By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
June 1, 2010
It was the picture of a classic New York campaign: The candidate dashed around the city where he had pulled himself up from poverty to business success and now a run for elected office. He met constituents, gave interviews and, at a private celebration in a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, thanked supporters.
But the recent flurry of campaigning was no ordinary political tour. The candidate, Juan Navarro, is a Mexican immigrant with homes in Queens and New Jersey, and his electoral goal is an office 2,200 miles away: the mayoralty of the small city of Serdán, Mexico.
Mr. Navarro, a legal resident of the United States, has made his expatriate identity a major theme in his platform, saying that his experiences as an up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant have taught him hard lessons that would make him a sensitive civic leader in Serdán, his hometown.
“You learn a lot about how to survive,” said Mr. Navarro, 33, who has lived in New York for 18 years but in recent months has spent nearly all of his time campaigning in Mexico, where he plans to live if he wins. “That’s important in a country like Mexico, because we don’t have as many opportunities.”
Mr. Navarro’s cross-border candidacy reflects the intimate relationship between New York’s maturing Mexican diaspora and Mexico — a steady, two-way flow of people, resources, cultural practices and ideas.
But it also attests to the obstacles that Mexicans face in New York, even as they have recently become the city’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Although they are now its fourth-largest immigrant population — after Dominicans, Chinese and Jamaicans — they are still largely absent from politics. Leaders in their communities say they know of no Mexican immigrant who has held elected public office in the city.
Mexicans in New York, they say, lack political organization and experience, as well as a critical mass of candidates or voters, since so many are not American citizens. Even with the considerable inconveniences of an international campaign, the Mexican-American candidate tends to look homeward.
“It’s easier to run in Mexico, even if we’ve been so many years out of our towns and cities,” said Joel Magallan, executive director of Asociacion Tepeyac, an advocacy and education organization for Mexican immigrants.
It is not uncommon for Mexicans living in the United States to run for public office in Mexico, but most have made their bids from the American Southwest, where the majority of Mexican immigrants have settled. Only a few candidates have run from New York, community leaders say, and none have won office.
Mr. Navarro, with the backing of some Mexican-American business leaders and some regional power brokers in the Mexican state of Puebla, where Serdán is situated, appears to have greater momentum than any of his predecessors as he heads toward the July 4 election.
His expatriate experience has worked both for and against him. He says it has given him a finer appreciation of the deprivations that compelled him and so many others to leave Mexico, and allowed him and his brothers the opportunity to make the money that he now wants to invest in Serdán. But he has also been attacked as a carpetbagger.
Among many in New York’s Mexican leadership, his candidacy is a source of pride. “He has gone to help the people,” said Erasmo Ponce, an immigrant from Puebla and owner of one of the largest tortilla-making companies in the New York region. “It was a good and sensible decision. The friends of Juan are united behind him.”
Mr. Navarro’s successes so far have mirrored the meteoric growth of the Mexican population in New York. In 1980, there were about 6,700 Mexicans in the city. They now total more than 170,000, with more than double that number in the region, according to the Census Bureau, though the Mexican Consulate in New York estimates there are about 1.2 million in the region. Most Mexicans in New York have come from the Mixteca region south of Mexico City, particularly Puebla.
Several Mexican immigrants who have become American citizens have run for elected office in the New York region in recent years, including Roberto Lopez, who was a city councilman in New Rochelle, N.Y., from 2003 to 2007.
Mr. Navarro said that although he might someday consider a run for office in the United States, he was a long way from having enough money or familiarity with the American political system. To run in Maspeth, Queens, where he rents an apartment, or in Passaic, N.J., where he owns a house, he would have to become an American citizen. For now, he said, he is more interested in helping his countrymen.
Mr. Navarro’s celebrated return to Mexico was in sharp contrast to his departure. Born into a poor family of street peddlers, he grew up selling candy for pennies. In 1992, at age 14, he slipped across the United States border with the help of smugglers; they brought him to New York, where he joined three older brothers who had arrived earlier and worked in a garment district sweatshop.
Mr. Navarro and his brothers eventually became legal residents and started their own businesses, forming a band that played for Mexican audiences along the Eastern Seaboard. They founded a small record company, opened restaurants — most recently El Tequilazo in Midtown — and promoted Mexican events in New York.
They gained some notoriety in 1999 when a bull escaped from a rodeo they had organized in Queens. The police gave chase, shooting the animal dead in a parking lot. The brothers were issued police summonses for failing to get permits for wild animals.
Although Mr. Navarro, who is single, has many relatives in Serdán, he was largely unknown there last August, when he heralded his arrival by sponsoring a party for the city’s residents. “Nobody knew who he was before that,” said Valentín Rosas Hernández, a correspondent in Serdán for El Sol de Puebla, a daily newspaper.
As Mr. Navarro courted political and business leaders there, he also marshaled support from Mexican leaders in New York. Last month, the state leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, one of Mexico’s main political parties, selected him as their candidate.
Alejandro Armenta Mier, president of the party’s state committee, said in a telephone interview from Mexico that the endorsement resulted from a poll of party leaders in the city. But Mr. Navarro’s campaign aides said he was handpicked in backroom negotiations by a small cadre of state power brokers — a tradition in Mexican politics known as el dedazo, or the big finger.
Mr. Armenta said Mr. Navarro understood the struggles of ordinary families. “Juan Navarro is the representation of the effort of thousands of Puebla families who have had to leave and go to the United States to seek their livelihood,” he said.
Mr. Navarro’s two opponents, however, have tried to cast him as an uninformed interloper.
“He hasn’t been here, and people don’t identify with him,” said one rival, Jesús Hernández Sánchez, a former city councilman. “We know the needs of the people.”
Mr. Navarro, who is back in Serdán this week, traveling from dawn to dusk throughout the city’s 24 townships, said he did not leave 18 years ago because he wanted to, but because he had to.
“I went out to earn,” he said, “and I’ve returned to share what I gained.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/nyregion/02mexican.html
