La Nueva Frontera: Don't Stop Thinking About Manana

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It wasn't the only mayoral debate held in Los Angeles last month, but it was the most unusual. The five candidates cleared their schedules so they could take part, even though most of the 125 people who came to listen couldn't vote. For 2 1/2 hours the rivals argued nonstop about a variety of topics including what to do with the city's poorly managed garbage dump. And it was kind of interesting that two candidates showed up in western shirts, cowboy boots and hats.

But all that made sense, since the job up for grabs in this debate was that of mayor of Jerez, a city 1,500 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. So numerous--and influential with voters back home--are the town's L.A. refugees that none of the wannabes dared to run without wooing people in California. "They tell their families their observations about us," says candidate Alma Araceli Avila Cortes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. "They have moral authority with the people back in Jerez."

The story's the same elsewhere in Mexico. Migration patterns from south to north have become so routine that you can't get elected governor of the southern state of Puebla without campaigning in New York. And the road to the governor's job in the state of Chihuahua runs through Dallas. As more and more Mexicans leave home for points north, the nation's politicians--and its electorate--become increasingly Americanized. The farther away from Mexico City (and the closer to the border), the more independent-minded, entrepreneurial and individualistic the population becomes. Such thinking was once considered too "American" by many in Mexico. But no longer. Says Antonio Ocaranza, a public-affairs consultant in Mexico City: "Individual empowerment is going to be the key element in the new Mexican society."

No one more embodies this shift than the Mexican President, Vicente Fox Quesada. His election last year was a political earthquake, in part because it broke the 71-year-long one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I. Fox spent most of his business career working in Mexico City for Coca-Cola, the quintessential American company, and he likes to say--much as Ronald Reagan did--that U.S. business practices can be used to reform federal government. More important, he is culturally a norteno, given to blunt talk, a distrust of the Mexico City bureaucracy and open admiration for the U.S. His National Action Party, or P.A.N., reinvented itself in the northern states of Chihuahua and Baja California, reshaping itself in the 1980s from an ideological right-wing sect to one that championed free elections, civil society and honest government. Fox pushed that transformation so hard that he eventually alienated himself from much of the P.A.N. hierarchy. He governs essentially as an individual--perhaps the ultimate expression of American political values.