El Salvador Closely Watching Race for California Senate Seat

California Senate candidate Liz Figueroa may well be the best-liked politician in El Salvador.

Although people here cannot vote for Figueroa in the fall election, they celebrated her triumph in the Democratic primary this month as a victory for Salvadorans. One daily newspaper here sent a correspondent to cover her campaign for the seat near Oakland. The 47-year-old state assemblywoman and daughter of Salvadoran immigrants was even the cover story for the first issue of a newspaper’s Sunday tabloid section called Enfoques (Focuses).

“This erases the stereotype of Salvadorans as people who just go to the United States to do heavy labor,” said Ivan Gonzalez, editor of the weekly section, which appears in La Prensa Grafica. “This could even raise the national self-esteem.”

Even though Figueroa was born in the Bay Area and has visited El Salvador only once--more than two decades ago--she is seen as a potentially important ally.

“The Salvadoran economy is heavily dependent on the United States,” said Hector Silva, a La Prensa Grafica reporter who covered Figueroa’s campaign. Salvadorans abroad send home about $1 billion a year, close to 10 times the earnings from coffee exports, El Salvador’s major export, according to Central Reserve Bank figures.

Any policy change that might endanger the ability of Salvadoran immigrants to earn money in the United States and send it home has an immediate resonance here. For example, President Armando Calderon Sol has lobbied in the United States to prolong the stay of Salvadorans who fled north during his nation’s civil war, which ended six years ago.

Similarly, tighter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws raised an immediate outcry in El Salvador.

As a result, people here are eager to see signs that their compatriots in the United States are gaining political clout.

“What affects Salvadorans at the political level in the United States also affects people here,” Silva said. “What benefits Salvadorans in the United States will benefit their relatives here.”

However, Oscar Andrade, vice president of the Salvadoran Reconstruction and Development Fund, who lived in the United States for 14 years, is concerned that the enthusiasm might not be completely justified.

“There has always been the hope that among the million or more Salvadorans who live in the United States, some will rise to positions of leadership,” he said. “But we still have to ask, ‘How Salvadoran is she really?’ It could be that her identification with her heritage is minimal.”

In trying to answer that question, newspapers here have covered Figueroa’s personal life in far more detail than they dedicate to their own politicians: Her relationship with her parents, grandmother and two children all have been fully explored.

She spoke to a Salvadoran reporter about her two brothers’ involvement with illegal drugs in the United States and her own struggles against sex discrimination, openly discussing problems that legislators here will rarely admit exist.

That personal style of reporting reflects an effort to understand what impact Figueroa might have on Salvadoran issues, Gonzalez said.

“This is a point of contact between the two countries. It affects both Salvadoran communities,” he said.

Further, Silva said, Salvadorans are interested in Figueroa because they believe that her success is a watershed.

“This is the beginning of Salvadoran participation in California politics,” he explained.

“We could be now where the Mexicans and the Cubans were 20 years ago,” Andrade said. “And in another 20 years, we could have not just one, but five representatives of Central American origin in the [state] Senate or even in Congress.”

Gonzalez foresees even a broader significance: “This will encourage Salvadorans who can contribute not only in politics, but in science, education and other fields.”