Marcelo Ebrard, who was once seen as a future President of Mexico, is helping the Democratic Party get out the Latino vote for Hillary Clinton. Photograph by Roberto Armocida / GDA via AP

Marcelo Ebrard was the mayor of Mexico City from 2006 to 2012, the time when that city gained a reputation as a dynamic, sophisticated world capital, even while the country’s image as a place of dark and ever deepening crisis, corruption, and violence steadily worsened. He implemented numerous urban quality-of-life initiatives—a wildly popular bike-sharing program, an expansion of the rights of sexual minorities, a reduction of crime, and an attack on the air-pollution problem (an initiative in which the Clinton Foundation was involved). As Guillermo Osorno, a writer and editor of the Mexican digital journal Horizontal, told me in an e-mail, Ebrard also “gave the city a unique narrative as a progressive city as opposed to the conservatism and political backwardness in other areas of the country.”

Toward the end of his term, Ebrard, who is now in his late fifties, was widely regarded as Mexico’s President-in-waiting for the 2018 elections, and for many people that was one reason to feel a little optimistic about the future of the beleaguered country. And in 2011 he did, in fact, vie for the Presidential nomination of his Party of the Democratic Revolution, or P.R.D., before yielding to his mentor and predecessor as mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. However, in 2012, Mexico elected Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as President, and he soon emerged as Ebrard’s most steadfast political enemy. After leaving office at the end of his six-year mayoral term, Ebrard served for two years as president of the United Nation’s Global Network on Safer Cities. Then, in 2014, he resigned in order to launch a failed bid for the presidency of the P.R.D., which since 2012 had been beset by numerous scandals and the perception that its new leaders had allied with the party with Peña Nieto. After that loss, Ebrard left the P.R.D. to contend for a congressional seat on behalf of the Citizens Movement, a small left-of-center political party, but was blocked by the country’s Electoral Tribunal. An onslaught of calumny, insinuation, and unproved accusations of corruption—none of which ever resulted in criminal charges, or even a formal investigation—was aired by rival politicians and in some of the country’s establishment media, driving Ebrard from the country. At first, Ebrard moved to Paris, where he worked as a consultant, mostly on urban issues. But as of this year, he has relocated to New York City. While few would rule out an eventual return to the Mexican political arena for Ebrard, he is no longer being spoken of as a potential 2018 Presidential candidate. For the past two years, he seemed to have completely removed himself from Mexico’s always treacherous political life, and was rarely even mentioned by the media.

Last week, though, a spate of news stories appeared in Mexico revealing that Ebrard is working on Latino get-out-the-vote campaigns on behalf of Hillary Clinton. I quickly got in touch with him from Mexico City, and over the last few days we’ve been exchanging e-mails and speaking on the telephone. “It was after hearing Donald Trump speak,” Ebrard said, “that I decided to get much more involved, beyond just giving opinions. The risk represented by el Señor Trump, the things that he says, in particular about Mexico, but in general, too, are like nothing else I’ve encountered.” Ebrard recognized long ago that Mexican-American voter participation lagged badly behind that of other communities in the U.S., and that there was a lot of work that needed to be done to begin to elevate that turnout. He has been interested in the problem, and active in organizing networks of Mexican-American voters—many have dual citizenship, after all, and can vote in Mexican elections—since 2006.

Ebrard had previously worked with Voto Latino, and with other voter-registration and participation groups in California, Arizona, Florida, Chicago, and elsewhere, and he is working with those groups again now. He is not, as was incorrectly reported in some Mexican news accounts, directly involved with the Clinton campaign—though the groups he participates in do collaborate with her campaign, especially at the state level. “At first they called and asked, ‘What do you think of this, what’s your opinion of that?’ ” Ebrard said, describing his initial role. Over the months of the U.S. Presidential campaign, though, Ebrard went “from being a consultant to somebody committed to direct political action.”

There doesn’t seem to be much national-campaign glamour in what Ebrard does, though he did play a part in convincing the Mexican mariachi star Vicente Fernández to come out of retirement to perform a new corrido endorsing Hillary Clinton. (A new “get out the vote” corrido may be imminent.) He has appeared in a video, distributed over social networks, in which he addresses potential Mexican-American voters in Spanish, encouraging them to vote for Clinton. But a lot of what Ebrard does is quite wonky, studying endless opinion and polling data, working with what he called “very interesting new instruments for analyzing social networks.” His job is to interpret that data, and put forth ideas and identify problems, state by state. “Much of the Latino vote still has a lot to do with who trusts the system and who doesn’t,” he said. The big challenge is to get people who are accustomed to avoiding attention—who do not consider themselves as included in U.S. society, and who otherwise fear and distrust every aspect of the political system—to overcome their inhibitions. To reach them, you need to find lots of good community persuaders. Ebrard described an initiative to identify students of Mexican origin at state universities and convince them to become involved through social-network outreach. Two hundred and thirty students signed up. He described them as “talented young people who hadn’t had much political participation before, and now they’re helping us in everything we’re trying to do, a new generation. The first group that Señor Trump is putting at risk is them, the young.”

Speaking from Florida on Saturday morning, Ebrard said that what he thought had especially driven an apparent late surge in the Latino vote in that state was the “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump was caught on tape essentially bragging about assaulting women. That video has had “an expansive effect in the Latino vote, with women becoming especially active,” he said. “Why? Those voters aren’t worried about being deported, because they’re here legally, and they may not care about the wall. But in conservative Catholic households the woman is sacrosanct; you can’t talk about treating women that way in that traditional Catholic world. It’s worse than any ideological thing Trump could have done.”

In California, on the other hand, Ebrard said, Mexican-American families might be less traditional and more mixed than in Florida, but almost two in five of those Californian families are headed by women. “You speak like that about women to them,” he said, “and you’re going to have a serious problem.”

Another challenge, Ebrard said, has been to find ways to “articulate” the character and concerns of Mexican-Americans who’ve been in the U.S. for two or three generations, who often no longer even speak Spanish, and who have every right to feel like ordinary and secure U.S. citizens, yet “who feel severely threatened by the xenophobia of el Señor Trump.” That’s one reason, Ebrard emphasizes, that Latino organizing has to be about more than November 8th. “If half the U.S.A. is thinking in the ways that Trump is calling for, then Mexican-Americans are going to need much more political representation.” On the political right, he said, Cubans have long had such representation, from local politicians to members of Congress. Mexican-Americans certainly possess the numbers to eventually have a similar impact. “But people who are from Mexico often have a distaste for politics. They say, ‘No, politics never changes anything,’ ” Ebrard said. “In this election, they’ve learned that there is a lot that can change, and that it can change against you.” The established Mexican-American middle and lower-middle class understands that the racial animosity being unleashed by Trump “puts at risk their American Dream.” Ebrard believes that this election has politicized Latino communities in a way that, regardless of what happens this Tuesday, will “express itself in in a lasting way.”