Could California residents play a role in Mexico’s historic July 1 election?

Catalina Sánchez, a 36-year-old graphic designer who lives in Poway, certainly intends to — without ever leaving San Diego County.

Like Sánchez, a record number of Mexicans living abroad are preparing to vote in this presidential contest playing out amid uncertainty over the future of U.S-Mexico relations.

These voters will not only help choose a new president to lead Mexico for the next six years but also for the first time participate in Senate elections and in six states, choose new governors. Also for the first time, those from Mexico City will be able to cast ballots from abroad in the capital’s mayoral contest.


With some 12 million Mexicans estimated to live abroad, “the potential is huge, enormous,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at University of California San Diego. “They have rights, they send remittances to Mexico, they are very active in Mexico in many ways. Why not vote?”

For Fernández de Castro and other observers of U.S.-Mexican politics, that question is drawing much interest. Mexicans living abroad are a potentially powerful political force in their home country, but one that has yet to come into its own. The higher their numbers, and the tighter the election, the greater the chance they can make a difference.

With the election less than three months away, more than a half-million Mexicans living abroad have received voting cards issued by Mexico’s National Electoral Institute. They are spread all over the globe — from Abu Dhabi to Athens, from Cairo to Caracas — but the majority by far lives in the United States. And of those, the largest numbers are residents of California.


The last day to apply for a card was March 31, and consulates across the state saw a flurry of last-minute activity as voters such as Sánchez arrived with birth certificates, passports, driver’s licenses, and other documents to show their Mexican citizenship and U.S. residency.

“It made me feel very special, being Mexican,” Sánchez said as she walked out smiling of the San Diego consulate’s Little Italy offices. “In these elections, it’s going to be very important to vote, to put the right person in power.”

They will be voting at a moment of strain and uncertainty over the future of the U.S.-Mexico relationship. President Donald Trump’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement, vow to build a continuous border wall and make Mexico pay, his shifting stances on young unauthorized immigrants in the DACA program, and most recently dispatching the National Guard to the border have been setting a new tone.

In Mexico’s presidential race, the next few weeks of campaigning are expected to be intense — bringing out concerns about corruption, violence, Mexico’s economic future. But also about Mexico’s relationship with the United States.


Daniela Valdez-Jasso, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UC San Diego, has previously flown home to vote in Ecatepec outside Mexico City. But this time, she’ll be sending in her ballot from San Diego.

“I am strongly against what the current government is,” she said. “If I am going to criticize it, I need to make sure that I am doing something to change that.”

The front-runner in the polls is a left-of-center candidate making his third presidential bid, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, often known as AMLO. His closest rival, Ricardo Anaya Cortés, is a member of Mexico’s center-right National Action Party, the PAN, the party’s former national president who heads a coalition that includes two smaller center-left parties. Trailing in third place is former Mexican finance secretary José Antonio Meade, candidate for a coalition dominated by Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI.

Also on the ballot is a political independent, Margarita Zavala, the wife of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón. She was in San Diego on Friday giving a talk on the UC San Diego campus, stressing the strong connections between the United States and Mexico to an audience that included students, professors, some her supporters from Baja California and Mexicans living in San Diego.


Voter identification cards

Nearly 89 million Mexicans have valid voter identification cards, but that high number is no indication of how many will vote on July 1. Many people obtain the card because it is needed for a range of transactions such as opening a bank account or obtaining a credit card.

“It is our national identification card,” said Enrique Andrade, a counselor with Mexico’s National Electoral Institute. “Many Mexicans have it as an ID, not necessarily because they plan to vote.”

More than 510,000 Mexicans living abroad have received voter ID cards that would allow them to participate in the July election. But in order to vote from abroad, they must first activate the card through an online process.

Andrade estimated that fewer than a third of these voters will do so by the April 30 deadline: “In reality, I’d expect about 150,000,” Andrade said in an interview last week.


“There’s still a great need for Mexicans living abroad to know about their right to vote,” Andrade said. “Bit by bit, I think it’s a right that will become better known.”

In San Diego, more than 11,300 voters had received cards to vote from abroad issued by the National Electoral Institute by March 26, though it remains to be seen how many activate their cards.

But in San Diego and other U.S. border communities, the institute’s numbers don’t reflect the untold numbers of Mexicans who don’t apply to vote from abroad, and instead are preparing to simply cross the border on election day with a card issued to a Mexican address.

Marcela Celorio, the Consul General in San Diego, believes that could help explain the region’s relatively low numbers compared with other cities that are farther inland. “It’s because of our geographic situation,” she said.


The largest of 50 Mexican consulates in the United States, the Los Angeles consulate had also received the greatest number of applications, and by March 26, the National Electoral Institute reported sending out more than 85,000 voting cards to Los Angeles voters.

But with some 1.7 million Mexicans living in Los Angeles, “the total amount of applications that we got compared to the population was low,” said Carlos García de Alba, the consul general in Los Angeles.

“It’s a mix of reasons,” García de Alba said. Despite outreach efforts to the Mexican community, “not everybody is aware,” he said. “There is a second group that says, ‘I know I have the right to vote, but I don’t want to.’ People think its complicated.”

Genaro Lozano, a political scientist from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, said though “electoral officials in Mexico are doing their best at getting Mexicans to go out and vote,” many living abroad are reluctant to do so out of mistrust for the government, even though the electoral institute holds autonomy.


Lozano and others see attitudes changing in the coming years. “This is something that Mexicans are getting used to, the binational politics of elections,” he said.

The ties that bind

The first time that Mexicans were able to participate from abroad was 2006; 32,621 did so, and the majority backed Calderón, the PAN’s victorious candidate. In 2012, Mexicans abroad emitted 40,714 votes, and again backed the PAN candidate who this time lost the election to the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto.

As greater numbers of Mexicans living abroad obtain the voter ID card — and activate it so that they can vote — the participation from abroad is only expected to increase.

At least some of those expected to vote from abroad are dual U.S. and Mexican citizens. And those California residents registered in both countries will have a chance to cast ballots both in Mexico’s election and in California’s June 5 gubernatorial primary.


“One of the issues on the ballot is our relationship with Mexico,” said David Ayón, senior strategist and advisor at Latino Decisions. “But at the same time, Mexico is having a presidential campaign in which one of the big issues is the relationship with the U.S.,” Ayón said. “The future of the relationship is on the ballot in both countries at the same time.”

Waiting outside Mexico’s San Diego consulate while his wife Catalina Sánchez finished her paperwork, Guillermo Mallén said “it’s at a very complicated moment” for U.S.-Mexico relations.

“The next president will have to be very skilled in managing the relationship,” said the Mexico City native, who is preparing to vote from California on July 1.

Email sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com


Twitter @sandradibble

UPDATES:

April 9 at 1:55 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details about voters in San Diego.

This article was originally published April 8, 2018 at 6 a.m.