From illegal immigrant to congresswoman?
Elvira Arellano, the controversial activist who spent a year in a Humboldt Park church in an unsuccessful bid to avoid deportation, is running for a seat in Mexico’s Congress. If elected July 5, she would represent a district in Tijuana, the border city where she first arrived after being deported from the U.S. in 2007.
Since then, Arellano has criss-crossed Mexico and traveled to Spain, Italy and Cuba to promote greater human-rights protections for migrants.
Arellano’s bid is a long shot. She is running with the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party in a state dominated by Mexico’s two other major parties. Arellano said her party has given her only about $20,000 for a race in which her chief rival is the brother of the governor of the Mexican state of Baja California.
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The Tijuana newspaper El Mexicano critiqued a recent debate performance by noting that Arellano spoke with the accent of a pocho, pejorative slang for a Mexican who lives in the U.S.
Arellano, who was raised and lives in the southwestern state of Michoacan, justifies her candidacy by noting that she started a shelter for migrants in Tijuana in 2007 and that many people living in that city are either migrating to the U.S. or have been recently deported.
“It’s true that I didn’t really know Tijuana,” Arellano said in a telephone interview. “What I do know is the needs of families. I know the reasons we have to immigrate to the United States. I lived the same things that thousands of people here in Tijuana have lived.”
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