FRESNO, Calif. – Last Sunday, scores of Mexican citizens in the San Joaquin Valley weren’t able to vote in their country’s historic presidential election, even after traveling in person to the Mexican Consulate in Fresno.
But those who showed up – whether they voted or not – were motivated by the opportunity to help shape their country’s future.
The consulate in north Fresno was the only polling station between Los Angeles and the Bay Area where voters could take part in elections from abroad. The line to vote wrapped around the small office, and red, yellow and black umbrellas shielded people from the sun.
At the end of the line, Santiago Ramirez said he had driven from 90 minutes away in Wasco, a small city in Kern County.
Despite not being registered to vote, Ramirez said he trekked to the consulate because he supports Mexico’s ruling party – the National Regenerative Movement (Morena) – and the positive changes his family back home in the Mexican state of Guerrero have seen in the last six years.
“People have seen positive change, and they’re motivated to continue with more of the same. And hopefully, things will continue going well, maybe even better,” Ramirez said.
Current Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wasn’t on the ballot, but his politics were. Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist and former mayor of Mexico City who just became the first woman to be elected president of Mexico, will now be at the helm of the Morena party Lopez Obrador helped create.
Ramirez said he was there to vote for her.
Support for Morena was apparent among other voters who showed up to vote in Fresno, too.
One man had pinned a cutout of Lopez Obrador to his hat. Another man, when asked who he supported in the election, raised four fingers – a nod to Lopez Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation” campaign.
The goal of the Fourth Transformation campaign was to get rid of corruption and help the poor. Lopez Obrador categorized it as the fourth significant change for the country, following three internal wars that shaped the country’s early history – the Mexican Revolution among them.
We don’t want an oppressed country. We don’t want a poor country, where only a few benefit from the riches of our beautiful nation.Angelica Otamendi
But unlike those violent conflicts, Lopez Obrador has stressed this transformation was meant to be peaceful and more based in economics.
Veronica Mejia, of Fresno, wholeheartedly supports the campaign as well. Originally from Mexico City, she said she is eager to one day return to Mexico and take part in what she also sees as a positive transformation under the Morena party.
“I am all in for Morena, because I want a government that has my back, one that is better than what we have here,” Mejia says.
On the fact that a woman is the country’s presumptive new leader – Mejia beamed.
“What can I say, I am extremely proud,” she said.
Support for Sheinbaum and Morena wasn’t universal, however. Angelica Otamendi, of Madera but who last lived in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, was in line to vote for Xochitl Galvez, the opposition candidate from the National Action Party (PAN). Otamendi said she supported Galvez because she felt the country was heading toward one-party rule.
She said she viewed this election as one where voters were choosing between “liberty or entering a communist regime.”
“We don’t want an oppressed country. We don’t want a poor country, where only a few benefit from the riches of our beautiful nation,” she said.
The 2024 Mexican election was different from those in the past, and not just because of who was elected. It’s the first time in-person voting was allowed outside of Mexico. Since 2006, Mexicans abroad have been able to mail in their votes. Online voting became possible more recently.
But it’s unclear if election officials were prepared for the swarms of people who showed up. The line in Fresno never seemed to shrink. Consulate offices around the country were reportedly limited to only 1,500 ballots – each.
In Fresno, only five machines were operating to accept those ballots. Voters waited for hours under the hot sun. Delays and bottlenecks led to calls for the Mexican election agency to reform how it conducts future elections abroad, and allow for more participation.
When word got out that voting was coming to a close in the late afternoon, voters who had grown tired got out of line. But others pressed harder to try to get into the consulate, flooding the entrance to the building.
They tried to hold the doors open, shouting at security guards. They accused election officials of corruption, while shouting support for Morena and Sheinbaum.
But elections officials, from the National Institute of Elections (INE) in Mexico, shut down voting machines and cleared the room by 5:30 p.m. Many in Fresno went home without casting a single vote.
An elections official declined KVPR’s interview request, and promised to release a statement via email, but it did not arrive.
We have to teach our children that things are going to be better for them.Raquel Magañanes
Accusations of corruption against Mexican agencies aren't new. Feeling betrayed by establishment politicians, many Mexicans have grown distrustful and frustrated with the government over the years.
But the rise of the Morena party has instilled a new perception that Mexico can still enact positive structural changes for its people. Supporters of newly elected president Sheinbaum believe she, like they saw in Lopez Obrador, can root out corruption from within – including what they see are needed changes in the country’s election agency, known as INE.
Voters chanted “out with INE,” repeatedly, as they were locked out of voting.
Later that evening, supporters of the Morena party gathered at a watch party miles from the consulate, in Fresno’s Tower District, where early results were beginning to show a clear win for Morena. By the end of the night, the party had swept a majority of state governorships, a majority of seats in congress, and the presidency.
Raquel Magañanes, an election observer who represented the Morena party at the polling site in Fresno, said the shouting and disruption that took place sent the wrong message. She acknowledged, however, that perhaps election officials now understood the heavy interest in political participation from Mexicans living abroad.
But she said the party, and its supporters, should move away from aggressiveness that she and many others have tried to leave behind.
“We have to teach our children that things are going to be better for them,” she told a room of Morena supporters. “That is why we are planting the seeds of love, of peace, and of respect – the way Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has taught us.”
