A Perfect Storm
Chapter 3
Three Magic Words: Independent, Political, and Organized
A Personal History of the 12th Ward IPO
Was it a crazy dream? I arrived a short time before the Candidates Forum was to begin. No mad scramble with the final checklist being drawn up with five minutes to spare. Our members helping each other to set up chairs and tables in the Centro Cultural Zacatecano. For once, no stress.
And it wasn’t just the usual suspects. Sometimes a large hall feels like a shoebox with a few marbles rolling around inside. Not today. Our 12th ward Independent Political Organization was hosting a coming out party, an open forum to decide on candidates for the 2106 primary. High schoolers took on roles as time keepers, photographers, and question readers.
Chris was arranging the pan dulces. Bernardo and Rogelio were patrolling as inconspicuous bouncers. The guys from Club Zacatecano nodded approvingly. Memo Magdaleño, a last minute replacement for Commissioner Garcia as moderator, tested the mic. Hilda Carbajal cribbed notes on her welcome statement. Paco Chaidez set up his translation shop in one corner.
Theresa Mah and stand-ins for Bernie Sanders and Kim Foxx worked the crowd. Javier Salas was out on the corner wearing a sandwich sign about his candidacy. Emma Lozano came strolling in with a smile and a few other Luis Gutierrez supporters. Down ballot judicial candidates were lobbying by the coat room.
Following presentations by candidates and surrogates, our group caucused to vote on our slate. It was a remarkable discussion, a striving for consensus free of bickering. The most gratifying aspect was the participation of the new generation. I felt a grandfatherly affection for the high school students from Kelly. We emerged with what turned out to be a winning, upset slate for the ward: Sanders, Foxx, and Mah.
What is the soil from which a new wave of independence has begun to grow? On one level we are jaded old timers, aggressive middle timers, and enthusiastic young volunteers. Some of us trace our roots to the labor and political struggles from the 70s and 80s. Others came up in social justice causes colored by liberation theology, neighborhood organizing, immigrant rights, fair treatment for our at risk youth. In our events, mural artists mingle with union stewards; stalwarts for the Ayotzinapa 43 discuss environmental policy with U of C math grads; striking teachers commiserate with mothers who fear for their kids.
We have one thing in common: we can count on each other even when the chill winds blow. I can remember each picket line, each victory party, each election training where I first met the members of our IPO crew. I met Bernardo when dropping of sandwiches at the Ward Yards voting location in 2010, Miguel when he commented on my Chuy button in a Verizon store. A bunch of them started showing up a Pete DeMay campaign meetings. We don’t prioritize those who talk but don’t act. Ours is a fraternity of affection and cooperation, laughs and hugs not stilted handshakes and suspicious glances.
For me, it started seven years ago. Then I realized that our neighborhood had no politicians who would back us. At that time, a son of our neighborhood was on trial for the crime of self-defense. He was a best friend with my two boys. His crew of hip hop graffiti artists held him in their hearts. At backyard meetings of his defense committee, I was transported back to my activism of 40 years ago. The solidarity of these kids who had scuffed their knees on the Hoyne Park diamond was a reminder of the togetherness that I had seen in the labor skirmishes of the ‘70s.
Please don’t say that the past is an irrelevant, dusty attic. Scrapes and bruises from earlier times inform us now, set the stage. The comeback campaign of Chuy Garcia as county commissioner was our chance to get some revenge from an old defeat. I’d been salted away in corporate computer jobs for 25 years. I’d been away from organizing, trying to make amends for not being a good family man in my twenties and thirties. A lot of my old movement friends had successfully embedded themselves in union or other socially useful jobs. Meanwhile, I was writing computer programs in cubicles. I used to say how jealous I was of my brother, “He can make one phone call and have 40 union members on any given corner the following morning.”
Chuy’s candidacy recalled the same hope I had felt when I helped in his committeeman race in the early ‘80s. On Chuy’s slate was Rudy Lozano Junior. His first bid for state representative was similarly meaningful. More than symbolically the martyr’s blood ran in young Rudy’s veins.
In that race we garnered a split decision. Chuy rallied troops and voters. His smile was still a strong card; his reputation, sterling. We painted Joseph Mario Moreno as a “bribes for bandages” hack who conspired to defraud Cook County Hospital. As the incumbent, he turned out to be crack in the façade of the Daley-orchestrated Hispanic Democratic Organization.
The Rudy Junior’s narrow defeat by Ed Burke’s brother, Dan, revealed that we had not yet consolidated our influence in a district dominated by the 14th ward. The Garcia/Lozano effort and subsequent campaigns represented a push by Latino progressives to regain territory which had been lost in the “Hispanicization” of the Southwest Regular Democratic machine.
In 2011 new cadres regrouped in the aldermanic campaign for Jesse Iniguez. In 2012 we tried again to put Rudy in Springfield. By 2014 the battle had shifted to Pete DeMay’s challenge of George Cardenas for 12th ward alderman. With each fight we were able to make ties, to add to our ranks more serious campaigners. In Rudy’s campaign, we held meetings on a regular basis. The most tireless campaigner and petition gatherer was Pete Mendoza. Pete learned his organizing from John Velazquez and Rudy the father. He sharpened his skills as a long time chief steward and precinct captain.
