Carolina, a fifty-four-year-old nurse from Puebla, Mexico, stopped thinking of herself as a voter when she became an immigrant. She has lived in the United States, without papers, for the past eighteen years, and during that time she hasn’t voted in a single election. In the U.S., she is not allowed to vote. In Mexico, she is—the country began allowing its citizens who live abroad to vote in 2006—but to register she needed to return home to fill out paperwork. Making the trip would have been too risky, given her legal status, and, until recently, she didn’t feel her vote mattered, anyway. “I never had any interest—in Mexico, there was no democracy to vote in,” she told me. In the late nineteen-nineties, before she left for the United States, her brother was killed by members of a drug cartel, and she and her family suspected that local officials were involved in his murder. “All the politicians in Mexico were the same,” she said. “What was the point of voting for any of them?”
Close to twelve million Mexicans, or about ten per cent of Mexico’s over-all population, reside in the U.S. The remittances these expats send home are among Mexico’s largest sources of foreign revenue. Last year, the money totalled nearly twenty-nine billion dollars, which was nine billion dollars more than what Mexico made off its crude-oil exports. Yet, despite their outsized economic contributions, Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. have comparatively little electoral clout in Mexico. Politicians campaigning for national office mostly ignore them. In 2012, the last time Mexico held a Presidential election, only about thirty thousand Mexicans living in the U.S. voted. “There are thirty-one states in Mexico. We’re like another state. We’re a major power, but we aren’t treated like one,” Carolina said.
This year, Mexico began allowing its citizens living abroad to register to vote without returning to the country. The change comes in the lead-up to what is expected to be a dramatic Presidential election, in July. The current President, Enrique Peña Nieto, is wildly unpopular, owing to a long list of accumulating scandals, ranging from rampant state corruption and abuse of power to escalating criminal violence. Peña Nieto’s reluctance to criticize Donald Trump has further dimmed his party’s election prospects. (Peña Nieto is ineligible to run for reëlection.) A leftist populist named Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, who is campaigning against the wizened political establishment in Mexico City, has surged ahead in the polls, promising to fight systemic corruption and to stand up to Trump. Last spring, Lopéz Obrador visited eight American cities, including Los Angeles and New York, as part of a national tour to decry Trump’s “inhumanity.” Carolina, who affectionately refers to Lopéz Obrador as “AMLO,” has registered to vote so that she can cast a ballot for him—and she’s joined a broader effort to persuade other Mexicans in the U.S. to register, too.
A few weeks ago, before the March 31st deadline for Mexicans to register to vote for the Presidential election, I met Carolina at a banquet hall in St. Peter’s Church, on Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan. She was serving homemade food and selling T-shirts at an event to raise awareness about the importance of voting. A contingent of volunteers from the Lopéz Obrador campaign milled around in beige vests emblazoned with the name of his party, Morena, while dozens of families sat down to have lunch after Sunday services.
“You see the people here?” Carolina asked. “They’re campesinos—agricultural workers. But there’s no work for them at home. They’re here in the U.S. because Mexico has forced them out.” In the weeks preceding our meeting, between shifts at work, she’d been travelling to churches in New York and New Jersey to encourage congregants there to vote. She also plugs Lopéz Obrador. “He’s the only one who isn’t corrupt,” she tells people. “His parents were poor, so he worked and studied. He knows what sacrifice is.”
Carolina told me the story of how she became politically active. Various YouTube channels had allowed her to follow daily events in Mexico more closely than she had before, and social media made it easier to communicate with family and friends back home. Often, she was appalled by what she learned. The situation she faced in the U.S. reinforced her sense of urgency. “People are scared and upset by Trump,” she said. “He has woken up the Mexicans. He’s making clear to us that the Americans don’t like us. And if Mexico weren’t so bad—so corrupt, so unstable—we could go back. Which is why we need to have more say over who’s in charge there.”
Juan Carlos Ruiz, an influential local priest and a co-founder of the New York branch of an advocacy group called the New Sanctuary Movement, told me, “Now, because of Trump, immigrants in the U.S. are asking more than ever, ‘If I do have to go back to Mexico, what would I be going back to?’ ” Even if they don’t vote themselves, Mexicans living in the U.S. can still sway family members back home. “There are two sides of the voting issue,” David Brooks, the U.S. correspondent for the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, told me. “There’s the formal vote, but also the informal vote. The immigrants in the U.S. have a massive influence over how their families vote in Mexico. Because all the money is coming from the U.S., the opinion of the people here tends to matter.” More than a hundred thousand Mexican voters in the U.S. were registered by the deadline. That’s a small fraction of the millions of eligible voters in the country, but it’s more than twice the number who registered for Mexico’s last Presidential election. And, in 2006, when Lopéz Obrador also ran for President, he lost by a total of two hundred and forty thousand votes. “People do seem more engaged than they used to,” Ruiz said. “The circumstances, both in the U.S. and Mexico, have gotten more dire.”
Peña Nieto’s party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, has dominated Mexican politics for much of the past century, and it has always viewed expatriate voters with suspicion—not without reason. Mexicans abroad are typically anti-PRI. In 2006 and 2012, for example, the émigré vote, small though it was, went overwhelmingly to PRI’s principal rival, the National Action Party, known as PAN. Last week, I called Arturo Sarukhán, who served as Mexico’s Ambassador to the U.S. between 2007 and 2013, to ask why Mexican voters in the U.S. were so wary of the PRI. These voters fit three general profiles, he said. The first group included voters who were highly educated and worked in élite fields like engineering, architecture, the arts, or banking; the second included dual nationals and leaders of community or religious groups; and the third were low-skilled workers, who were often undocumented. The PRI tended to alienate each of these groups, either because of its perceived corruption or because of its sense of disconnect from the Mexican immigrant community abroad. “I would be surprised if this year the majority of Mexican voters abroad don’t vote for AMLO,” Sarukhán told me.
At the church event, a pad and pen circulated from table to table so attendees could sign up for more information about how to register. “There are still big administrative hurdles to signing up,” Roberto Valdovinos, who leads a small nonprofit called Migrante Vota, told me. Requesting voter-registration paperwork is often a cumbersome process: Carolina called a government office in Mexico for information about the documents she needed to present for her registration at the consulate, in Manhattan. It took about two months for a voting credential to arrive in the mail, and then she had to call a toll-free number to activate it. Some Latin American countries allow their citizens abroad to elect their own legislators to represent the expat community in national congresses; other countries set up polling places abroad. Mexico does neither. “My husband is Colombian, and he can vote at the consulate,” Carolina told me. “But not us. We have to mail our ballots back to Mexico. If you’re Mexican, you have to really want to vote.”
