Ahead of Mexico’s July 2018 presidential elections, Latino groups in San Diego are rallying to get a name on the ballot: María de Jesús Patricio Martinez, known as Marichuy, a traditional Mexican healer and indigenous Nahua woman.
If Patricio gets enough signatures, she will be the first indigenous woman to run for president in Mexico. Groups like Raíces Sin Fronteras and Universidad Popular will be gathering signatures from Mexicans living in San Diego on Saturday at the Centro Cultural de la Gaza starting at 5 p.m.
"She’s an alternative. We know that a lot of people are so tired of the political parties ... they don't know the needs of the people, they don't know how they struggle to have food, how they struggle to have a house, how they struggle just to live," said Rosa Barajas, a member of Raíces Sin Fronteras.
Patricio is running on behalf of the National Indigenous Congress, which represents 60 indigenous communities across Mexico and which she helped create. Her viability as a candidate comes amid a rise in Mexican nationalism, in part a backlash to President Trump’s rise in the U.S.
“In that struggle, in that resistance, we are finding our identity — our roots," said Barajas, who met Patricio in May and has traveled with the National Indigenous Congress.
Currently leading the polls is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who lost to President Peña Nieto in 2012 and has expressed antipathy toward open trade policies and globalization.
Barajas said Patricio appeals to Mexican immigrants in San Diego because many of them came fleeing poverty in Mexico. They believe that Patricio, as an advocate for indigenous rights, will address poverty in Mexico because she has been fighting for the country’s poorest communities for decades. She launched a natural medicine health center in her hometown of Tuxpan, Jalisco a few years before co-founding the National Indigenous Congress.
“We didn’t come (to the U.S.) because we wanted to enjoy different world, no, it was because we needed it, because we were pushed, because people lost their places, their jobs, their land," Barajas said.
Next year's presidential election will be the first to allow independent candidates to run. But independent candidates need signatures from 1% of the electorate, both across Mexico and in 17 separate states.
Patricio has the support of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which launched a historic 1994 uprising against the Mexican government in Chiapas, in response to rural displacement and other problems they believed would come of NAFTA.
A North County signature-gathering campaign will begin next Tuesday at the Universidad Popular in Vista at 5 p.m.
