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“I grew up biculturally in Arizona. It was very common for people to cross the border five to six times a day. I’m sorry we don’t have that openness that we used to have,”* said ASU School of Transborder Studies director Irasema Coronado, during a panel at last Saturday’s Zócalo and Universidad de Guadalajara program “Are the U.S. and Mexico Becoming One Country?” The event was part of the Spanish-language LéaLA literary festival and book fair at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in downtown Los Angeles.

Panelists included artist, curator, and cultural consultant Anita Herrera and Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León sociology professor Víctor Zúñiga. The program was moderated by Puente News Collaborative’s executive editor and correspondent Alfredo Corchado.

The conversation moved past the vitriol around immigration in contemporary political debate and looked at what unites the U.S. and Mexico. The panel spoke of the ties that bind the two countries—through migration, work, family, culture, language—and shared ways people themselves can serve as bridges for cross-border exchange.

Obvious connections bind the U.S. and Mexico to one another, the group observed. The two countries are geographic neighbors, and parts of the U.S.—like Los Angeles—were once part of Mexico. Mexico is the U.S.’s primary trading partner. Mexico also has the second largest number of citizens living abroad, after India— many of whom are in the U.S.

Despite this, there is still polarization, Corchado said. So how can culture fight back against it, and change the climate between the two countries? he asked.

“I think that culture transcends borders,” Herrera said. Born and raised in Huntington Park, California, Herrera was inspired to start her “Diaspora Dialogues” art series after she moved to Mexico City in 2018. The project consists mostly of experiential art installations. One such installation was set up at Saturday’s event and celebrated a family backyard party typical of her upbringing. It consisted of displays of old family photos, tacos, music, and the specific balloon arches and tables customary at those events. In the series, she wanted to share her specific culture, her Los Angeles, and open a space to discuss what connects, and disconnects, Mexicans and the diaspora.

“The diaspora exists because of an imaginary line,” Herrera said. Though she and her friends in Mexico City often listened to the same music and watched the same novelas, they were clearly not from the same country. Friends and family in Mexico called her “la gringa,” a name she did not like. She recalled struggles to obtain her Mexican tax identification number and her “papeles,” to learn more Spanish, and assimilate into Mexico City culture.

“I’ve learned a lot and unlearned a lot,” she said. “In the U.S., we are taught to be more selfish and individualistic. I’ve learned a new way to live.”

Zúñiga, the sociologist, offered the example of the “0.5 generation,” those who lived in the U.S. (many of them born there) and then moved to Mexico in the earlier part of this century, who are the subject of his book. This generation’s unique experiences and perspectives, as American and Mexican, inspire Zúñiga to believe a better relationship between the two countries is possible, he said.

“These children are much more than just bilingual individuals, these children are binational” and also bicultural, he said, having learned “to move between worlds, rituals, and norms that rival each other.”*

“To be bicultural,” Zúñiga further defined, “requires you to feel at home in the U.S. and equally at home in Mexico”*—something he and many migrants cannot claim. So, he asked, what impact does this 0.5 generation have on their communities? How are they adapting, and how is Mexico adapting to their presence?

Part of the reason some families move back to Mexico is because of immigration issues, like deportation. These families do not want to live separately. For Zúñiga, when families make the decision to stick together and move back to Mexico in the face of state policies they are defending themselves against separation.

Coronado offered a different perspective on those families, highlighting that many of this generation that moved back to Mexico are angry. They feel alienated and estranged in their new schools. They grew up imagining their lives on the football team or going to prom, and their lives have been changed radically. Many state a desire to return to the U.S. when they become adults.

Zúñiga said his research shows the situation appears to differ by region. At schools located closer to the border, in, for example, Zacatecas, his work has shown that 99% of students asked if the American-born students were similar to them said “yes.” The same question posed to students in Oaxaca and Puebla resulted in only 20% affirming the similarities. That “anti-Yankee” sentiment is regional, it demonstrated.

