, in an effort to pressure the federal government into immigration reform.

In New York, the Rev. Raymond Rivera called that strategy “misleading, naive,” and said, “it won’t serve our community.” He added that the boycott drew more attention from the media than its actual impact deserved.

Which viewpoint persuades Latinos is crucial for the next 10 years in uptown New York. The federal government awards more than $400 billion to states and communities every year, in part based on census data. Census numbers also help determine where to build hospitals and schools, set the boundaries of legislative districts and determine how many seats each state has in the House of Representatives. In short, it affects communities’ financial and political resources for the next 10 years.

Even if the boycott isn’t as widespread as the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders would like it to be, not all pastors endorse the census. The Rev. Dominick Reyes of A New Beginning International Ministry Inc. in East Harlem said that in recent months many illegal Mexican immigrants have started attending his church. “They ask me: ‘Pastor, why do they want to know the census? Is immigration after us? Do we sign?’ They’re scared.”

Reyes felt very ambivalent toward the census and was uncertain about its ultimate purpose. Nevertheless, when people asked him, he told them not to worry and to fill in the form. As a pastor, he felt his job was “to take away fear from people who walk in my church.” He said he wasn’t against the census because he wasn’t against the government. “The Bible says we have to be under authority,” he said, “and Obama is our governing authority.”

On a recent Sunday, around 30 parishioners listened to Reyes in the cool first-floor room that serves as his church. “I am pro census, and I think you should write your name, and whether you’re a citizen or not,” Reyes said between prayers and songs. As it happens, the new census form doesn’t ask about citizenship. While the last questionnaire was 53 questions long and went to 1 in 6 households, the new simplified form is 10 questions long. For the first time, it will go to every household in the United States, and in a bilingual Spanish-English form to more than 13 million households. It does not ask about residents’ legal status.

Reyes was not yet aware of that fact, but “Ya es hora” intends to change such misconceptions. “We need to meet people where they are,” New York Secretary of State Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez said at the campaign’s launch. “We have to counter the incredible fear that has increased.”