3 Men, 2 Nations, 1 Dream

Thirty years after Andres Bermudez illegally entered the United States stuffed in a car trunk, he came home this month with a marching band and dinner for everyone in his old neighborhood.

Decked out in fancy Western wear, sunglasses and gold jewelry, Bermudez--now known as the “Tomato King” for the plentiful harvests on his 600-acre spread in central California’s Yolo County--appealed for votes to become the town’s mayor in Sunday’s elections.

As he walked from business to business on the dusty streets, shaking hands and kissing babies, his staffers broke out in song: “He’s here. He’s here, the guy who will take out the ruling party!”

Bermudez’s brashness has made him the talk of Jerez, a city of 40,000 in the central state of Zacatecas. He and two other U.S. residents are the first to campaign for Mexican elective office since the country’s “dual nationality” provision went into effect in 1998, allowing Mexicans who had become citizens of other countries to regain their nationality and property rights in their homeland.

On the campaign trail, the burly 51-year-old Bermudez steps from his late-model Chevrolet pickup in his snakeskin cowboy boots to talk with farmers in huaraches. Alongside the dirt road, he promises to erase corruption and bring the U.S. work ethic and technology to the Mexican countryside.

Bermudez and the other two U.S. residents are running mayoral campaigns against candidates from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known by its Spanish acronym of PRI), which has held near-absolute power here for seven decades.

Juan Duran, 50, who owns a car repair shop in Oxnard, is running for mayor of Tepetongo, a town of 10,000 about 25 miles away. Martin Carvajal, 45, a factory manager who moved from Los Angeles to Fort Worth two years ago, is running for mayor of Apulco, population 5,000.

The men are driven by a mix of altruism and ego. Like many migrants, they want to return to Mexico to show that they achieved wealth and success in the U.S. But they also want to further development in towns that lack sewers and paved roads.

If they win, they will have to give up many comforts they have come to expect as U.S. residents. The candidates’ wives wonder how they will fare leaving their friends and homes to live in small Mexican towns where social circles are often closed to newcomers.

But the candidates and their supporters hope that their examples will encourage other migrants to return as part of a new breed of binational politicians.

Juan Hernandez, advisor to Mexican President Vicente Fox on Mexicans abroad, said the Mexican government supports the three migrants’ activism, even though none are from Fox’s center right National Action Party (PAN). He and others believe that these municipal elections could usher in other candidates from the United States for state and federal legislative posts.

“These individuals come from immigrant-sending regions. They understand the issues in their communities. It tells us that Mexicans abroad are becoming successful. They are also becoming more and more politically active,” Hernandez said.

Fox, the first non-PRI president in 70 years, made migrants the hallmark of his campaign and courted them in trips to the U.S.

“We have political power now, and this is just the beginning,” said Santa Ana resident Lupe Gomez, president of the Zacatecas Civic Front, one of several clubs founded by immigrants to California. Some of the clubs have raised millions for public works projects in Zacatecas and were the breeding grounds for the Mexican campaigns.

The U.S. is now home to about half of the 1.2 million natives of Zacatecas, a state where “yup” and si are as easily exchanged as pesos and dollars. Men wear Dodger caps as often as cowboy hats. In these towns--separated by miles of mountains, farm fields and swaths of arid, desolate terrain--many houses stand abandoned by the families who have moved to “El Norte.” Talk of illegal border crossings raises no more eyebrows than a chat about the weather.

Still, some feel uncomfortable with the candidates and fear encroaching U.S. influence.

In a column about the Bermudez campaign in the local newspaper, El Sol de Zacatecas, J.E. Rivera wrote that many “believe that a great deal of our problems (family disintegration, AIDS, drug addiction, body piercing and tattoos) are related to North American influence.”

Indeed, American culture is apparent on the campaign trail. Campaign staff shrug when Bermudez asks for “el schedule.” He spouts English expletives when a staffer suggests that he paint his $40,000 pickup with campaign slogans. He speaks longingly of HBO and thousand island dressing.

Duran looks as much a tourist as a candidate as he videotapes trips through the poor neighborhoods, many without running water.

Carvajal, deported 13 times under various aliases before becoming a U.S. resident in the 1980s, says he will need to return to Fort Worth to pay off campaign debt if he loses.

In all three cases, foes have challenged the men’s loyalty to Mexico--how long they lived there and whether they intend to stay. Raul Rodriguez Santoyo, president of the PRI in Zacatecas state, says none of the American candidates meet residency requirements.

Bermudez won the nomination of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) only after a monthlong battle to get the local government to certify that he had lived in Jerez for the required one continuous year--effectively pushing the truth, because he had been on his farm near Winters, Calif., for extended periods during that time.

Bermudez, Duran and Carvajal “may want to help, but there are other ways to do it,” said Rodriguez. “The political race satisfies the ego but not the law.”

‘They Are the Same Zacatecans We Are’

If there is a godfather of the mayoral candidates, it is Zacatecas Gov. Ricardo Monreal.

