CHICAGO: Former Chicago businessman and Mexican immigrant Timoteo Manjarrez recently decided to run for mayor in his hometown of Teloloapan, a poor city in the south of Mexico where he returned to live six years ago.
“I always dreamed of coming back to my roots. Now we are going to get this city out of the backwardness it is submerged in,” the 42-year-old Manjarrez said in a telephone interview.
In July, eager to raise support for his election effort, the successful restaurateur turned to an unlikely group of people who could have a big influence on how his constituents vote — his former neighbours in Chicago’s Little Village and Pilsen neighbourhoods.
Two months ago, Mexico’s government gave its citizens living abroad the right to vote in the country’s next presidential election in July 2006.
About four million Mexicans in the United States are believed to be eligible to vote in Mexico’s presidential election next year. Analysts say this new bloc of voters could transform Mexico’s political landscape and will surely be an influential force in the presidential race, although it may take more than one election cycle for their full impact to be seen.
Although emigres cannot vote in local elections, Manjarrez and other local candidates are reaching out to the estimated 12 million Mexicans living in the United States to ask them to sway voters back home. Manjarrez visited Chicago, held a news conference and met with immigrant groups to promote his candidacy.
The influence of immigrants on Mexico has largely been exerted by the remittances. Mexicans living and working in the United States channelled $16 billion back to their families in Mexico in 2004. This was Mexico’s second-largest source of income after revenues generated by oil exports.
“We never had the right to vote, but we had the money,” said Martin Unzueta, who heads the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party in Illinois. “We hope that politicians will pay more attention to immigrants’ needs.”
With their emergence as a voting bloc, immigrants could gain leverage to push for immigration law changes long sought on the US side of the border.
But while welcoming the election law, critics say it leaves many hurdles for prospective immigrant voters: they can only vote in the presidential election, and they cannot contribute directly to candidates.
Manjarrez recently spent several days making the political rounds in Chicago’s Little Village and Pilsen neighbourhoods, considered the heart of the city’s Mexican community, the second-largest in the United States after Los Angeles.
The streets bustled with crowds dipping into Latino restaurants, supermarkets and music stores festooned with Mexican flags and advertising banners written in Spanish.
While the Mexican law expressly forbids political parties from campaigning in the United States, stepped-up organizing efforts are evident here.
“We are now entering a new stage of Mexican politics,” said Rodolfo Hernandez Guerrero, director of the Centre for US-Mexico Studies of the University of Texas at Dallas. “This will be a great political laboratory.”
The election law requires immigrants with a voter identification card to mail a request to Mexico City for an absentee ballot, which will be mailed out early next year.
Roughly four million Mexicans in the United States have the proper credentials allowing them to vote. Of those, one out of 10 will likely cast a ballot, Mexican election officials have predicted.
But a recent survey by the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Centre found that 87 per cent of Mexican immigrants said they planned to vote in next year’s election.—Reuters