Micaela (“Mica”) Garcia Martinez voted for a candidate whose party she loathed: Josefina Vazquez Mota. She was the first female to run as a presidential candidate for a major Mexican political party. Yet, Mica detests Vazquez Mota’s party, the presently ruling pro-church, pro-business National Action Party (PAN). That’s because she judged the last two local PAN presidentes de municipales to be worse than the normal run of thieves and liars, but, she said bitterly, because they were responsible for deaths of people she knew well. As for the party that “won” last Sunday, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), she lived too much of her life under its corrupt and brutal rule, she declared, and wanted nothing to do with that “vile armada”.
“I voted for the woman candidate,” she said when people asked why she favored Vazquez Mota. “Because even if she couldn’t win, that chance probably won’t happen again soon.”
Mica’s outspokenness could offend some people, but she was never a metiche, a meddler. She simply spoke up about things that concerned her, or directly and exceptionally pleased or displeased her.
Mica is a cerro woman, brought up planting and harvesting mountain milpas (corn fields), maintaining barbed wire fencing, cutting spiny huisache bushes to gingerly lace branches through strands of wire, stacking rocks along the base.
Mica was bold even as a child, yet absorbed her parents’ instructions on how Mexico believed females should act — in town and in the countryside. And she seemed instinctively to sense how to step along that thin line. Though as she got older she didn’t always follow it. Her gaze was direct and probing, for instance, which stirred frowns from some officials and others who believed they ran the pueblo. She had strong hands, well muscled arms and legs, and a straight-backed posture. Mica married young, and when her husband hit her a second time, she knocked him down with her cattle prod — a back-yard guaje limb. Swearing, he jumped up and lunged at her. She knocked him down again and slammed the knob-end of the guaje limb into his leg. When he left for the border two weeks later, he still limped. Mica knew people would gossip and criticize her about what she’d done, so she carried the guaje staff wherever she went.
Yet she was gentle with the twins that were soon born, as she had been with her first-born son. True, school teachers claimed they were wild children, but like Mica, all three were hard workers. The twins were girls, and as they were getting their growth, teachers said that they were precoz, too bold — and good looking — for their own good.Mica talked to all three, speaking candidly of sex and the life it has among gossips in small pueblos and barrios, and among males, mixing with their various ways of treating females. Soon, she bought a box of condoms. But that wasn’t necessary. By then the pueblo was struck by a contagion of border-crossing fever. The three children used every inducement their young minds could conjure to persuade Mica to cross the Rio Bravo into the United States. Mica’s large family had many members — a good number she’d never seen — living in Lincoln, California, in Houston, in Arizona, in Oklahoma and Oregon. The children sought allies among these, and all of Mica’s local friends — especially the gringos — though most of these placated the children without joining their argument: dreams of better paying jobs, better schools, a better life (if they could afford the right false, then easily available, papers that were said to “legalize” illegal immigrants).
That was 1989. Mexico was drowning in the wake of such a clumsy exercise of vote fraud that it had become a bitter joke. On the evening of July 6, 1988, the PRI had stopped the electronic counting of the presidential vote which was going against the official candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gotari. An unexplained computer “glitch” had brought down the electronic toting of votes, at least long enough for the electoral trend, shown by early results to heavily favor opposition candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, to be manipulated.
Mica, an enthusiastic Cardenas fan, was so disillusioned by this “theft of the nation” by the PRI, that she, like many others, almost decided to leave Mexico. She didn’t, she would always say, because she didn’t know how to live like an American — and had no desire to learn.
After that, like many Mexicans, Mica became a full-time enemy of the PRI. But her children did go the United States, where an assortment of relatives helped them get educations, and a series of well-paying, if often taxing, jobs. Mica, of course didn’t, not even to visit. “It is easy for them,” Mica would explain. “Because they haven’t been Mexicans very long.”
When I read to her from U.S. newspapers, as I often do with Mexican friends, about how the United States sees Mexico, she usually laughs.
“Your periodistas up there are as deaf and blind as the ones here.”
“But with freedom of speech, of the press, journalists here do a pretty good job, much better now that they did before,” I reply whenever she says that.
“That’s like saying we have a democracy, hombre,” she snorts. “We don’t even get to choose the candidates.” Mica frowned in hard thought. “We don’t have those primarios. The first elections to pick a candidate.”
“Elecciones preliminares,” I said.
“Si. We need those. Now, the ciudadanos don’t get to chose who is going to run for any position.”
“The media up north finally figured out that political parties here buy votes.”
“That’s a little late to be news, no?”
“Well, that was a day before the election.”
“But they’ve been doing it for, what?” Mica said. “Before the campaign legally began, no? They got an early start. (Enrique) Peña Nieto began campaigning more than a year ago.”
“Some voters got more than seventy-five dollars in gift cards, this June 30th paper says. It reports about half of the votes are going to be recounted, because there were more than 1,000 complaints.”
“It’s too late. The presidency, the governorships, presidentes municipales. All of them have already been stolen.”
Mica’s children, adults now, write her frequently these days, pleading with her to tone down her forthright ways, citing drug gang killings of people who draw the “wrong kind of attention to themselves.”
Mica tells them she will, but she doesn’t. When drug gang assassins were recently targeting women, a lot of people — men and women — hunkered down and became unusually quiet. She did neither.
In March, 22 women were killed in Jalisco, and 137 men. Some of those were local folks that she and I knew. She was emphatic in loudly calling the assassins a long list of names. And if she had a dust-up with some stranger who appeared he might be drug and/or politically connected, she didn’t draw back. “Dios, I don’t want to be tortured,” she declared. “I want to make them so mad they’ll shoot me rather than that.” And if effrontery doesn’t work, she has a secret strategy to accomplish that extreme goal.