Mexican Politicians Look North : Latinos: Candidates begin to recognize the potential power of Los Angeles’ large immigrant community in their own affairs.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, an unsuccessful candidate for the Mexican presidency, is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles Saturday hoping to tap into a newly discovered source of support for his political movement--millions of Mexicans and Chicanos living on this side of the border.

The son of a revered former president of Mexico, Cardenas ignited an ongoing movement toward democratic reforms even though he lost the 1988 election.

He is now reaching out to win the hearts and minds--and the financial support--of his compatriots and their descendants in Los Angeles, where more Mexicans live than anywhere outside Mexico City.

This is Cardenas’ first visit to Los Angeles, and the tour itself is a departure from the tradition of Mexican campaigning. It has long been considered political suicide for Mexican politicians to court “Yankee” approval, but Cardenas is making it clear this is an appeal for grass-roots support from Mexican immigrants. But more than that, in a new strategy for Mexican politicans, he is also seeking the support of Mexican-Americans.

“In the future, you’re going to see more and more Mexican politicians pressing the flesh over here as they do over there in Mexico,” said Raul Ruiz, a Chicano studies professor at Cal State Northridge, who is helping to organize Cardenas’ tour. “Certainly that’s something that’s positive.”

“We have had everybody and his brother calling and asking why are we Mexican-Americans doing this,” said Los Angeles grocer Joe M. Sanchez, one of Cardenas’ backers here. “The Jews in America have been concerned with what’s happening in Israel. The same is true with the Irish-Americans and Ireland, and the Afro-Americans and South Africa. Why shouldn’t Mexican-Americans get together and do something for both of our countries?”

Mexico has no system of absentee balloting, but more politicians are recognizing the influence of Mexican workers who live in the United States and travel back and forth between the two countries, taking back with them not only foreign currency but political ideas as well.

Cardenas’ visit is only one sign that foreign leaders are recognizing the potential strength of Los Angeles’ immigrant community when it comes to their own internal politics.

Philippine President Corazon Aquino this weekend will make Los Angeles the final stop in her seven-city trade and economic mission through the United States and Canada. This is the only city where Aquino will not make official visits with government officials or business leaders. Instead, according to the Philippine Consulate, she will meet with the fast-growing Filipino immigrant community in Southern California.

“The expatriate Filipino community here, not just in Southern California but in the entire United States, played a significant role in rallying international support against the dictatorship (of Ferdinand Marcos),” said consulate spokesman Gil Roy Gorre. “Mrs. Aquino knows that better than anyone else.”

Gorre said that Southern California has the largest concentration of Filipinos outside of the Philippines and that his office anticipates that the 1990 Census will show that Filipinos have overtaken the Chinese as the second-biggest immigrant group in Los Angeles behind Mexicans.

As for Cardenas, his whirlwind four-day tour of Los Angeles will begin with a $100-a-plate fund-raising luncheon Saturday at the Velvet Turtle restaurant in Chinatown. He will also make four university appearances, including an address Saturday night at East Los Angeles College.

Cardenas shook the foundations of modern Mexico when he quit the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, united disparate leftist groups and won an unprecedented 31% of the votes cast for president in last year’s election. The official count showed the ruling party’s candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, winning with only 50.36% of the vote, the narrowest margin in the party’s 60-year history.

Even now, some of Cardenas’ supporters continue to insist that the PRI, as the ruling party is known, stole the election, and say Cardenas is the rightful victor.

In spite of the defeat at the polls, Cardenas’ campaign to open up Mexico’s political system is credited with making other opposition victories possible. In July, a candidate for the right-wing National Action Party won the governor’s seat in Baja California Norte, the first time the ruling party has lost a governorship.

Cardenas says he will run for president again in 1994, and to that end he is wooing supporters in Los Angeles. An engineer by training, Cardenas is a former governor of the state of Michoacan, where a large number of Mexican immigrants to Southern California come from.

Cardenas has found support among many Latino businessmen and longtime Los Angeles community leaders. The committee sponsoring his tour includes attorney Armando Duron of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, businesswoman Gloria Alvarez, attorney Gil Avila, consultant Irene Tovar, Mike Hernandez with the Olvera Street Merchants’ Assn., and Abel Amaya, a professor and director of USC’s Centro Chicano, a student center.

Sanchez, one of the organizers, conceded that a number of well-established Latino business leaders who trade with Mexico chose not to lend their name to Cardenas’ tour, saying they feared a backlash from the Salinas government.

Nevertheless, the fact that so many others have shown their support of Cardenas is a sign of the Latino community’s political maturity here, Ruiz said

“Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in L.A. have come of age in some sense,” he said. “We want to be part of the democratic movements spreading all over the world.”

CARDENAS AT HOME--While Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has kept alive his grass-roots links with the Mexican people, he faces a tough dilemma. B7