In so many ways, the border is a model for the larger countries, said Coronado, who herself grew up moving between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. People move across the border for work, for doctor visits, and for medicine, she observed. Border towns exhibit an interdependency that can serve as a model for both countries on “how to get along, respect each other, have a harmonious relationship.”*

*This quote was translated live from Spanish to English by on-site interpreters.

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My favorite pecan pie recipe is from a Methodist cookbook sold at a church not far from the Virginia farm where my grandmother grew up. The pie’s perfectly gooey consistency comes from an obscene amount of Karo corn syrup; its slightly salty crust accentuates the toasty flavor of baked pecans. I make it every year for Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday I celebrate despite not living in the U.S. and not being American.

I was born in the ’90s in Mexico and grew up with the tantalizing promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This landmark trade deal was heralded as a beacon of regional interconnectedness and economic progress. But for us kids, it symbolized more immediate delights: the chance to enjoy a Hershey’s chocolate bar or to buy the clothes Joey Potter wore in Dawson’s Creek, which we also now watched on TV. The promise of belonging to a shared, integrated region defined our childhoods, and with them, our identities.

I attended a private bilingual school, one of many that catered to Mexico’s expanding middle class and took pride in molding us into the most American versions of ourselves. Instead of a soccer team, we had basketball; we read coming-of-age novels like Holes and took SAT prep courses in case we wanted to apply to college in the U.S. But even among my classmates, I felt different. I thought of myself as not only bicultural but binational too.

My grandmother was an American nurse. In the ’40s, she met a visiting doctor from Sinaloa, Mexico inside the elevator of the Virginia hospital where she worked. As he held the doors open, he told himself that he would marry her one day. Eventually, he did. They had five children. The last of them, my dad, was born in the Mexican state of Sonora but was eligible for U.S. citizenship through his mom.

The author (left) with her father and older sister during a trip to Oaxaca, around 1997.

My dad was born long before the 1998 law that allowed Mexicans to have dual nationality, so he grew up in Mexico with a U.S. passport and, eventually, a Mexican work permit. In the late ’80s, his work permit expired, and he was deported out of Mexico. He crossed the border by foot, over the Laredo Bridge into Texas, carrying the official notice of his deportation from the country of his birth. He took a bus to Chicago, where he slept on a bench inside O’Hare airport until enough hours had gone by that he could legally return to Mexico, where my mom and 1-year-old sister awaited.

A few years later, I was born in Mexico City. I didn’t grow up with an American passport, but I did grow up with this story. It was proof of what I felt deeply: I was both Mexican and American.

Ever since I can remember, my dad has tried to pass on his U.S. nationality to my sister and me. He understands the financial and professional privileges of a blue passport. But because he’s never lived in the States (outside of the winters and summers he spent at the family farm in Virginia), he always hit a dead end. Still, I remained convinced that getting my U.S. nationality was just a matter of time. If my grandmother had been American and my father was American, why wouldn’t I be?

When I moved to New York for grad school on a temporary student visa, I was determined not to let bureaucracy get in the way of my heritage. So I filled out a “petition for alien relative,” a form that allowed my dad to request that I be given permanent U.S. residency through a green card. I could then, after several years, apply for citizenship. The reply from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services came in the mail a few weeks later: the petition had been accepted, meaning I was eligible for residency.

There was one caveat. I needed to follow-up with the Department of State, which processes the residency applications of U.S. citizen relatives and, eventually, issues the actual green card. Because my case wasn’t eligible for expedited processing, it would have to wait its turn in line. Last time I checked, the Department of State was beginning to process applications submitted in 1994.

The author (left) and her mother celebrating Thanksgiving in California, 2010.

Looking at the waitlist—and knowing I would not have documentation validating my binational identity for decades, at least—shattered something in me. The NAFTA promise that made us middle-class Mexicans think we would be citizens of a culturally intertwined North America felt like a lie. In Mexico, I was half-gringa. In the U.S., I was only Mexican and, as such, not always welcome.

