Last Labor Day, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia spent four hours at Karen Lewis’s house, discussing her plan to run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Garcia, 58, is a Cook County Board commissioner and a former alderman and state senator; Lewis, 61, is the fiery president of the Chicago Teachers Union. He’s Mexican-American; she’s African-American and Jewish. “We were strategizing her victory path,” Garcia told me recently. “We talked plenty about conditions in the Latino community.”
“Why me?” he asked her.
Jesus and Evelyn are residents of Little Village, a low-income Latino community on the southwest side. “I have my complaints about daily life in the neighborhood,” Garcia said earlier this month. We were in the dining room of the modest three-bedroom home on 25th Place he and Evelyn bought 24 years ago. “Having to pick up people’s dog poop and beer bottles in front of my house. Noise on 26th Street in the summer—loud music, screeching tires, people yelling, kids acting up.
If his candidacy has caught fire, however, it’s not evident from the campaign contributions he’s received. Aside from a couple of big checks from labor groups, the money has dribbled in. He’s collected $902,000, compared with $11.2 million for Emanuel. But then, most of the voters he’s targeting haven’t got much to spare—certainly not compared with the investment bankers and real estate developers who keep fattening Emanuel’s reelection fund. (Among the other three contenders, businessman Willie Wilson has raised the most—$1.4 million—but all except $5,000 of that was from himself. Alderman Bob Fioretti has raised $455,000, and onetime mayoral aide Bill “Dock” Walls has raised $30,000.)
Simpson said he supports Garcia because he believes he’s “deeply committed to the neighborhoods and to empowering people.” But he acknowledged a shortcoming Garcia has as a candidate: “He doesn’t have the habit of easily crystallizing things. He’s thoughtful, and that tends to slow down his response.” In the debates, “he could come off as brilliant, or as someone who hasn’t yet formulated his positions.”
Garcia’s road to a big-city political career began in a small village in Mexico. He was born in Los Pinos, a village on the edge of a river near the Sierra Madre, in Durango. It had 200 inhabitants at most when he was a child; everyone was acquainted, and many were related. They gathered often for holiday celebrations and fiestas. Garcia’s home was in the center of town; the church and school were across the street, so “everything that happened was right in front of my house.”
