Chicano Agenda Getting Bigger Play in Mexico

It wasn’t just another political meeting. Instead of gossiping about the upcoming race for governor or the U.S. Senate, a dozen prominent Mexican American leaders met last weekend in a Downtown Los Angeles hotel to discuss this year’s presidential election in Mexico and what they want from the new president.

They just didn’t talk about it. They acted like a special-interest group in an election in this country.

The local Chicanos met with a personal emissary of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of Mexico’s ruling political party, and presented him with a list of demands, although the Mexican Americans didn’t call it that. But it sure looked like one.

The Chicanos want expanded cultural, educational and sports programs between the Mexican government and Mexican Americans. They want the Mexican government to consider using Chicano professionals for various business and government ventures, complaining that qualified Mexican Americans were often passed over in favor of others.

They also asked Mexican officialdom to take the time to better understand Mexican Americans and their place in U.S. society.

In return, the Chicanos can become a lobbying force and conduit for Mexican interests and concerns.

The 90-minute exchange with Colosio emissary Santiago Onate Laborde, over coffee and Mexican sweet bread, left the Chicano politicos happy but still angling for more leverage in a Mexico rocked by the recent Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.

“It was a very productive first meeting,” said Los Angeles school board President Leticia Quezada. “The purpose of the meeting was our agenda, not the PRI’s.”

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In the past, such a meeting would have been unimaginable. Mexican officials did not take Chicanos and their concerns very seriously because, after all, Chicanos are U.S. citizens.

Some Mexicans believed that Chicanos were on the lower economic and social rung in this country. That belief was strengthened by the inability of many Mexican Americans to speak Spanish, which horrified certain Mexicans, according to Jorge Bustamante, Mexico’s leading researcher on Chicanos.

For their part, Mexican Americans reveled in their heritage and many Mexican traditions. But they were ambivalent about the PRI, which has run Mexico since its inception in 1929. Their families had left Mexico because they were cynical about PRI’s dominance and the slim chances for prosperity there.

But things have changed.

Contacts between the Mexican government and Chicanos started in 1971 during the tenure of President Luis Echeverria and quickened when Carlos Salinas de Gortari assumed the presidency in 1988. Quezada and other Chicanos met with Salinas in Tijuana and came away with agreements for Mexican-trained teachers to come to the United States to help with this country’s bilingual programs.

Also, a Mexican cultural institute was established in Los Angeles.

In the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexican American lawmakers cast key votes in favor of NAFTA when it passed Congress.

There’s also the matter of Chiapas.

The rebellion in Mexico’s version of Mississippi has been a public relations nightmare for Salinas, especially in this country. For example, Juan Jose Gutierrez, head of a Boyle Heights nonprofit immigration agency, recently called Colosio a political “dead cadaver” who can’t win because of Chiapas. Those comments were picked up and duly noted in Mexico City.

When Onate met the L.A. Chicanos, led by Quezada and Montebello attorney Raul Ayala, he was happy to talk about Chiapas. He allowed that army abuses probably occurred during the brief fighting but pointedly added that abuses were also committed by the Zapatistas. These things unfortunately occur in times of war, Onate said, citing U.S. atrocities in Vietnam.

“No one (in Mexico) condones that, but it happened,” Onate said. “We have to confront it and deal with it.”

The Chicanos were impressed with Onate’s response, knowing he reflects the party’s thinking since he is a rising star in the PRI. They, too, have heard the talk that Onate may become Mexico’s foreign minister in a Colosio administration.

After that, who knows?

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Colosio isn’t the only presidential candidate in the Aug. 28 election. There are at least six others, including Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the populist son of a former president who bolted from the PRI in disgust and nearly defeated Salinas for president in 1988.

“We want to talk to them too,” Quezada said, no doubt remembering an American political lesson of covering your bases.