I was reminded of this constantly while living in the States, though always in milder ways than foreigners who don’t pass as white (which I do). “Sorry, no Spanish here,” a woman on the other side of the phone replied when I called a public office asking—in my accented English—for an interview. On Bumble dates, men asked me for the expiration date of my visa; I went out for a few weeks with a guy who ultimately decided he could no longer see me because I didn’t have the paperwork to guarantee a long-term stay in the country. Second aunts posted Confederate flags with BUILD THE WALL captions on Facebook. I was unwanted. I did not belong. I was not who I thought I had been.

Four years after moving to New York, I consulted an immigration attorney who suggested a much easier path to a green card. It turned out I was eligible for an O-1, also known as the exceptional talent visa. I just had to file the paperwork and wait three months. After some years with the O-1, I could apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. I should have been excited, but something felt off.

I knew my privileged education had unlocked a path for immigration that many people are desperate for. I recognized that being able to choose where to build my life was an incredibly rare opportunity. But I also realized that living in the U.S. by any means possible wasn’t what I had truly been looking for. What I yearned for was a document that recognized my deep-rooted bond to my grandmother’s home. I had been searching, desperately, for something to validate my identity —papers I could point to that would say “You are of here, and also of there.” Yet documents alone couldn’t give me that. I headed back to Mexico.

Back in Mexico City, I rented an apartment far from where I grew up. I began buying my produce at the local mercado instead of Costco, which is where my family usually shopped. My poultry and meat came from a carnicería around the block. In some ways, I felt more Mexican than I ever had; in others, I felt like another digital nomad transplanted from the States to my own country.

Time passed. As my lingering doubts about going back to the U.S. dissipated, life took me by surprise. I met the man who would become my partner, the pandemic came and went, and we got married. I am now pregnant with our first child. When considering options for delivering our baby, my husband suggested we look into giving birth in the U.S. It would be our way to give our baby dual nationality, opening up employment and educational opportunities. We talked to friends who had done so and looked up doctors. But I decided against it.

These past few years, I’ve found a certain ease in my singular Mexican identity as I balance both the cultures I love. I enjoy warm tlacoyos for breakfast while listening to The Daily, bake peach pie on rainy Mexico City afternoons, and aloofly navigate the non-immigrant alien line at U.S. airports. While citizenship remains locked behind layers of bureaucracy and circumstance, biculturalism is something I continue to cultivate for myself. And this rich, complex blend of cultures is something I can pass on to my child, just as my dad did to me.

The post The Borders Between My Mexican and American Identities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The biggest elections in Mexican history will take place on June 2. Citizens will vote to fill more than 20,000 offices: electing a new president and governors from eight of our 32 states, filling the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies (the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives), and installing a new head of government for Mexico City and thousands of other communities.

If that sounds hectic, it’s because it is. In Mexico City, braving a month-long heatwave, literal tons of political propaganda litter the streets. Every free wall, pedestrian bridge, and lamp post has been overtaken by multicolor plastic signs and candidates’ smiling faces. Plastered one on top of the other, most end up crumbled, half ripped, or destroyed. Clara Brugada and Santiago Taboada, political rivals running for head of government in Mexico City, have denounced each other’s teams for taking down the propaganda. It gets put back up within days.

Despite the posters’ bright colors, these contests can only be described as gray—the opposite of exciting. Rather than being about the future, they’re stuck in the past.

In México, people often see the president as a villain. Things seemed different when the leftist Morena party leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador ran for the office in 2018. As Mexico City’s mayor from 2000 to 2005, López Obrador expanded the Periférico, the city’s biggest urban highway; renovated the city center; provided government pensions for citizens 70 and over; inaugurated the Metrobús system; and stood up to President Vicente Fox.

Despite a prominent bribery scandal, López Obrador positioned himself as an outsider, speaking often about fighting the Mexican power mafia, politicians and businessmen who acted against the true interests of Mexico. López Obrador lost in 2006—by a mere 0.56%—and again in 2012. During these years he traveled the country calling himself the “legitimate president” who had won the 2006 election. In 2018, he won a decisive victory, defeating his runner up by 31 percentage points, and becoming Mexico’s first “president of the people,” as he would put it. He launched a daily, two-to-three-hour 7:00 a.m. press conference called the “Mañanera,” in order to speak to his people. He opened the Mexican White House to the public as a museum.

