SILAO, Mexico — Jeb Bush often mentions his wife’s family, how he fell in love with her in nearby León, and her immigrant challenges coming to the United States.

Only rarely — and critically — do the likely front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination or his aides mention his wife’s father, José Maria Garnica Rodríguez.


Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell reiterated Tuesday that Columba Bush’s father abandoned his family. “Mrs. Bush did not have a relationship with her father after he left her mother and their family when Mrs. Bush was just a young teenager,” she said. And published accounts, including one in The New York Times recently, largely have taken that line, calling him a migrant worker and nonpresence in his daughter’s life.

But relatives here say it’s not true.

“He never abandoned her. She was the one who left with Jeb,” Antonia Morales Mendez, 65, Garnica Rodríguez’s second wife, told POLITICO this week in her small blue house 220 miles northwest of Mexico City. She told a similar story to DailyMail.com in January. “Once she left with this guy, she had no relationship at all with her father.”

Why didn’t Columba Bush speak to her father for the last 40 years of his life?

“Maybe the fame? The money?” she said, sitting on an old couch under a figurine of a bloodied, crucified Christ.

Antonio Garnica Rodríguez, 77, Columba Bush’s uncle, her father’s last living sibling, said it hurt his brother “a lot, in a big way, because they never allowed him to see his grandchildren.”

“He knew them only out of magazines, newspapers and TV,” Mendez said through tears. “He died really wanting to meet his grandchildren.”

On Wednesday, after speaking with Jeb Bush and his wife, Campbell added to what she had said the day before: “Much of the story [the relatives have] offered is either inaccurate or incomplete. It’s not surprising Mrs. Bush wouldn’t want to maintain a relationship with the man who abandoned her mother and family.”

Family disputes are difficult to untangle, and this one dates back more than half a century and crosses a border. What’s certain, though, is that it is part of a transformational event in the personal and political life of Jeb Bush. His wife’s experience is the root of his views on immigration, which put him at odds with many conservatives — and the city of León, 20 minutes up Mexico’s Route 45, is the site of what he has said many times was the most important single moment of his life.

He was a tall, gangly 17-year-old gringo who was in León on a two-month exchange program from Andover, Massachusetts, and Phillips Academy, one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the United States. She was 16 years old, petite and a Catholic school student at the Instituto Antonia Mayllen. His father had been a congressman from Texas and at the time was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Her father, meanwhile, had grown up an hour away, in the rural village of Arperos, and worked as a waiter in Mexico and in the U.S., at first illegally and then legally picking fruit and working on road crews.

The two young people met in the central plaza in the city’s historic district on a Sunday afternoon. She was in her sister’s car. He was standing on the curb.

It was love at first sight, he has said ever since. Earlier this month, he divided his life into two segments — B.C. and A.C., “before Columba and after Columba.”

Columba Garnica de Gallo was born in León on Aug. 17, 1953, the youngest of three siblings. She has a brother, Francisco, born in December 1949, and a sister, Lucila, born in October 1951. She was a well-behaved girl and a good student, according to her uncle. “No smoking, no pot,” he said. “She wasn’t a crazy girl.”

By the time she met Bush, her parents had been divorced for almost a decade, since 1963. Because of that, she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989, “my childhood, I would say, was a bit sad.” According to a 2004 biography, “Columba Bush,” by Beatriz Parga, a celebrity journalist from Colombia, her father accused her of being “a bad daughter” because she forgot her “modest” Mexican ancestry. Her father, according to the book, also mistreated her mother, who worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.

“For whatever reason, she speaks ill, she has bad feelings,” Mendez said at her home. “Probably, Columba had that opinion about her father because her mother told her these things. Columba’s mother was three years older than José Maria. She was extremely jealous of him. If he would sit next to a girl on the bus, she would make him miserable for that.”

Columba Bush told the Mexican newspaper Reforma in 2001 that she didn’t talk to her father “because my dad divorced my mom in 1963, when I was 10, and since then there is a rift.”

But she didn’t completely lose touch with her father. After she met Bush, and almost a decade after the divorce, she lived with her father in the U.S., according to family members. A year after their meeting in the central plaza, Jeb Bush wrote in in his 2013 book “Immigration Wars,” “Columba moved from León to Southern California,” not mentioning that she lived there with her father. Her uncle and her father’s second wife said she lived at her father’s house in La Puente, Los Angeles County. She spent “not more than a year” there, according to her uncle.

