What Chicago needs is solidarity. Two-thirds of Chicagoans are people of color. That is a powerful number. There are those who don’t want Black and brown Chicagoans to live into that power.
Mayor Brandon Johnson ran on the message of collective abundance that could be available if Chicagoans can learn to love one another. Voters who believed that another way was possible showed up to affirm his belief that violence could be solved if every child in this city was invested in. Why invest in police academies if that money would be better served in making sure Black and brown children had fully funded and thriving schools? Why not introduce a minimal increase in the real estate transfer tax for the super-wealthy making billions of dollars on land deals that could be used to support services for unhoused people? Why not raise the wage of the most exploited workers as a part of a post-COVID-19 recovery plan for our city?
Johnson and his team are posing bold questions and solutions.
Let’s let Johnson lead. Today, that means let’s back up aldermen with a true vision and practice of solidarity. Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, who represents an aggressively gentrifying community where community group Palenque LSNA concentrates a lot of its organizing, has employed creative and bold strategies that give power to working-class and poor residents to determine our futures. He helped secure the Lucy Gonzalez Parsons Apartments, which are providing 100 affordable rental units in the heart of Logan Square where more than 20,000 Latinos have been displaced in recent years because of skyrocketing rents and property taxes.
Ramirez-Rosa centered community voices in planning La Placita, which will reorganize the Eagle Monument and CTA Blue Line station to look like Latin American town centers, so that the residents of the affordable housing buildings will feel at home in their new backyard. Residents and community organizations make decisions in his ward about budgets and zoning requests. The elected officials who benefit from Realtor lobbyists do not want someone like Ramirez-Rosa or other progressives to be citywide leaders — it will cost them billions of dollars.
Imagine the city’s Latino and Black caucuses coming together with the Department of Housing and the Department of Planning and Development to create a Black and brown housing agenda for Chicago that says public safety is a result of investing in people and their communities. The mayor’s new bond program is a revolutionary way to invest in communities beyond tax increment financing districts that left so many poor communities out of economic development. Let’s dream big! The mayor is the kind of leader who could lead on this vision. So is Ramirez-Rosa. Let’s let them lead.
The political actors who gain from land speculation, exploitative labor, and the weapons and surveillance industries want to keep power in the hands of the few. In order to keep all the power, they simply create confusion through misinformation, and our communities are poorer each time we turn against one another. Latinos did not cause Chicago’s housing segregation. Yet Latino homeowners have benefited from anti-Black real estate practices that depress housing values in the Black South and West sides while giving Latino homeowners the ability to sell and make big profits in the city’s gentrifying Southwest and Northwest sides.
Conversely, Black Americans did not orchestrate the economic sanctions that have forced migrants from South America to seek food and stability. Yet, Black Americans expressing anti-immigrant sentiments fuels nationalist conservative forces that would rather have us angry at each other than at sending our tax dollars to pay for militarized police forces in Chicago and Gaza. Let us move toward winning solutions for and with one another in solidarity.
These past few years have been hard on Chicago: The ongoing effects of COVID-19, the arrival of 40,000 migrants, and generations of economic and social segregation are all exposing converging crises. We are experiencing these crises because the old ways of competing and blaming victims leaves us all isolated and suffering.
In moments of crisis, it takes special leaders with a vision of collective winning to get communities to forge a new way ahead that leaves us all better and stronger.
Johnson has at least three more years to do something very different — cultivating solidarity as a healing salve.
Juliet de Jesus Alejandre has been the executive director of Palenque LSNA, formerly the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, since 2020. She is mama to three boys and grew up on Chicago’s Latino West Side, up and down Grand Avenue.
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