Many Mexicans believed that perhaps this man would be the change the country needed, after enduring decades of corruption and scandal. On Sunday July 1, when López Obrador’s victory was announced, hundreds of thousands gathered in Mexico City’s Zócalo, or main square, in a moment of joy, hope, and catharsis. I went there with my mother; she was truly happy, because she had supported him for years and thought it would never be possible for him to win. That day, in front of the roaring crowd, López Obrador hugged himself as if he were hugging all of us and said, “I love you.”

López Obrador named his movement “La Cuarta Transformación,” or the Fourth Transformation, suggesting his presidency would mark a historic shift comparable to the Mexican Revolution of 1910—an era of “Primero los pobres,” where the poor come first.

Reality has failed to meet expectations. The president promised to combat elite private sector interests, but promoted a model of austerity and reduced public spending that erased dozens of government programs in favor of a model of direct monthly payments for some disadvantaged groups. These payments, made by bank transfer, have been denounced for irregularities, and for being used as a way to condition voting, and have only increased private sector power. Some 30 million Mexicans lost access to health care.

López Obrador leaned into divisive, authoritarian, populist rhetoric. He also instituted changes to the police and military that made Mexicans less safe. In many states today, including Michoacán, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato, organized crime factions force residents in mining, transport, or agriculture to pay a fee just to do their work. In the country there is a crisis of over 300,000 internally displaced persons that have relocated due to violence.

Almost six years have gone by, and López Obrador is facing the end of his term. Many people are pleased with the monthly payments; salaries have increased, too. For many Mexican voters, the president still represents a moral alternative over politicians from traditional parties. He was, they say, chosen by the people.

But for the rest of us, the mood is no longer joyful—just skeptical. These elections have involved a huge outpouring of resources. They have been loud. Cars drive through the streets with boomboxes announcing the names of the candidates. Politicians dress in the colors of their parties (phosphorescent orange from head to toe for the Movimiento Ciudadano party). It’s like being at a carnival—noisy, colorful, unserious—and on social media the frenzy is even more intense: You can see videos of candidates dancing and giving away Cheetos with their faces stamped on the packages.

The flashiness is not accidental. Money is the driving force behind these elections. It is the criterion for selecting local candidates, who pay a fee to run for office. It pours out to thousands of consultants to feed the endless publicity and influence votes. Organized crime money finances campaigns and buys candidates. The whole exercise feels like a marketplace, not a forum for ideas.

The day of the election may be a chaotic one. Already, electoral violence is at an all-time high, with more than 30 candidates murdered. Mexicans expect to see the same kinds of disruptions that occurred in the midterm elections of 2021, as well as confrontations between candidates when results are close.

There’s one change that’s certain: Mexico will have its first female president. Physicist Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate for Morena, has spent the past six years as mayor of Mexico City, and all polls suggest she’ll win. She is running against another woman, former Senator Xóchitl Gálvez, from the opposition PAN-PRI-PRD party, a conglomeration of former opponents whose uncomfortable marriage has the sole purpose of forming a unified front against Morena. Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s designated successor, has promised continuity: to defend the poor and represent the people, fight corruption, and uphold the principles of La Cuarta Transformación. But her promises are hard to believe. Sheinbaum’s government in Mexico City failed to show accountability for incidents of negligence like the collapse of a subway line in 2021 that resulted in the death of 27 passengers, reduced investment in public transportation, and failed to uphold promises to make a greener, less polluted city. She is also working within a divided, fractious party—and a movement so identified with one charismatic politician that many wonder if it can outlast its creator.

Xóchitl Gálvez, meanwhile, is inexperienced and little-known. Her candidacy reflects the traditional parties’ inability to produce strong opponents. It is as if none of the big names wanted to contend against Morena.

