Citizenship across Borders: The Political Transnationalism of El Migrante

5 Transnational Electoral Politics

5 Transnational Electoral Politics The Multiple Coronations of the “Tomato King” On July 1, 2001, Andrés Bermúdez Viramontes was elected presidente of Jerez, one of the largest municipal governments in the state of Zacatecas. Bermúdez, a successful tomato grower, labor contractor, and inventor of a tomato transplanting machine who lived in Winters, California, gained international media attention during his campaign as El Rey del Tomate (the Tomato King). Running under this rubric, Bermúdez, the candidate of the PRD, positioned himself as the prototypical transnational Mexican migrant , and thus as a symbol of the rising power of el migrante in Mexican political life. Bermúdez’s campaign and his victory were publicized widely in the Mexican and international press, where his victory was represented as a sign of the transnationalization of Mexican political life. The Tomato King’s victory and its implicit transnationalizing of political power caused considerable consternation among his opponents in the once dominant and now threatened PRI party, who seized on a legal obstacle that potentially prevented transmigrants from participating in Mexican electoral politics. Before the Tomato King could take office, the PRI succeeded in having his election invalidated by a federal electoral court (for failing to fulfill “local” residency requirements) in an ongoing national and transnational political struggle over the meaning of cross-border electoral power. In the face of these exclusionary practices, the Tomato King, who had been deprived of what he saw as a democratic electoral victory in the new transnational political space of Mexican politics, cemented an alliance with another transnational political actor, the Frente Cívico Zacatecano (FCZ), a political arm of the Zacatecan migrant organizations in southern California (Goldring 2002) and joined with supportive public intellectuals in Zacatecas to gain constitutional reforms in the state that now recognize 109 “binational residency” as a legitimate dimension of popular elections. These state-level constitutional reforms paved the way for the Tomato King to stage a dramatic transnational political comeback in 2004. Once the exclusionary state law had been changed, the Tomato King expanded the transnational electoral coalition of which he had become both a leader and a symbol. He made political allies at multiple sites on both sides of the border, while simultaneously fostering a dynamic bermudista social movement at the grassroots level in Jerez. On July 4, 2004, the Tomato King was once again elected presidente municipal of Jerez, winning office by a wide margin. He received 41 percent of the vote in a three-way race, defeating his closest opponent by over two thousand votes. How did this dramatic turnaround come about? What factors help us to understand and explain the bermudista phenomenon? How can we account for the centrality of el migrante in the discourses and practices contributing to the transnationalization of Mexican electoral politics? In this chapter we use transnational ethnography to tell the story of the rise, fall, and dramatic rebound of the most prominent transnational political candidate to emerge in the struggle over dual citizenship in contemporary Mexico. We explore the cross-border electoral politics by which Andrés Bermúdez, the Tomato King, was twice elected mayor of Jerez, Zacatecas. We seek to explain the meaning of his transnational electoral victories and their cumulative impact on the role of “the migrant” as a new social actor in Mexican political development. We advance an agency-oriented perspective that underlines the need to carefully historicize the relationship between transnationalism and citizenship—that is, to map the contingency and agency underlying the changing practices of states, migrants, and transnational institutional networks vis-à-vis questions of transnational citizenship. This is best done by paying close attention to the social and political practices whereby human agents pursue historically specific political projects that extend the practices of citizenship across borders. Who Is the Tomato King? Andrés Bermúdez is a successful immigrant entrepreneur with no political experience who decided to put aside his business operations to run for of- fice in his Mexican hometown. Bermúdez was not the first migrant to become an elected official in Mexico. In many migrant-sending regions, the economic clout and improved social status acquired by successful migrants have led them to prominent positions in local politics after their return to their home communities (Alarcón 1988; Fitzgerald 2000). In at least one case during the Bracero program (1942–65), a presidente municipal even governed his community from the United States (e-mail communication 110 Chapter 5...