New York — In central Illinois, full of farms and modest homes, there are many people who support former President Donald Trump and his heavy-handed immigration policies. However, last May, they chose a Mexican immigrant as mayor of the city of Arcola, of regarding 3,600 inhabitants.
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Jesús Garza, 51, is a mechanic who has lived in that town in Illinois for more than two decades, and now divides his time between his workshop and the town hall, trying to improve street lighting and safety, since the city only It has a policeman per shift.
Garza says he is grateful for the trust placed in him by his American neighbors, who have always shown him support and seen him prosper, he says. The support, he says, he has had since he started working as a mechanic for a local citizen until he opened his own shop 17 years ago and now has three employees.
“People here have told me ‘we don’t vote for a Republican party, we don’t vote for Democrats, we vote for you, for the person that you are,'” he said during an interview with the AP when asked how it is possible that Trump supporters vote for a Mexican immigrant.
Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2020, imposed various provisions to curb illegal immigration in the United States. Among other things, he approved extraordinary measures to limit asylum, charging anyone who entered the United States without authorization from Mexico with criminality, which resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the border. During his election campaign, he called Mexican immigrants criminals.
Garza was born in Cadereyta Jiménez, the “broom capital of Mexico,” in the northern state of Nuevo León. He wanted to study automotive engineering but college was too expensive and he ended up as a mechanic, he said. Lack of employment, however, forced him to move to Arcola, where his father worked in a broom factory.
Garza arrived in the city in 1993 with his wife and a nine-month-old baby on a tourist visa. His father, who was already a US citizen, began the process to fix his son’s immigration status.
Without speaking a word of English, Garza began working at the broom factory, the city’s main employer. In fact, he said, the brooms were made from a spike grown in Mexico, and that’s how Garza’s father, Joaquin, ended up in Arcola, regarding a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Garza spent months sleeping just four hours because he worked at the factory at night and in an auto shop during the day. Until his boss at the workshop offered him a raise and sent him to study English.
“I guess he saw potential in me back then,” Garza said. “They know that you want to learn, that you want to work. I imagine he thought ‘let’s see what happens with him, with the boy’, and well I didn’t let him down. I always worked as he wanted and I always did everything the man told me.
Garza, a father of four and grandfather of two grandchildren, said he ran for mayor because he saw local businesses closing their doors.
“When you have lived here for a long time, in Arcola, you begin to worry regarding the things that you are going to leave for the future,” he said.
About 66% of Arcola voters voted for Trump last year, according to official data.
“The Americans tell me and ‘you don’t stop, why don’t you get tired?’” Garza said. “And ‘yes, I get tired’, I tell them, but I see that people support, that’s what makes me, as one says, continue, continue, continue, continue”.