Idealists might say that these elections are a decision between two visions for Mexico’s future. In my mind, they are something less profound: a reaffirmation of a movement that prophesizes extraordinary morality while sadly copying previous governments’ vices. It feels as if today’s Mexican political system is run by the idea, rather than the reality, of electoral change. Through elections we can put a woman in power, an outsider in power, a different party in power; we can punish the ruling party, or the traditional parties.

Change alone is not hard. What is hard—extremely hard—is change that makes things better.

The elections are all people talk about here, but they feel like background noise to me. More competition does not necessarily translate into more democracy, or better democracy. It’s the scramble for power that truly drives Mexican politicians. Little can be said for the exercise of power itself, or if leaders care at all about what happens the day that follows the election.

The post Mexico’s Noisy, Colorful, Unserious Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the place where he came of age, a spacious ranch home his father acquired in 1993, on the outskirts of Winters, California, in the western Sacramento Valley.

In a nod to his Catholic upbringing, Junior crosses himself when he passes the town cemetery, where his father is buried. He bought the burial plot adjacent to his father’s, so that he can be as close to him as possible.

It’s easy to understand the devotion. Bermúdez, the “Tomato King,” who died of cancer in 2009 at just 58, willed himself from undocumented field worker and ranch hand to naturalized U.S. citizen; from successful farmer and labor contractor in California to pathbreaking congressman and migrant politician in Mexico.

In 2001, he made history by being elected mayor of his hometown of Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas, which has sent over half a million people to the U.S. over the last half century. Bérmudez is believed to be the first U.S. immigrant to win a mayoral election in Mexico. His first victory was overturned—because his primary residence was in the U.S.—but he won again in 2004 after his binational residency was established, then left that post to run for federal congress in Mexico City two years later. There, Bermúdez championed migrant causes, including allocating greater federal resources for the repatriation of paisanos who died in the U.S.

I am writing a biography of Bermúdez, and I am drawn equally to this complex and contradictory figure by his larger-than-life character—in his signature all-black cowboy ensemble—and by the unprecedented transnational movement he ignited. Bermúdez gave migrants a voice in the politics of their homeland. He also reproduced the strongman tendencies and political bossism he fought against, not to mention machismo.

He is both rule and exception: so much like millions of fellow Mexican migrants who anonymously toil in this country, but also remarkable for transcending strictures of citizenship and borders. Tracing his California path through rural swaths of the state is a reminder of how Bermúdez, and others, have made it their home while maintaining lifelong ties to their ancestral motherlands.

And so I take the 99 Highway to Porterville, where the Bermúdez clan’s U.S. trailblazers first arrived in the mid-20th century as part of the Bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of guest workers from Mexico to the fields of California. Fiddling with the radio dial, I’m as likely to hear conservative Christian propaganda as I am to stumble over country music or a Mexican station with Mixteco programming.

In Porterville, I meet a group of Bermúdez’s first cousins and contemporaries. Their aging bodies and visible ailments—strained backs, aching knees—are a testament to lifetimes of physically taxing work in the fields.

We sit in their back patio under a light drizzle and talk. Like any good transnational testimonio, the assembled elders start by honoring their elders, the patriarchs who first came to the U.S. They left rough upbringings in the scattered ranchos of the Zacatecas mountains, where they migrated seasonally between their native El Cargadero and Cueva Grande, tending drought-stricken land and famished dairy cows.

After stints in construction jobs in L.A., these pioneers eventually landed in the Central Valley. They worked the crop circuit up and down rural California, picking grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, strawberries, cherries, oranges, and olives. Labor contractors murdered workers for their paychecks. The migra launched raids that sent them scattering through orchards “like deer.”

When Bermúdez followed these forbears, arriving in town in his late teens in 1969, he did what the rest of the single migrants did, his cousins tell me: worked, drank, smoked, dated. You couldn’t tell, in Porterville, that his trajectory would be any different.

