NWA’s Hispanic numbers help land Mexican consulate office
Posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Business_Matters/169828/
The final selection of Little Rock for the regional Mexican Consulate was decided by the huge population of Hispanics in Northwest Arkansas, said Robert P. Trevino, Gov. Mike Huckabee’s policy adviser on Hispanic affairs.
“The Mexican government tracks its migrant population in the [United States ] carefully. They saw the population was following jobs to the fast-growing regions like Northwest Arkansas,” Trevino said.
Ultimately, the Mexican government decided that locating the consulate in Nashville, Tenn., or Memphis would not benefit the Northwest Arkansas Hispanic population any better than the Dallas consulate currently does, Trevino said. They would still have to travel a long way to conduct their business. A Little Rock consulate would be a large improvement for that important population, he said.
Officials hope the process begun when Huckabee visited with Mexican President Vicente Fox in Mexico City nearly four years ago will come to fruition by December.
Sometime that month, Mexican Consul-General Andres Imre Chao Ebergenyi plans to open the doors to the Mexican Consulate in Little Rock.
“When Gov. Huckabee visited, they talked about the possibility of a consulate in Little Rock. After he left, the government began working on it,” Chao said. Volumes of paperwork and many steps had to be completed before the consulate could be established, he said.
“Finally we are here,” Chao said in an Oct. 4 interview. A temporary office is in Arkansas Rehabilitation Services’ space on Corporate Hill Drive while the logistics are being worked out for the permanent building at 3500 S. University Ave. An old medical office will be converted into the consulate’s offices.
Chao hopes to begin remodeling the space immediately. Everything should be completed by December, he said.
Once the permanent office opens, Chao and the three-member staff will begin the regular work of issuing passports and other important documents for Mexican nationals in the area served by the consulate. It will be the 47 th Mexican Consulate in the United States, and will serve the mid-South, mainly Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Chao will also assume his role as the go-between for businesses in Mexico and the United States.
The consulate will either be the last to be opened during the Fox administration or the first opened in the administration of presidentelect Felipe Calderon’s administration, who takes office Dec. 1.
The state and the Mexican government are working hard to open the consulate during Fox’s administration, Trevino said.
Securing the consulate in Arkansas, rather than allowing it to go to Tennessee was important, Trevino said.
“Gov. Huckabee realized early on that states with Mexican consulates have done very well tradewise with Mexico. We did research and talked with the officials, we saw right away that we needed to be in play for the consulate,” he said.
The consulate office itself will be a business draw to Little Rock as people come to conduct their affairs with the Mexican government, Trevino said. They will stay in Little Rock hotels, eat in local restaurants and get a chance to see the city and part of the state they might not have visited without the consulate’s presence.
In 2004, Mexico’s then-consul general in Dallas, Carlos Garcia de Alba, announced the plan to build the consulate in Arkansas. Huckabee stood beside him when he made the announcement at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. Huckabee said he actively sought a Mexican consulate for Arkansas, and its arrival would open up opportunities for Arkansas businesses.
De Alba spoke at the Embassy Suites hotel in Rogers in September 2005 as part of a roundtable discussion of executives and government representatives arranged by Winrock International.
The topics were market opportunities and migration trends of Hispanics affecting business in Arkansas. De Alba was asked to address the role of the Mexican Consulate.
One of the more important services provided by Mexican consulates is to recruit and encourage investment by Mexican businesses and corporations in the United States, de Alba said.
“The U. S. government needs to be more aggressive in recruiting Mexican business investment,” he said.
Mobile consulates allow immigrants to use birth certificates and other documents from home to get passports or consular identification cards from their countries. The governments issue the documents regardless of whether the person entered the United States legally or not.
Mobile consulates typically are advertised in Spanish-language media, are held in churches or restaurants, and last a day. The country’s representative could issue documents from Mexico and register births and marriages.
In Rogers, for instance, 500 to 1, 000 people may show up at a one-day program, Eduardo Rea, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Dallas, told The Associated Press in April.
“Rogers is like the big league for the Mexican population in Arkansas,” Chao said. “That community is very important and very strong.”