Arellano won’t get public voice on immigration issue

It is official – Elvira Arellano is not going to be a member of Mexico’s Congress.

The woman who spent a year holed up in a church in Chicago’s largely Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood to avoid being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and deported lost in Sunday’s mid-term elections for political positions across Mexico.

ARELLANO, WHOSE SON remains in the United States (he was born here, so he gets citizenship), had submitted herself as a candidate for Congress from the Baja California, which is the state along the border surrounding Tijuana.

Arellano had hopes of becoming a political official who could put a personal face on the immigration from Mexico’s perspective – in short, why are so many people willing to risk a walk through the deadly desert to live in a United States with hostile elements that cause them to have to live their lives in secret?

It’s not that Mexicans rejected the idea of having to consider if their political system is so flawed that many Mexicans would rather live somewhere else. It more is the fact of politics as usual.

Family rules.

IN SHORT, SHE was running for Congress against the brother of the governor of the Baja.

He needed a political post to hold, and his brother provided a campaign organization that could turn out the vote.

So she probably never had much of a chance of winning. Of course, it didn’t help her much that her political party is the one that has a reputation in Mexico of being “leftist.” Of course, the people who think that are the same types as those in this country who go about tossing words like “socialist” to describe the current president and “Communist” whenever the Democratic Party is discussed.

But it could have been interesting had Arellano gained a post that would have given her fight on the immigration issue a bit of political legitimacy.

FOR THE FACT is that Arellano was the woman who risked much to get into the United States, and once she was here wasn’t exactly getting rich off the American teat, no matter how much the nativists want to claim that “foreigners” are bleeding the U.S. dry.

She was working a job at an airport, so she was the woman who got on the airplane after it landed and the passengers dispersed, and had to pick up after the mess made by those very passengers.

This “illegal” operated a vacuum cleaner. Or at least she did until federal authorities did a raid and busted up her employment.

It was at that point that she took to the church and remained inside for a whole year – based on the notion that federal immigration authorities wouldn’t have the nerve to enter a church and take her out kicking and screaming.

THEY DID NOT.

They waited her out until she finally decided to leave and be an activist on the immigration issue, knowing she’d be picked up eventually and deported – which she was, in Los Angeles.

Since arriving in Tijuana (which puts her within sight and earshot of the United States), she has traveled to Cuba, Spain and Italy to talk about the immigration issue.

It is what she does.

SHE WANTS TO make people aware of the fact that it isn’t a criminal hoard sliming its way across the line in the dirt that is the U.S./Mexico border, but merely people wishing to make a better life for themselves while also potentially boosting the economy of their recipient nation.

After all, Arellano was essentially a cleaning woman – even though some will claim she was a potential threat to this nation because of her proximity to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

The image of the woman with the vacuum being the threat to national security is just a tad too ridiculous to take seriously.

But perhaps the thought of her political bid was also too much for some people to take seriously.

SOME MEXICAN OFFICIALS prefer to think that it is merely a bit of disloyalty to country that causes so many of my ethnic brethren to think that the United States offers a chance of a better life.

That allows them to ignore the very real problems that hold a large percentage of the population down and give them next to no chance to advance in life. That certainly was the situation some 80 years ago when my own grandfathers made the decision while still teenagers that they had more opportunities if they moved from their homes in central Mexican states.

So while it isn’t a surprise that Arellano didn’t win, I must admit to thinking it is a shame. Her presence in Mexico City could have stirred up enough of a political “hornet’s nest,” so to speak, to make the issue interesting.

The chances are good that she would have said some things about her Mexican counterparts that would have even gained some support from her one-time critics in the United States.

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