This is a translated (and slightly editorialized) version of a piece I wrote for the Mexican magazine, Nexos. Photo by Gustavo García.
At 3:30 PM, Susana Perez had already been in line for six hours to vote. This is the first time she voted since she immigrated from the state of Puebla to New York in 1995. In her former life, she had worked in a textile company in the state of Tlaxcala. The money was good. But then there was a devaluation of the Mexican peso. With that, the money dried up and Susana lost her job.
"I left because of the bad governments," Susana tells me, joined by family members, each wearing a maroon-colored garment or accessory: a bag, a blouse, a dress in support of the Morena party. Led by Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), Morena promised to lead with a progressive social, economic, and political agenda known as the “Fourth Transformation” or 4T. The so-called transformation imagines a future in which government employees no longer abuse their power in order to enrich themselves and protect their allies. It boosts welfare programs and promises to end inequity. To Mexicans living in the US, the 4T is a national project that looks to rectify the wrongs of history that caused them to immigrate from the country in the first place. The 4T lends credence to their Mexicanness.
"I tell people that AMLO is my dad," interrupts a woman with a pom-pom decorated with patriotic colors – green, white, and red paper serpentines dangle from her wrist.
"We are much more informed than we used to," says Susana, who proudly tells me she longer watches television. Instead, she consumes "the [president’s] daily morning press conference and its derivatives," meaning YouTube accounts and “alternative news sites.”
"Today is a historic day," she repeats over and over.
The people around her, whether they know Susana or not, nod along in agreement.
Thus begins the second floor of the fourth transformation, more than 4000 kilometers away from Mexico.
In 2022, two years before the largest election in Mexico's history, hundreds of Mexicans residing in the New York metropolitan area gathered in a public plaza in Queens to commemorate another historic event: for the first time, Mexicans abroad could vote in a referendum that would determine if the president, in this case, Andres Manuel López Obrador, would finish his six-year term.
On April 10 of that year, Corona Plaza in northern Queens was packed. Mariachis and chinelo dancers from the state of Morelos swayed through the plaza, wearing their carnival outfits; even a Zumba dance company waved Mexican flags, shaking their hips to the rhythm of cumbia and reggaeton. The celebration was organized by Morena New York Committee 1 (Morena NY1), one of the numerous support networks formed by members of the ruling party residing in the United States.
Today, June 2, 2024, this same group, motivated by new public policies that have facilitated voting from abroad, has doubled down on its support for the political party.
The political weight of Mexicans abroad has grown enormously in recent years. While in the 2012 election, just over 40,000 citizens residing abroad voted, in the 2018 election, the equivalent figure was more than double. The most interesting thing, however, is that many of these voters can no longer be described as "migrants." Although 11.7 million people born in Mexico reside in the neighboring northern country, there are approximately 37.2 million people of Mexican origin in the United States. This represents 60% of the Latino population in the country. The US Latino population may not be a monolithic group, but Mexicans are overrepresented among this group.
Today, the Mexican population is made up by those that were born abroad, the first and second generation of those who emigrated (mostly to the US), and those who currently reside in Mexican territory. The diverse make-up of this population results in demographic, political, cultural, and economic shifts that Mexicans and their American counterparts have yet to comprehend, especially if we consider that Mexico has begun its stage of transnational development.
For Morena NY 1 and other pro-Morena “activist” networks in the US, AMLO’s six-year term has been met with joy and celebration.
The announcement of a public work promoted by the president warrants a pilgrimage to Times Square, documented live and broadcast to their 282,000 followers on Facebook. Throughout the six-year term, Morena deputies have visited their fellow party members in the United States to cultivate their trust in the party. Through webinars, in-person visits, rallies, and “civic training” workshops, Morena volunteers abroad seek to affiliate the migrant population and Mexicans abroad with the movement that brought López Obrador to the presidency.
Starting at 3:00 AM on this June 2, hundreds of Morena militants began gathering outside the Mexican consulate in New York. By noon, thousands of members of the Mexican community were lined up in a queue that wrapped around the block three times. As Susana mentioned, this was in fact a historic moment: for the first time, Mexicans abroad could vote in person at one of twenty consulates across the United States.
According to Claudia Zavala, a representative of the Mexico’s autonomous voting agency (INE), as of May 27, nearly 1.6 million Mexicans living abroad had a valid voter ID, of which 223,961 registered to vote. Of these, 56,249 (25.12%) registered to vote bu mail; 151,989 (67.86%) chose to vote online, and 15,723 (7.02%) chose to vote in person.
"This is an unprecedented election, as it is the election in which the most Mexican residents abroad have registered to exercise their right to vote," Zavala told me.
At 4:42 PM, the ballots reserved for those who had not registered in advance began to run out – only 1500 had been allocated to each eligible consulate. INE representatives walked through the endless line assuring their paisanos that they would be able to vote.
Several of the self-ascribed "alternative" news sites Susana mentioned were broadcasting live in front of the consulate, including Sin Línea TV, a small media company that delivers "without embellishments or filters, direct and faithful to reality."
