Mexicans in U.S. Do Their Civic Duty

Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico was so important to Los Angeles seamstress Irma Montoya that she car-pooled to Tijuana to cast her ballot.

“Even though I live in Los Angeles, what goes on in Mexico affects me because my family is still there,” Montoya, 26, said Sunday afternoon after returning from the border city.

Montoya, a Mexican citizen and a legal Los Angeles resident since 1983, was enjoying soft drinks with her young American-born children under a tree in MacArthur Park as she often does on Sunday afternoons.

She had left for Tijuana on Saturday in a van with 11 other residents of the Pico-Union area, leaving her children with their father, her ex-husband. The group spent the night in the border town and voted first thing Sunday in one of the eight polling places set up there for Mexican citizens living outside the country.

Montoya said she voted for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate, Ernesto Zedillo.

“It was a vote for stability,” said the native of Mexico City--even though her heart was with conservative National Action Party (PAN) candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos.

“If the PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party) or any other party but the PRI wins, there would be violence and I would be afraid for my family,” said Montoya, who sends money to relatives in Mexico City but plans to stay in Los Angeles because, she says, life is easier here for women alone.

Montoya said she saw several police officers at the border, and before she was allowed to vote, election officials carefully checked the photo ID card she had obtained at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles.

Other U.S. residents were not so lucky. After traveling south of the border to do their civic duty, many were turned away because their voting credentials had expired.

Sitting near Montoya at the park, construction worker Antonio de Jesus said he had little interest in the presidential politics in his native country.

“I have no preference--they’re all same to me,” said De Jesus, who comes from the state of Guerrero.

He said he didn’t vote because it was too much trouble to get an ID card, then drive to the border to vote.

Across town, at the PRD headquarters in Alhambra, everybody was talking about the election; the party set up this headquarters during the 1988 presidential campaign to inform expatriate voters.

A huge Mexican flag fluttered in the breeze outside, and the converted former garage was festooned with pictures of presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and slogans that said “Change Is Security” and “Democracy Now!”

Next to one somber photo of Cardenas was a streamer that said: “Something More Than a Smile.” Cardenas, son of the 1930s Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas, has said he will not smile until he is elected president.

Many here and in Mexico believe that widespread fraud cheated Cardenas out of the presidency in the 1988 election, in which PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner.

All day Sunday, Spanish-language television and radio stations blared election news from Mexico City. It would be a long night, but supporters here expressed confidence that their candidate would win.

Jose Gonzalez, a 49-year-old tool-and-die maker living in East Los Angeles and an official of the PRD, said Cardenas is likely to win because this election was expected to be the fairest in his nation’s history. And he dismissed polls predicting otherwise, saying they were all tainted.

But Gonzalez admitted he was angry that the Mexican government made it so difficult for Mexican citizens living abroad to vote.

“They know Los Angeles is a bastion of PRD support. That’s why they don’t let us vote here,” he said. Gonzalez did not go to Tijuana to vote; he opted to work in PRD headquarters here.