Don't Stop Thinking About Manana

By Peter Katel/Mexico City

It wasn't the only mayoral debate held in Los Angeles last month, but it was the most unusual. The five candidates cleared their schedules so they could take part, even though most of the 125 people who came to listen couldn't vote. For 2 1/2 hours the rivals argued nonstop about a variety of topics including what to do with the city's poorly managed garbage dump. And it was kind of interesting that two candidates showed up in western shirts, cowboy boots and hats.

But all that made sense, since the job up for grabs in this debate was that of mayor of Jerez, a city 1,500 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. So numerous--and influential with voters back home--are the town's L.A. refugees that none of the wannabes dared to run without wooing people in California. "They tell their families their observations about us," says candidate Alma Araceli Avila Cortes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. "They have moral authority with the people back in Jerez."

The story's the same elsewhere in Mexico. Migration patterns from south to north have become so routine that you can't get elected governor of the southern state of Puebla without campaigning in New York. And the road to the governor's job in the state of Chihuahua runs through Dallas. As more and more Mexicans leave home for points north, the nation's politicians--and its electorate--become increasingly Americanized. The farther away from Mexico City (and the closer to the border), the more independent-minded, entrepreneurial and individualistic the population becomes. Such thinking was once considered too "American" by many in Mexico. But no longer. Says Antonio Ocaranza, a public-affairs consultant in Mexico City: "Individual empowerment is going to be the key element in the new Mexican society."

No one more embodies this shift than the Mexican President, Vicente Fox Quesada. His election last year was a political earthquake, in part because it broke the 71-year-long one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I. Fox spent most of his business career working in Mexico City for Coca-Cola, the quintessential American company, and he likes to say--much as Ronald Reagan did--that U.S. business practices can be used to reform federal government. More important, he is culturally a norteno, given to blunt talk, a distrust of the Mexico City bureaucracy and open admiration for the U.S. His National Action Party, or P.A.N., reinvented itself in the northern states of Chihuahua and Baja California, reshaping itself in the 1980s from an ideological right-wing sect to one that championed free elections, civil society and honest government. Fox pushed that transformation so hard that he eventually alienated himself from much of the P.A.N. hierarchy. He governs essentially as an individual--perhaps the ultimate expression of American political values.

Mexicans are still getting used to a politician who campaigned nearly as much after his election as he did before. Fox likes to hit the streets in preplanned walking tours but has genuine encounters with voters along the way, while cameras record the sometimes testy back-and-forth. And Fox has crisscrossed his country to rally support for his tax-reform plan, which would place new levies on food, medicine and books as part of an overhaul of the notoriously inefficient tax system. If some of this salesmanship sounds familiar, that's because Fox's communications director, Francisco Ortiz, twice visited the Clinton White House to study how the 42nd President accomplished his legislative goals. "The President has to be campaigning in order to listen to the people," explains Ortiz.

Fox will need every ounce of his formidable charisma to get that measure approved. If he can sell the Mexican public on the idea, he will still have to get the measure approved by a Congress whose members, by law, cannot succeed themselves, giving them little incentive to respond to public opinion. But that too may be changing because of rising awareness that one-term members of Congress lack the expertise to check and balance the presidency effectively.

Fox appears to be doing everything he can to broaden his party's base in the north. He has called for allowing Mexicans abroad to cast absentee ballots. "All Mexicans, wherever they are, should have the right to vote," he said, weeks after his inauguration last Dec. 1. And he transformed the Office of Mexicans Abroad into a top-level presidential agency to link directly migrants and the chief executive and serve as an advocate for them in the U.S. Fox has said that he intends to be President to "all Mexicans"--at home and abroad.

Not every Mexican politician is styling himself after Fox. But of the five who turned up for the debate away from home in L.A. last month, three had made their fortunes in the U.S. before returning to Jerez to begin political careers. Andres Bermudez, 50, vowed that "from now on, government has to do better." Bermudez, the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party candidate, knows a thing or two about self-improvement. He entered Los Angeles in 1974 hidden in a car trunk, then went on to start greenhouse and orchard businesses that now employ 800 workers--nearly all Mexicans. Win or lose, Bermudez says, he sees himself as the wave of the future: "There are too many Andreses who'll come from the U.S. to force [Mexico] to do better."

--With reporting by Dolly Mascarenas/Mexico City

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With reporting by Dolly Mascarenas/Mexico City