Commentary:
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
The Mexican Presidential election of 2012 is this July. Mexican Josefina Vasquez Mota, the first woman nominated by a major political party for President of any country in North America dropped in on a reception in her honor the other day, I was there.
Ms Mota is the fifty-something candidate of the Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) which won the Mexican Presidency in the historic election victory of Vicente Fox in 2000. That was followed by another historic election victory by Fox’s PAN party led by Harvard-educated Felipe Calderon in 2006.
We drove north from San Diego to attend the invitation-only reception for Josefina on Saturday. It was sponsored by the Hispanic100, an influential group of former public officials, appointed and elected mostly Hispanic Republican men and women with a sprinkling of current officeholders.
The venue was a historical mansion owned by a pioneer Mexican American family in Orange County’s Santa Ana, a city of over 320,000 people of which 75% are of Mexican-origin. A hundred or so people attended. Local politicians, elected state officials and candidates, retired military, business people, media people and some television cameras showed up.
They were greeted by a wait staff circulating with Mexican delicacies through the hungry dinner-hour crowd.
Missing was the friend who sent me my invitation, Ms Rosario Marin, the George W. Bush appointed Treasurer of the United States and California cabinet member under Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger.
She showed up arm-in-arm with the Mexican PANista candidate for President, Josefina Vasquez Mota. Rosario guided Josefina through the crowd shaking hands and greeting the Americans (mostly) of Mexican descent with a broad Mexican smile and hand shake. They came right to me. With my politically-experienced left hand holding her elbow and right hand shaking hers I lowered my head so Josefina could hear me well and told her in Spanish that I was delighted with her candidacy, that I wished her well. I told her, so only she could hear that my father was a Mexican congressman when I was born in Mexico City 71 years ago.
It was a thrill to talk with a Mexican candidate for President here in the United States. Then to listen to the candidate give a moving speech that strikingly reminded us that no matter where we are, Mexico is with us. True, that is where our 500-year-old New World roots are; Minutemen, be damned!
Mexico has come a long way politically in the past two decades. It loosened up politically under then ruling party (PRI) Presidents De La Madrid, Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo (all three with American graduate university degrees).
Its economy is growing faster than the American economy and is headed towards becoming the world’s 5th largest economy (as per projections by Goldman Sachs). Government birth control education over the past three decades has slashed the national birth rate by half or more. A plummeting labor surplus is the result. As the surplus shrinks, fewer young men are coming to the United States illegally. There are fewer workers, more jobs and higher wages in Mexico.
This and a burgeoning free enterprise Mexico is what Josefina is running to be President of; as well as a better educated Mexico that she helped improve as Secretary of Education under President Felipe Calderon. Jesuit-educated at the Ibero-Americana University in Mexico, she is well-grounded in education.
She studied Economics and worked as a financial writer for Mexico’s “Wall Street Journal” EL FINANCIERO. She is well grounded in economics.
She has served in two cabinet positions, first under President Fox and as Secretary of Education under President Calderon whose national campaign she managed in 2006. She ran for and was elected to the Mexican Congress. She ran for a congressional leadership position and won. She is well-grounded in national politics.
Fascinating to any student of Mexican politics is the very idea of a woman being nominated for Mexico’s Presidency by a major political party, much less the history-making Center-Right ruling party. Neither Canada nor the United States has ever experienced nominating a woman for the country’s Chief Executive Office — by any major political party. Mexico leads the way.
Candidate Josefina Vasquez Mota extended credit for her Presidential run to her hostess, former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin. A former reporter, she worked on Vicente Fox’s Presidential campaign which led her to a Fox Cabinet position but that Mexico being Mexico, few paid attention to her politically.
Then, United States Treasurer Rosario Marin officially visited Mexico after her U.S. Senate confirmation. That visit opened up Josefina’s eyes to the possibility that women (a Mexican American, no less) could rise to and hold responsible positions in the greatest democracy in the world, the US of A. So, she thought — why not Mexico?
President of Mexico Josefina Vasquez Mota, is it possible?
Contreras’ 12 books, including A HISPANIC VIEW: IS MEXICO BURNING? are available at amazon.com