With Chicago Tired of “Mayor 1%,” Chuy García Could Actually Win His Runoff with Rahm Emanuel

[marmar]

from In These TImes:


With Chicago Tired of “Mayor 1%,” Chuy García Could Actually Win His Runoff with Rahm Emanuel
While money poured into the recent mayoral and aldermanic elections, voters showed that they are tired of business as usual.

BY KARI LYDERSEN


“He’s like a helium balloon,” Marcos Muñoz told me last week, speaking about Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “He keeps rising and rising, and he doesn’t even know he’s popped.”

Muñoz was with Cesar Chavez in the Central Valley in California in 1965, part of a seminal labor movement demanding rights and respect for farmworkers. After a stint organizing for the United Farmworkers in Boston, where he met his wife, Muñoz settled four decades ago in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. That’s where he met Jesus “Chuy” García, a political activist with the vibrant, independent movement then pushing for immigrants rights, labor rights and basic services in black and Latino neighborhoods.

Muñoz described how he was skeptical of García at first, but was won over when García joined the grassroots brigade of locals who would sweep the alleys of trash and broken glass.

Last night García made history, forcing Emanuel into the Chicago’s first-ever mayoral election run-off by winning 34 percent of the vote to Emanuel’s 45 percent.

This moment can be seen as a victory not only for Cook County Commissioner García, a Mexican immigrant who still lives in Little Village, but for Muñoz and the countless other Chicagoans who make the city what it is through their hard work, their creativity, their very existence. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17685/chicago_election_runoff_chuy_rahm

[cyberswede]

1. It would be pretty cool of Garcia wins. nt