Voters’ Tough Pilgrimage Home Turns Triumphant

The Garcias rumbled down Interstate 5 in their aging brown Bronco, seeking to oust the world’s longest-ruling party from office.

But the Hawthorne couple’s caravan to vote in the Mexican elections Sunday didn’t quite come off like the storming of the Bastille.

In fact, by midnight Saturday, as they stood with their fellow travelers and some stray dogs on a dark Tijuana street, the mood was getting downright bleak.

“This is a disaster,” declared their leader, several hours into roaming the sprawling border town. “We’re lost.”

While others may have headed home for a warm bed, this group of 15 Mexican emigres went to sleep in a mosquito-infested parking lot. But despite the limited number of ballots available for voters living outside the country, their persistence paid off.

Just before 9 a.m. 46-year-old Susana Garcia grinned as she dropped her ballot through the slot, the first person among hundreds to cast their votes at the Tijuana airport.

This election struck a chord with thousands of Mexican Americans as the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, lost its hold on the presidency for the first time in more than 70 years. Many drove for hours, some from as far as San Jose and San Francisco, to vote at the closest polling places--Tijuana.

Some whipped in from Los Angeles and San Diego. Others got the run-around from officials at the border or got lost. Those who arrived at the airport found a line so long and slow-moving that it could defeat all but the most diligent.

By 11 a.m., about 400 people waited to cast ballots at the airport. Many were immigrants, still drawn by nostalgia and loyalty to their homeland.

Those who endured the long wait echoed a common motivation: “The PRI party has had 70 years of total rule,” said Anselmo Olmos, 65, who came from Pomona with his brother. “The people are tired of these leaders.”

It is still unclear how many Mexicans living in the United States crossed the border to vote, though initial expectations of major bus caravans and floods of traffic did not materialize.

Most of those interviewed while they waited to vote said they supported the victorious opposition candidate, Vicente Fox of the right-leaning National Action Party (PAN), or Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). Fox, who ran neck-and-neck in most preelection polls with the ruling party candidate, Francisco Labastida, is popular in the U.S. border region.

Unlike in the United States, there are no absentee ballots for Mexicans living outside their country. Traveling to the border is often the only way to vote for Mexican citizens--many of whom are legal permanent residents or citizens of the United States.

Adriana Reina, 28, never paid much attention to elections in the past because she believed that they were rigged by the government. But this year, she and her husband made an early morning drive Sunday from their home in West Hollywood to cast their ballots.

“Before, it was useless to go to elections,” she said. “This is the first time everything could change.”

Still, she grew suspicious as she crossed into Tijuana from San Ysidro, Calif. She had heard that there would be polling places set up at the border crossing. But as they arrived, there were none, and officials seemed to know nothing about where to vote, she said. She said other would-be voters were milling about the area, also confused.

“No one could give you a straight answer,” she said. “No one could tell you to go here or go there.”

The couple, originally from Mexico City, next went to a government building where they were passed around among officials until someone told them to drive to the east side of town and the airport at Otay Mesa.

There, they stepped into the voting line, only to see it was moving so slowly that others were leaving in frustration.

“They couldn’t make it harder,” she said. But it was worth it, she said.

Some men grew visibly restless.

“Vamonos, senores!” several shouted, as election officials matched everyone’s name to registered voters in a book, meticulously wrote down a 17-digit identification number and fingerprinted each person.

But other voters thought the plodding pace was a sign that officials were ensuring that the election was legitimate.

Gladys Correa, 58, arrived in Tijuana after an overnight drive from San Jose that featured few glitches. She and the 14 activists in her van said it was worth the time to let their voices be heard.

“It was worth the pain because we need a change in Mexico,” she said, heading off for breakfast before a long return trip north.

The Garcias couldn’t agree more. They had joined a caravan of mostly PRD supporters, which was supposed to include hundreds of people leaving from Olvera Street Los Angeles. But only 15 people in two vans and the Garcias’ Bronco actually made the trip. The places they were scheduled to meet like-minded travelers were empty. But their spirits were not dampened.

As they crested a hill in San Diego County and glimpsed the sweep of Tijuana lights, Antonio Garcia sighed warmly, “Ah, Tijuana,” and Susana Garcia said, “My heart always starts beating here.”

At a Chevron station in San Ysidro, she opened an icebox full of tamales for the men in the two accompanying vans.

Later, driving rundown Tijuana streets, they kept the conversation humming along, talking about the differences between Mexico and the United States and saying that women seem to swoon over Vicente Fox as they did with Bill Clinton.

Most of the men in the group had been braceros--the name for Mexicans workers who were imported to pick America’s crops from 1942 to 1964. The wrinkled, stoic men, with their starched shirts and straw cowboy hats, worked for years in Texas, New Mexico and California. All the while their contracts included 10% pay deductions intended for a savings fund in Mexico.

The fund, estimated at $150 million, has vanished from a Mexican government-controlled bank and the braceros can’t get a straight answer on where it went, they said.

Antonio Garcia’s father is one of them, and Antonio believes that Cardenas as president would have supported the braceros’ struggle.

But not all the Mexicans immigrants had such deep-seated issues with the government. Michelle Coppel, 20, an exchange student at UC San Diego, can’t relate to the sometimes apathetic view of many young Americans. The first-time voter hopes to make a difference. “We need something new,” she said.