A Death Felt North of the Border

Among Southern California’s 3.8 million residents of Mexican descent, the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio could not have hit harder than when Leticia Quezada heard about it.

Quezada, the Los Angeles school board president who was born in Mexico, thought it was a cruel joke when her husband told her. She is among local leaders who have sought stronger ties between Mexican Americans and the next Mexican president and wanted to cultivate the 44-year-old Colosio, who was the candidate of Mexico’s ruling party.

When she realized the terrible news was true, Quezada, 38, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was in a deep state of frustration. She couldn’t work up enthusiasm for a teachers meeting the morning after Colosio died.

“I’m so overwhelmed by it,” she said. “I’m paralyzed. I’m depressed. It hits really close to home.”

*

Colosio’s murder is the last thing Mexico needs right now, given the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the clamor for political reform. The assassination is a another signal that Mexico faces a very uncertain future.

In the minds of many Mexicans, there are powerful parallels between Colosio and the two slain Kennedy brothers, John and Robert. Colosio’s murder will have as great an impact on Mexican history as the slayings of President Kennedy and his brother, the U.S. senator from New York, had on American history.

There’s been no event like it in modern Mexican history.

The same Kennedyesque questions come to mind once again: Did the gunman in Tijuana act alone? Was there a conspiracy to kill Colosio?

The chaotic scenes from Tijuana of Colosio’s supporters and aides grappling with the suspected assassin reminded me of 1968 when Sirhan Sirhan was wrestled to the ground after mortally wounding Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel.

On Wednesday, I was in The Times’ newsroom working on a column about the closing of Los Angeles’ oldest bookstore, the 105-year-old Fowler Brothers, when the first news bulletin came in. I knew instantly I’d be writing about something different.

The angry reaction over Colosio’s death among local Chicanos and Mexicanos, which even extended to how L.A. broadcasters butchered the pronunciation of Colosio’s name, is easy to understand.

For many Mexicans, Colosio was one of the people. He wasn’t a man of privilege as are many who run the PRI, as the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party is called.

He was a norteno, a northerner, from the town of Magdalena de Kino, just 50 miles south of the Arizona border. He came from poor ranching origins where family values stress self-reliance. Many of Mexican descent who have come to the U.S. can relate to Colosio’s modest background.

They understand the hard work that is required to get an education. He couldn’t afford much and had to fight for scholarships to attend college. Although he ultimately earned a doctorate, he retained an affection for the average man and woman.

He, in turn, became so popular that Quezada didn’t have the heart to call her mother in Mexico to talk about the slaying--it would have been too painful for the older woman to discuss.

In his campaign, Colosio sought to transfer that personal popularity into votes for the PRI, the dominant but often corrupt political machine that has governed Mexico since its beginnings in 1929. The average Mexicans who grew tired of PRI’s rule--and yet have come to accept its rule and feared instability after the Indian uprising in Chiapas--were heartened to know that Colosio would offer hope as Mexico’s new chief executive.

His death is especially disheartening for L.A.’s Chicano political Establishment because it sought to strengthen its ties with Mexico’s top leaders.

Colosio, perhaps more than any other politician in modern Mexico, sought to understand the Mexican American experience in the United States. He had studied at the University of Pennsylvania and saw firsthand how many of his compatriots live in this country.

Some Chicano activists and business leaders in Los Angeles say that they had met as many as five times in recent months with Colosio. They found him to be a man interested in their ideas.

“We were blunt in wanting a more serious and substantive relationship with the Mexican government,” says Boyle Heights activist Juan Jose Gutierrez. “We were frank with him . . . and he listened.”

*

The news of Colosio’s death hit particularly hard in Los Angeles because, ironically, some Chicanos last week were awaiting word of yet another meeting with Colosio. It was proposed that they get together with the candidate during a campaign stop in Tijuana.

Instead came word that he was shot and killed there.