Relatos de un Autoexilio

(Note taken of The New York Times page http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/nyregion/westchester/15colwe.html?_r=1)

LIKE many immigrants, some of the Salvadorans who live here have one foot in the United States and one foot in their homeland.

Their soul and spirit are back in El Salvador with the spouses, parents and children they left behind when they came here seeking jobs. Much of the money they earn ends up in El Salvador in cash remittances for those relatives.

And a March 15 election in El Salvador is generating excitement and heated debate in some neighborhoods here — even though Salvadorans living in the United States can’t vote in it unless they return home.

The region’s Salvadoran pockets — in Port Chester, in Hempstead and Brentwood on Long Island and in Bridgeport in Connecticut — are hotbeds of campaign fervor. On Jan. 11, for example, organizers for the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the leading opposition party in El Salvador, held a meeting in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church here to drum up support and raise money for its presidential candidate, Mauricio Funes, a television journalist turned politician. Fifty to a hundred people were there, depending on whom you ask.

Hoping to scotch anxiety-provoking rumors, the speakers promised listeners that remittances would not be blocked if the presidency were won by the F.M.L.N., an outgrowth of the leftist guerrilla movement that fought the Salvadoran government in the 1980-92 civil war. They also tried to calm fears that an F.M.L.N. victory might mean that the United States would jettison a visa program that gives temporary protected status to 229,000 Salvadorans.

Supporters of the ruling party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as Arena, and its presidential candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, have also campaigned among the more than a million Salvadorans estimated to be in the United States. Guillermo Chacon, secretary of the Salvadoran-American National Network, a 20-year-old nonpartisan group that helps Salvadorans with housing and other social services, said presidential candidates from the smaller parties had even taken flights to New York to rally the faithful.

While Salvadorans who remain here can’t vote in their native country, they can call relatives and press them to vote for a favored candidate. That is what they are doing, Salvadorans here say, and perhaps the reason they do so with urgency and ardor is that homeland politics is not just a matter of sporting interest.

They worry about the declining earnings of Salvadoran farmers because of continental trade agreements, about distances relatives have to travel for clean water, about endemic corruption.

“There’s more of a crisis in El Salvador than there is here,” Daniel Navas, a 45-year-old construction worker in Port Chester and organizer of the Jan. 11 rally, said in an interview two weeks later.

The large number of Salvadorans here translates into a greater number of relatives back home to cajole. The 2000 census reported 600 Salvadorans living in Port Chester and 3,100 in Westchester, though community officials think both figures are significantly undercounted because Salvadorans who are here illegally avoid census takers.

Mr. Navas has three grown children whom he left behind when he came here in 2000 because he could not find a decent job, even with master’s degrees in computer systems and business administration. He hasn’t seen those children in eight years, he said, but often calls, and the topics they bat around include the election.

“My daughter says to me that ‘You’re going to be deported if the F.M.L.N. wins the elections,’ ” Mr. Navas said. “I said: ‘That’s not true. They can deport us if we don’t have a paper, but not if the F.M.L.N. wins.’ ”