At 5 PM, an exasperated voter began shouting, expressing his frustration to a polling station official. The NYPD tried to intervene while the man shouted: "Freedom of speech!" In the distance, one could hear the whisper of "México en la piel" by the singer Luis Miguel.
The extravagant displays of support for López Obrador by Morena supporters living abroad have coincided with government efforts to promote their political participation. For decades, all kinds of Mexican migrant associations based in the US have fought for political visibility in their country of origin.
The concept of the extraterritorial vote was first introduced in 1996 and coincided with Mexico's democratization process.
The 2000 election was key in crystallizing the relationship between the extraterritorial Mexican vote and the institutions—and the very idea—of Mexican democracy. Candidate and future president Vicente Fox referred to migrants as "heroes of Mexico" and promised them that if elected, he would ensure they had the right to vote. Consequently, the PAN candidate could count on the support of several migrant organizations that had long sought political representation in Mexico. However, the right to vote from abroad was not enacted at the federal level until 2006.
Since the introduction of the extraterritorial vote, the number of Mexicans abroad who are part of the electoral roll increased by more than 200%, reaching the 223,000 who registered to vote in this election. Although the community of Mexicans living abroad does not fit a homogeneous political profile, López Obrador's popularity within the diaspora has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2012, the current president obtained just over a third of the foreign vote; in 2018, he obtained more than 64%.
In the 2024 election, the opposition also tried to establish a presence abroad. In late September 2023, presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez traveled to the United States to meet with leaders of the Mexican immigrant community in Southern California, as well as with Mexican members of the film and television industry in Los Angeles. Her trip concluded with a visit to the coastal city of Oxnard, where she visited Mexican day laborers in the strawberry fields where they work and talked about the working conditions of immigrants.
"I am convinced that Mexico is a country of 170 million, divided by a river, and that this is its 33rd state," Gálvez said in a video uploaded to her social networks.
Although neither Gálvez nor Sheinbaum could campaign abroad, as prohibited by Mexican electoral laws, both have traveled to the United States to meet with members of their respective parties, as other candidates have done in the past, including López Obrador in 2017. This strategy has paid off. According to Juan Hernández, advisor to the opposition coalitio, almost a third of the 220,000 signatures Gálvez collected in support of her presidential candidacy were from Mexicans living abroad.
Nonetheless, efforts to engage Mexicans living abroad in Mexican politics has not resulted in the implementation of transnational policies that truly speak to the the contributions of Mexican diaspora to the Mexican state. Just as an example, last year the Mexican diaspora contributed $58 billion US dollars to the Mexican economy by way of remittances. This is only second to the Indian diaspora’s contributions, which exceed $110 billion.
At eight in the evening local time, the Mexican consulates in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago began closing their doors. Election observers and INE officials had promised these unprecedented crowds that all pre-registered people would be able to vote. This was not the case. With the sun setting in the backdrop, thousands of people, still waiting in line, chanted: "We want to vote, we want to vote!" Mexican flags waved in the distance.
Upon the publication of this piece, the INE had not yet published data on electoral participation abroad. In any case, I doubt the data will be representative of what I witnessed in the small Mexican simulacra that presides over the island of Manhattan – thousands of people of all ilks, immigrants and non-immigrants, furiously attempting to exercise their democratic duties.
Those who have studied this extraterritorial voting population, which include academics and public officials, agree that the political power of the Mexican diaspora abroad, particularly in the United States, has yet to reveal its full potential. Since the 2021 constitutional reform—which eliminated a requirement that a person's parent be born in Mexican national territory for that person to acquire Mexican nationality—thousands of people now have a clear path towards becoming Mexican citizens, with all the political rights this citizenship guarantees. To date, however, this reform has not yet translated into massive electoral participation.
It is impossible to spend much time in the United States without listening corridos reverberating from the kitchens of practically any restaurant; without hearing murmurs of Spanish on public transportation; without recognizing a booming bass and a guacharaca thumping from dancehalls; without seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe over and over again, dressed in the star-spangled banner. Mexico exists in the United States, beyond political borders. And that Mexico of the outside could become a very powerful actor in the politics of the Mexico within.
The influence of the Mexican diaspora in national politics remains in an embryonic phase. But it is entirely possible that, in the coming years, Mexicans abroad will become a voting bloc with an electoral weight that corresponds to their demographic weight. It is impossible to say whether they lean predominantly toward one party or another, or whether their political preferences will be as diverse as their life stories. But one thing is clear: the extraterritorial vote could very well become a formidable force.
This June 2, thousands of Mexicans, of all types and backgrounds, dressed in maroon or other colors, could not be part of the democratic exercise. But thousands of them will return to the polls in November for another strangely Mexican contest, in which millions of Mexicans will participate: the US election.
Notes from the mental miscellanea:
I recently learned that Dimes Square used to be called “Chumbo” and that the Atlantic AND the Wall Street Journal wrote about its burgeoning sensibility sometime in 2011 (h/t
)I finished watching Ken Burn’s country music documentary a month ago and learned that Nudie Cohn’s rodeo creations were largely executed by Manuel Cuevas, a tailor from the Mexican state of Michoacán.
Reading Gillian Rose’s “Love’s Work” again
Still searching for the best prose writer of food (that are not recipes!)