And so I head to Winters, a small town of just over 7,000, the place where Bermúdez’s path diverged from other young undocumented migrants’ stories. After his stint in Porterville, Bermúdez briefly returned to Mexico to marry and start a family. He then moved them to the U.S., choosing Winters for yearlong agricultural work—more appealing for a new father than following the crop circuit. A local white rancher named Tufts saw in Bermúdez a swift English learner and a hard worker, consistently the fastest picker on his crew. He invited Bermúdez and his young family out of the subsidized housing they lived in on the other side of town and into a trailer home on the ranch property.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the flow of migrant workers into California was plentiful, and Bermúdez, now bilingual, struck out on his own and began recruiting laborers for the U.S. Forest Service. By the 1990s, he returned to Winters a wealthy man and ventured into tomato growing—this time, as his own boss. He got involved in every stage of production, from sowing to transplanting, even innovating a technique that would earn him the “Tomato King” moniker, adapting agricultural machinery for a greater yield. He supplied Ragu, Morning Star, Del Monte, and Campbell’s.

In Winters, memories of the man in his “Tomato King” prime abound. Driving through the quaint town with Junior, he’s quick to point out McArthur Street, where his father bought his first property. Where he leased land to grow tomatoes. The exact spot where he got pulled over for driving under the influence, or where he broke out into a brawl. The Buckhorn, his favorite bar to rub elbows with the region’s white farmers. Rotary Park and the Winters Community Center where he hosted the Fiesta Mexicana and delivered impromptu speeches. The place where he threw epic parties for hundreds of his workers, many from his hometown of Jerez.

Most dream of a return. But Bermúdez actually managed to go back—and to take an unlikely and unprecedented leap into the Machiavellian world of Mexican politics. His critics will insist that Bermúdez was drawn by the allure of power; still, as a mayor and congress member, he battled the establishment by giving migrants a voice. “I am here to represent my people,” he once told me. He always told elite politicians that “to do away with migration, they need to have been migrants themselves. Nobody can do away with that which they have not felt.”

Death brought Bermúdez back, again, to the U.S. In the five years that I’ve been researching my book, I’ve grown close with the Bermúdez family; on another recent trip to Winters, I attended a rosary for Andrés Junior’s maternal grandmother, who died last year; Bermúdez jokingly called her his favorite suegra (mother-in-law) in an unabashed reference to his infidelity and cheating ways.

The family buried her just a few yards away from Bermúdez, where the entire nuclear family has plots. To paraphrase the migration scholar Osman Balkan, the interred bodies serve as anchors, investing the soil with political meaning for their relatives and survivors.

In death, as in life, Bermúdez has imbued this corner of California with his legacy—one that stretches to Zacatecas, and beyond.

The post In Search of the ‘Tomato King’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last year, while organizing a global democracy forum in Mexico, a member of that country’s national electoral court requested I add a speaker to our program: an American judge who was an expert in how elections work.

First, I contacted election lawyers, who told me they knew of no judges with such expertise. Then I called judges, eight leading U.S. jurists in all. Among this diverse group of judges were Republicans and Democrats, those who work at the state level and the federal level, in district courts and appellate courts.

Seven of the eight judges said they didn’t know of any U.S. judge who was an expert in elections either. They suggested that I instead invite a leading scholar of American election law—Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law.

The eighth judge suggested I try a friend and judge on the East Coast who had handled some election cases. When I called up this jurist, he replied: “I’m no election expert. But hey, aren’t you in L.A.? Don’t you know Rick Hasen?”

My search turned out to be an endorsement of the brilliant Professor Hasen, whose new book A Real Right to Vote is well worth your time. But it was more than that, too. It was a lesson in just how clueless American judges are about politics and elections.

To redress that problem, California and the U.S. should follow the lead of other countries in the Western hemisphere and establish a separate, specialized court system for handling all election-related cases.

A dedicated election tribunal would produce judges with the deep knowledge that is increasingly essential as politically polarized Americans contest elections more frequently in the courts. Indeed, one prominent law scholar—yep, Hasen—has documented that election litigation nearly tripled since the 1990s.

But, as my search showed, election law expertise is hard to come by. That’s partly because most judges went to law school when the issue was not such a big concern, and partly because judges, seeking to avoid politics, rarely come to understand it on the job.

