Some 7 million Mexican citizens who live and work in the United States are not permitted to vote in their country's presidential elections. Courted by candidates for the money and influence they might exert, they nonetheless remain Mexico's most stubborn skeptics. PNS commentator Martin Espinoza reports from Acambaro, Mexico.

ACAMBARO, MEXICO -- It's 9:00 a.m. before the sun's morning rays finally reach over El Cerro del Toro (Bull Hill) to this small central Mexican town, Acambaro, where my parents were born.

Acambaro wakes up late and goes to sleep early. A candidate for mayor once promised that if elected he would have the hill removed so people would get up earlier, as they do in more developed places. But the town's stagnant economy has less to do with the sun than with Mexico's seemingly eternal economic crisis, a crisis that has forced millions to seek better paying jobs in the United States.

More than 7 million Mexican-born immigrants live in the United States -- 7 million economic fugitives who have separated themselves from home, friends and family. The bitter realities they have faced -- before and after leaving -- have in many ways hardened them to the promises of politicians. Immigrants regard the recent promise of a new democratic era in Mexico with a great deal of skepticism.

Opposition candidates in this year's presidential elections are hoping to channel that skepticism. They are trying to pressure those north of the border to influence the way family members south of the border vote in the July 2 elections -- expected to be the most competitive in Mexico's history.

Center-left candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and center-right candidate Vicente Fox Quesada have both campaigned in places such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Salinas and Fresno. Whether they can rally enough support from immigrants to make a difference remains to be seen.

My family left Acambaro and settled in Sacramento in California's Central Valley 37 years ago. There my mother nurtured three generations of U.S.-born children, becoming a great grandmother while still in her 60s.

With each newborn Bobbie or Stevie, my family becomes more firmly grounded in American soil, and every year its connection to Acambaro is slightly eroded. Future generations may in some way identify with Mexico but nothing will ever make them go back.

My brother-in-law Juan Nuoez, born in a small town not far from Acambaro, would very much like to vote in the Mexican elections from the U.S. -- though his enthusiasm is tempered by his certainty that there will be electoral fraud. My oldest sister Laura, born in Acambaro but now living near Brownsville, Texas, believes the elections are important only because they could affect the family still in Mexico.

Lourdes Borofsky was born in Mexico and left Acambaro after her husband died in the mid 1980s. She moved to Canada and later married a Canadian of Jewish-Russian origin. She does administrative work for the provincial government.

"The elections," says Borofsky, now in her late 50s, "continue to be the biggest six-year farce, joke, and mockery in Mexico. I ask myself how is it that Mexicans keep going to vote."

She would never contribute to anyone's campaign. "It would be stupid, especially knowing that there is such great need among Mexico's poor, which appear to be growing in number every day."

Borofsky's youngest daughter Andrea Cecilia Ibarra -- who left Mexico after her mother did and is now a bilingual school teacher in Salinas, California -- shares her mother's skepticism, but is slightly more hopeful about the future.

"Here in Salinas," says Ibarra, "you hear new information every day about July 2 (election day) on the news, both local and U.S. Hispanic news, on the radio and from other people. And people are talking about the elections." Her fiancee's family is "going down to Mexico for the summer and they want to make sure they get there in time to vote."

"If I could," adds Ibarra, "I would definitely vote from over here. I'm not sure for which, because it is such a fake event -- but I'd vote anyway."

For many immigrants -- who've gone from being exploited at home for 30¢ an hour to being exploited in the United States for $5 an hour -- democratic elections are a sort of vague intellectual luxury.

"I'm 39 years old and I never voted in a Mexican election when I lived there," says Rogelio Reyes, who lives in a room in San Francisco's Mission District. "Here in San Francisco, the only thing that concerns me is whether my boss pays me. Sometimes he pays, sometimes he doesn't. I have four children in Guanajuato, and I haven't seen them in a year."

He thinks the presidential candidates "are a bunch of thieves. When Vicente Fox was governor of my state, we were all trying to get to the U.S."

Undocumented immigrants in the Mission District like Reyes are primarily concerned with "jobs, housing, immigrant rights, and now the recent shootings of undocumented Mexicanos in Arizona by reactionary racists," says housing activist Richard Marquez.

Juan Perez left Acambaro about 10 years ago and now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though Perez first left Mexico because he wanted to "explore other horizons," he now considers himself an economic fugitive.

"For the sake of improving our economic status," says Perez, "we become incredibly disciplined, submissive. People work hard, and sometimes the eagerness to earn more money distracts us from the problems that affect us as a minority group."

Mexico's migrant population is quite possibly the country's largest dissident group. Their exile is in many cases due to extreme economic realities, realities that make the current promise of a new democratic era in Mexico as hard to swallow as the possibility of moving mountains.