The New York Times: "Salvadoran Immigrants Turn Attention Back Home"

LIKE many immigrants, some of the Salvadorans who live here have one foot in the United States and one foot in their homeland. (Photo JOSEPH BERGER:GENERATIONAL SPLIT Jose Ulysses Torres, center, an immigrant from El Salvador, and his 16-year-old daughter Martha, with Daniel Navas, another Salvadoran immigrant, at La Pupusa Loca in Port Chester)

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.

One of the major concerns among many Salvadorans in the United States is that the money they send home — $3.8 billion in 2008 — no longer goes as far because of inflation in El Salvador, which the C.I.A.’s World Factbook put at 8 percent for 2008. 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.’ ”
Why the passion about an election in which he can’t vote?
“Our heart is still there,” he replied simply.

With Mr. Navas in a local Salvadoran restaurant, La Pupusa Loca, was Jose Ulysses Torres, 44, a bakery maintenance man who hails from El Tablon, a village that he said has 210 houses, and Mr. Torres’s 16-year-old daughter Martha, a Port Chester High School student who did the translating. Mr. Torres figures that half his Salvadoran village’s population has transplanted to Port Chester and Bridgeport, so there are many long-distance calls with voting advice to relatives back home.

Of course, expatriates in lots of places, Americans included, are interested in their home country’s elections. Philip Berns, an immigration lawyer in Stamford, Conn., said he thought homesickness, language barriers and the difficulty of grasping the subtleties of another political system all accounted for why expatriates “pay almost no attention to the politics of the country they are living in.”

But that often begins to fade with the next generation, as reflected in the contrast between Mr. Torres and his daughter. A large part of Mr. Torres, a green-card holder who said he came here 24 years ago to escape Salvadoran military recruiters, still resides in El Salvador. He has made several trips back to his native village with money collected from Salvadoran-Americans for medication and toilets.

Martha, though, is focused on life here. She followed the McCain-Obama race, while her father tuned in to the legislative elections that were held Jan. 18 in El Salvador and resulted in a plurality for F.M.L.N. — 37 seats to Arena’s 34, though not enough to swing power away from an Arena coalition.

“I told my dad he’s more interested in the Salvadoran elections than what’s going on here,” Martha Torres said. “The answer he gave me is he’s planning to move there.”

E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com - The New York Times

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