This means, unfortunately, that American elections are shaped by a judiciary with little knowledge of, or feel for, electoral politics. And it is precisely why the 2024 election season is a mess.

You can see judicial cluelessness about elections at work in all four ongoing criminal cases against Donald Trump. The former president and his savvy team have made mincemeat of judges, attacking them to score points with the Republican base and outmaneuvering them to create so many delays that it’s unlikely any case will go to trial before the November election.

A specialized court for elections also could save the U.S. Supreme Court from itself. The court’s justices are losing credibility because of perceived political bias in their decisions and public appearances. Most recently, the court’s conservative majority all but endorsed Trump’s delay strategy by agreeing to hear the former president’s plainly phony claim that former presidents are “absolutely” immune from this country’s laws.

But the Supreme Court’s bigger problem is that it is a citadel of election ignorance. Not one justice has ever been elected to political office, much less administered an election. No justice has a strong scholarly background in election law. Unsurprisingly, then, in their decisions, the Court consistently misunderstands the basics of our political and electoral systems.

Take its recent decision overturning Colorado’s move to ban Trump from the ballot because of his actions to overturn the 2020 election by corruption and violence. The decision was unanimous but also egregious. The justices both misread the plain text of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from office and failed to understand basic democratic principles.

They took the bizarre, up-is-down position that states should not get to determine who gets to be on the ballot and serve as president—even though our entire electoral system is state-based. There are no national elections in this country; our presidential contests are really just 50 separate state elections.

It should frighten us that these nine democracy dimwits may well decide the outcome of a presidential election that promises to be close.

Many countries around the world have moved to redress this problem of judges’ lack of expertise and sophistication in contentious elections. Latin America, which has a long history of bitterly contested elections like the one we in the U.S. are experiencing now, has led the charge in trying to develop more judicial expertise and independence on election cases.

More than half of Latin American countries have established specialized electoral courts to handle election disputes. By now only three countries in the Americas—Argentina, Venezuela, and the U.S.—still give the decision-making power to their regular Supreme Court.

The electoral courts are not a panacea. Mexico’s has been dogged recently by internal conflict between its justices. But as Victor Hernández-Huerta, a Wake Forest University scholar of comparative and Latin American politics, writes in Election Law Journal, specialized courts develop expertise over time. And they have numerous benefits. Separate election courts can protect the reputation and independence of the regular court system by shielding it from the stains and strains of tackling controversial electoral questions.

Dedicated election judges also are accustomed to ruling quickly and efficiently under election time pressure, unlike the American judges in Trump’s cases, who keep delaying things to deal with unfamiliar questions.

Specialized electoral courts have produced particularly important successes when candidates or parties sought to overturn election results.

In Guatemala, in the face of threats of retaliation and prosecution, the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal intervened to keep Bernardo Arévalo, of the anti-corruption party Movimiento Semilla, on the 2023 presidential ballot when the ruling powers sought to disqualify him on dubious grounds. As a result, Arévalo won the election and managed to take office in January despite attempts at sabotage.

The Brazilian Electoral Court—a system that includes the national Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, along with regional electoral courts and boards—is widely considered the world’s best, because of its structural independence and its record. The court proved its mettle in 2022 when President Jair Bolsonaro made unfounded allegations of election fraud and sought to overturn the result. The electoral judges not only upheld the election but also held Bolsonaro accountable for “abuse of authority” by banning him from running for public office for eight years.

Last spring, I ended up taking all that judicial advice about Hasen and having him speak at the Mexico conference about how courts handle tricky questions of democracy. When I caught up with him recently, I asked whether he agreed with me that the U.S. needs its own separate electoral court. He said that I was “putting the cart before the horse.”

He pointed out that the countries with such courts also have national elections (unlike our state-based system) and national election administrative bodies. When I noted that the U.S. judicial branch does have special judges and courts on bankruptcy and immigration, Hasen pointed out that each of those areas has a federal body of law associated with it. That’s not yet true of elections.

“You’re asking me a graduate-level question,” he said of the idea of a specialized electoral court, “when we’re not even in kindergarten yet.”

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