Transgender recall vote lays bare U.S. battle between progressives and conservatives

Thousands of people voted to elect Raul Urena to Calexico council, hoping the young politician would bring a fresh approach to the California border city's long-standing problems with unemployment, crime and deprivation.

But when Urena started pushing ideas popular with progressives across the United States, some voters changed their minds.

The fact that Urena also took to wearing a dress and high heels to council meetings left some of them feeling duped.

Urena, who uses she/her pronouns, sees transphobia in an effort to recall her in a referendum on Tuesday.

But her opponents say it is about ideas and what they say is progressivism's tendency to push the wrong issues.

"I voted for him because he is a young man who seems to have good ideas for my city. It would be a good change," says Angela Moreno, a 62-year-old retiree.

"But when I started to pay attention to what he was doing, his ideas, his beliefs, what was important to him... I wasn't in that plan."

Her city doesn't need electric car chargers or greater tolerance for drug users, says Moreno.

"I didn't vote for that."

- Culture wars -

Calexico is a town divided.

Call it the generation gap; call it the culture wars; or call it two populations shouting past each other, it's a story that echoes throughout a nation gearing up for November's face-off between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

On the one side are those who yearn for an America they see disappearing; on the other are those who want something different and don't mourn a place they feel has never worked for them.

Like other rural cities, Calexico's economy has stuttered in recent years.

Unemployment is high in a place where pandemic-era border closures stymied trade. Its population is overwhelmingly Latino, Catholic and older, voting Democratic in the main, but very much on the conservative wing of the party.

Young people see scant opportunity and tend to leave when they get the chance. Few come back.

Urena did.

After studying economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Urena, now 26, moved home in 2020.

She was thrust straight into city politics, standing for a vacancy created when a council member was turfed out amid allegations of corruption.

In 2022, she was reelected for a full four-year term.

Although she insists her gender fluidity was never a secret, it wasn't until after reelection that she began wearing dresses and heels on public business.

"People have been making fun of my gender identity since 2020," said the politician.

Then last year, after assuming the mayor's office -- the position is rotated annually among the council's five members -- she learned of a recall referendum campaign, a plan she says is being masterminded by defeated opponents.

"They're essentially leading a recall effort in response to having lost the last couple of elections," Urena tells AFP.

"They are trying to unseat the progressive movement in Calexico."

- 'Deceived people' -

Former Calexico mayor Alex Perrone says people object primarily to Urena's lack of experience and divisiveness.

"I hold very truly to our constitutional rights... and he's taking that away from us," he says.

"If you go to a council meeting, and you say something contrary to his beliefs, to his agenda, you're his enemy."

But, he adds, some also feel cheated by Urena's public transition.

"When he campaigned, he wore nice little pants and a button-up shirt. After he got elected he started wearing a dress," Perrone tells AFP.

"He deceived people. They thought they were voting for one person, but they were voting for another."

Still, the campaign insists Urena's gender identity is not the actual point.

"This recall will not focus on the lives of anyone due to personal and sexual choices," reads its Facebook post.

"Although all comments are welcome, please refrain from this line of discussion."

Even so, there is a very personalized tension in the air, with dueling yard signs urging residents to vote for or against the recall, and vicious comments at public meetings.

Urena's fellow progressive council member Gilberto Manzanarez, who is also the target of a recall, frets divisions are paralyzing the city, affecting even uncontroversial acts like filling a vacancy for police chief.

"It wasn't even a unanimous vote," he says.

"That tells me that this council is just as divided and just as fractured as the community right now."