Her father’s contact with the U.S. began in the 1940s, when he crossed the border illegally to work, according to her uncle and her father’s second wife. On those trips, made over a number of years, they said, he picked fruit and vegetables, bringing his earnings home to León.

By February 1960, though, he was legal. He got a green card, making him Resident Alien A11987053, allowing him to “reside permanently and work in the U.S.” The 5-foot-5, 140-pound José Maria Garnica Rodríguez worked mainly in construction, helping to build roads as a member of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.

And by June 1966, he was a homeowner, buying in La Puente a two-bedroom, one-bathroom, 570-square-foot house — the first house his daughter Columba lived in in the United States.

“From there,” her uncle said, “she jumped to Jeb.”

Columba’s father told The Associated Press in 2001 that she left his house abruptly in 1973. He had met Bush just once when he came to visit in La Puente. One day, he said, Columba told him she was going to the post office, and she never came back.

“He never saw her again,” Mendez said.

“She became girlfriend with Jeb and then she went to La Puente and then she took off,” her uncle said. “And that was it.”

Columba Bush didn’t break ties with her whole family — today, her sister and her mother, who’s 94, live near her in the Miami area, according to records — but she did end contact with her father and her father’s side of the family.

She married into the Bush family on Feb. 23, 1974, in Austin, Texas, when Jeb was 21 and she was 20.

She became a U.S. citizen in 1979.

The couple and their young children moved to Miami in 1981 “because it is a bicultural city,” Bush said in an interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York in 2013.

As Bush became a successful developer of commercial real estate, then the head of the Republican Party of Miami-Dade County, then the state’s secretary of commerce and ultimately its governor in 1999, José Maria Garnica Rodríguez wanted to re-establish contact with his daughter so he could meet his grandchildren — George P. Bush, born in 1976; Noelle Lucila Bush, born in 1977; and John Ellis Bush Jr., born in 1983.

At one point, Garnica Rodríguez called his daughter’s house — it’s unclear in what year — and Jeb Bush answered the phone. He told his father-in-law that Columba was “indisposed,” according to Mendez and the uncle. He thanked Bush for taking care of his daughter, and Bush said he did so because he loved her, according to the AP report from 2001.

“Immigration to me is personal,” Bush wrote in “Immigration Wars.” “It means my wife and family, as it has for countless Americans.”

He continued: “Thanks to my wife, I became bicultural and bilingual, and my life is better because of it. For the first time in my life, I learned what the immigrant experience was.”

“For those that have these kinds of marriages,” he said at the 92nd Street Y, “appreciating the culture of your spouse is the most powerful part of the relationship, and being able to share that culture, and live in it, has been one of the great joys of my life.”

Last year, he said he considered the illegal entry of some immigrants to the United States an “act of love.”

“The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their families — the dad who loved their children — was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family.”

Over the past almost three decades, in brief interviews, the publicity-shy Columba Bush has told reporters that she likes watching Mexican soap operas and listening to Mexican music and eating Mexican food and that her eyes get wet when she hears the Mexican national anthem.

“I think that we are two very, very different cultures, but in essence are very similar,” she said in the interview with Reforma. “I think it’s important to have more dialogue and more respect.”

Her father, who moved back to Mexico from La Puente when he retired, living off a Social Security check and a pension he earned working in the United States, died Nov. 26, 2013, a few months from his 90th birthday. Mendez said the cause was pneumonia. His ashes are kept here at a local church called the Iglesia del Perdón — Church of Forgiveness.

“He never got upset with me,” said Mendez, his widow. “He was a patient man. It hurts me so much that they portray him as an ogre.”

She was asked what she would think if the daughter of the man she married were to become the first lady of the United States.

“That’s good for her,” she said, “but that’s it.”

Sylvia Garnica Campos, a cousin of Columba Bush who lives in Riverside, California, told DailyMail.com that her cousin “was being a snob” and “did not want to be associated with the country side of her family” because she had grown up in the more urban León.

Antonio Garnica Rodríguez said he still loves his niece.

“We’re old, we’re retired,” he said. “We just wish good luck.”

A street dog napped at his feet, not far from the hustle-bustle of the business district, a jumble of low-hanging power wires, tortillerias, metal snack carts and the rat-a-tat-tat of motorbikes zipping between slow-moving cars.

He was asked what he knows about Jeb Bush.

“That he’s a politician,” he said. “That he’s going to run against Hillary Clinton. That they’re going to fight.” Columba Bush’s uncle grinned and pantomimed a boxing bout, holding up his fists.

Luis Mdáhuar contributed to this report.