Monreal, who campaigned in California and visits the state twice a year, suggested the idea of the mayoral bids to the three men late last year. He said they showed leadership, had money in the bank and a had a track record with voters because of their activity in civic clubs in California.

“They have learned about business, about technology, about farming, but . . . they are the same Zacatecans we are, and they can help,” said Monreal, a member of the PRD who makes no secret that he aspires to be Mexico’s president.

For Carvajal, that learning process began as he moved between Zacatecas and California for nearly a decade. He and his family finally settled in Los Angeles. He became a legal U.S. resident and opened a furniture factory. Until five years ago, when he sold the firm, he employed 70 people.

When one of his sons got too close to gang activity, he moved to Fort Worth, where he now manages a furniture factory. Wife Olivia works on the assembly line. Son Jose was the first in the family to graduate from college and is looking for work to use his engineering degree. Daughter Maria is studying computers at the University of Texas, Arlington. The youngest, Jesus, is 13.

“I feel like we got the American dream. Now we want the Mexican one too,” he said.

Seeking office in the remote village of Apulco as the candidate of a new centrist party--Democratic Convergence--he is considered to have a good chance of winning.

Carvajal helped found the Zacatecas club in Los Angeles in 1987 and has remained very active, often traveling to Mexico three or four times a year.

“I just kept thinking, one day I will be mayor. . . . I want to rob technology from the United States and bring it here,” he said.

Although Duran’s chances of becoming a mayor seem dim, he keeps knocking on doors. As a member of the center-left Work Party, he says he wants real change for a place that will always be home.

In the late 1960s, Duran’s family left Zacatecas and he moved among Los Angeles, Oregon, Chicago and Mexicali, Mexico. He picked lemons, strawberries, lettuce and cilantro. He also worked as a bartender and sang in mariachi bands.

He became a U.S. citizen and now owns a two-bay auto garage, which his brother Bernabe is running in his absence.

When he returned to visit Zacatecas, “I would see my friends from long ago, still in the same problem as before. I would drive on the roads, and it would ruin my car. It made me want to do something to help my people,” Duran said.

At the same time, he wonders if he can live without the comforts of California and whether his family can adapt. Duran’s wife is not even Mexican, and the couple’s 11-year-old daughter, born in Oxnard, does not have a mastery of Spanish. “I’ve been in the U.S. for all these years, but I can’t get Mexico out of me,” he said. “You want to go back, and then you wonder how to leave everything you’ve worked for.”

Rising From Rags to Riches

Of the three candidates, it is Bermudez who provides the ultimate rags-to-riches saga.

In 1973, he and his wife paid $550 to a “coyote”--a smuggler--to take them to California. They rode inside the trunk of a car for 149 miles.

Bermudez received U.S. residency in 1982 and in the early 1990s became a U.S. citizen.

The family lived in farm labor camps until Bermudez gradually bought 600 acres near Winters, west of Sacramento, and another farm near Watsonville, Calif., in the early 1990s. He estimates that his annual income is $300,000.

He bought fancy cars and built a large home with tile and pillars from Mexico. He added a pool only because “rich people have pools in the United States.” He says he has swum in it once.

Family members play key roles in the farming operation, which employs 700 people, including 200 from Jerez. It is no secret in Jerez that Bermudez can get as many as 300 temporary visas for Mexicans who want to work his fields. That disgusts his opponents.

“People don’t like the way he’s tossing around money and the visas. It smells,” said Salvador Espinosa, one of his opponents who returned to Jerez 10 years ago after 30 years in Pasadena.

Bermudez is expected to win his election. He is campaigning hard, from factories to stores to schools to public housing.

“The PRI has been saying it will do things for 72 years. They inaugurate roads and never finish them. . . . We need to begin with actions,” he says as he drives away from a one-room kindergarten, where he promised parents he would install playground equipment whether he won or lost.

Teacher Mirna Salsero is stunned by his promise. For years, she has asked for help because the school’s unimproved land doesn’t offer enough for the students.

One mother with a 16-year-old son asks Bermudez to get him a farm worker visa because he’s threatening to go with a coyote to Long Beach the next day. Bermudez says he is too young to qualify for the visa.

“Why don’t you have him stay? We’re going to make things better. I promise,” Bermudez says.

At lunch, however, he wonders if he can. The campaign makes him consider whether he’s from Mexico or the United States. In Jerez, his black dress shirts and sunglasses contrast sharply with the locals’ white tops and squinted eyes. He feels out of place in Jerez, annoyed by slow restaurant service and inefficiency in other businesses and even his own campaign. But he feels prejudice in the U.S.

Would he ever have even considered running for mayor in Winters?

He laughs at the question and says no one would vote for a Mexican immigrant with a heavy accent.

“I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I wonder if I can live here,” he says on a campaign stop in Jerez. “Now I can’t turn back. I made a promise to this election, and I will see what it brings me.”

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ON THE WEB: A multimedia slide show of Andres Bermudez--the “Tomato King” of Yolo County and mayoral candidate in Jerez, Mexico--is on The Times’ Web site at https://latimes.com/mexcampaign