The other Pete was DeMay, our candidate for alderman in 2014. He came seemingly out or nowhere with years of experience organizing hotel workers in Puerto Rico and autoworkers in Tennessee and Mexico. Creative, combative, and hardworking, he inspired a campaign that showed great promise until it was derailed by legal tricks from the incumbent.
Dozens of other 12th warders have these kinds of expectations. We have dreamers, advocates for separated families, youth organizers. Each 12th ward neighborhood school has activist mothers who feel the decline in educational quality as dollars go elsewhere. The twelfth ward is home to a surprising number of leaders of the Teacher’s union and union activists in manufacturing and service. Some are progressives priced out of the north side; some have participated directly in the renewed resistance in Mexico.
But on a deeper level, the hope comes from the laborers and commuters, clock punchers and gear shifters, the moms and dads. The common people are seeing dreams fade from technicolor to a dull gray. They, as a group, are the ones learning lessons. As organizers, we have to bend down close to listen to something that I call “community wisdom”. Each election, each implementation of austerity, each abuse produces resistance – from grumbles at the checkout line and clashes with landlords to large scale marches by the Kelly High student body. Each failure of organized resistance, each victory, no matter how small, produces germs of a new understanding.
Complexity rules. We are up against the classic pattern. Society’s regulators are forever responding to the ever changing needs of the super rich.. The competitive system produces a constantly shifting terrain for the opposition. Anybody who has lost a job in the great industrial runaway movement, anyone who has been escorted out of the building when their skills or salaries don’t match the corporate requirement, anyone who must adjust to maddening accountability paperwork, all these have personally felt the disorientation. In the political realm, the social regulators settle on crazily shaped ward boundaries to pack, stack, and crack natural unities.
In response, we, the opposition, have to constantly adjust. Before the IPO, we were promoting the McKinley Park Progressive Alliance. As ward and district elections loomed, wider geographies seemed to be more relevant. The 12th ward includes, in addition to McKinley, sections of Brighton Park and the Marshall Square part of Little Village. The MPPA still exists on paper, but we seem to be reaching a bigger audience with the IPO while accomplishing much the same. We hope to resurrect a more locally focused McKinley effort as soon as possible.
To our credit, the MPPA was a Paul Revere alerting the McKinley community to the proliferation of charter schools. Our earliest focus was the intrusion of the Gulen Movement, a secretive charter network based in, of all places, in Istanbul. We risked being attacked of Islamophobia, but stuck to our guns with presentations showing unmistakable patterns of corruption. We riled people up best when we exposed multiple fraudulent H1-B hirings of Turkish teachers at a time when our own sons and daughters are losing jobs at the public schools.
We credit advice from Alvaro Obregon with giving us a completely different footprint in the community. “Run as community reps for Local School Councils”, he urged. I was a bit late to the strategy, already my closest political ally, Jose Hernandez, was embedded in a couple of school councils. Theresa Mah had been voted in with him on a slate at Kelly High. Jose had close ties at several other schools and was instrumental in winning construction of the Calmeca Dual Language Academy on the western edge of the ward.
When I got onto the council at Everett Elementary, I found myself immersed in a layer in the community that I had little prior knowledge of. I was pleasantly surprised at the sisterhood that existed among the Everett mothers. Soon I was volunteering as an English as a Second Language teacher in the parent’s room. It became a time to learn and at the same time teach. With an Irregular schedule of workshops we brought in outside speakers on topics from citizenship to health care and school funding.
What was the deepest significance of Alvaro’s advice? Three points: 1) the crisis in public funding of education is acute in our neighborhood and it is a citywide issue, 2) those most affected on the Southwest Side are immigrant parents and their children, 3) being immersed allows for the best construction of resistance plans. What a windfall! Now we had consistent access to people most directly affected by one of the system’s austere reorganizations.
The key point has to do with the relation of organizers to the population in need. Without concentrating ideas coming from average people, it is impossible to decide on which plans have a chance.
The McKinley Schools Showcase captured the spirit nicely. We gave voice to six school communities at a time when their achievements are being depreciated to justify cuts and marginalization.
Is defense of public education an exclusive a model for IPO success? No. There are numerous ways to connect locally. We would like each of our members to consciously create a relationship with people, whether in a neighborhood, a community garden, a family network, a home town federation, a union, a school council, a church, or a precinct. In these networks, we find not only votes, but more importantly, sources of human love, cooperation and knowledge.
Our choice as a ward level organization follows on the success of Little Village’s 22nd Ward IPO. For several years, some of us had unrealistically waited in hopes that their organization would reach out and colonize us. In fact, they had provided organization and example in many ways. How can we forget two forays by Rudy’s campaigners into the heart of the 14th ward in his runs for the legislature? The Little Village multi-generational cadres provided the experience for any campaign that involved Chuy or Rudy. They did timely educational events. And they were the backbone of 22nd ward service through the alderman’s office. Many moved on to human service in the non profit sector.
The reality for us, though, was that, if we wanted to have an Independent political organization, we had to do it ourselves. There are no saviors, no big network that understands our reality like we do. We aspire to be a democratic organization growing like wild flowers and leafy vegetation from the grassroots.
On December 16th, 2015, with a feeling of collective liberation, a scruffy cohort of activists raised their hands in unanimous approval for our 12th ward IPO bylaws and hallmarks. Hard won lessons won’t be lost on us. It is not a question of tricking our way to power. As we grow we hope to guide something much stronger that our small group. Like the Senator from Vermont says, “A political revolution is on the rise.”