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In the years since HDO formed it has touched most of Chicago's most powerful Latinos on their way to power. Meanwhile Chicago is home to a federal Congress Latino super-majority, a gerrymandered district run by Luis Gutierrez that contains a mainly Puerto-Rican area on the Northwest side and a mainly Mexican one in the Southwest. That just means more resources and higher stakes, if not wider influence, for the Latino political set.
As HDO has grown, its influence broadened, it has diluted some from the old-fashioned neighborhood structures with their roots in waste management, produce imports, real estate and construction. But not so much as you might have imagined given the diversification of the Latino world in Chicago. HDO's people still mainly come through the police force, another city job, or the industries I named. Students of post-colonial theory may help us elucidate the problem HDO presents Chicago today, but I'd rather speak in plainer terms.
HDO is caught up by its own history, a poor crop of candidates, and its thuggish leadership, and it is no longer useful to Chicago politics, a point King Richard made very clearly when he appointed his long-time critic, Latino school-reformer Miguel Del Valle to the position of City Clerk instead of any of his HDO boys. This doesn't mean HDO is irrelevant though! They might not have the blessing of the king anymore but for many years they've kept the grass cut short enough in their wards that they can still contest elections on the backs of their financial and street operations.
Meanwhile, outside the walls of the city, the Latinos continue to come, mostly from Central America and primarily from Mexico. The two massive marches for immigration reform sent a loud if not so clear message. There are a million Mexicans in Chicago! ...and Chicago's city hall doesn't look much like L.A.'s. More and more immigrants are coming directly to the suburbs, because the city wards' housing stock is already pricing them out. But everybody knows, everybody who has ever been to a Chicago Latino neighborhood, that things have changed since HDO came to power. There is now a home-owning, legally permanent, ESL population, a massive of group of non-voting AND voting Mexicans. Maybe not yet the political sleeping giant people were talking about, but a very big teenager who doesn't know how intimidating it looks from the outside.
What I'm getting at is if you take the woes of HDO, the rise of the Independents (who are really just Del Valle and Rick Munoz), and the surge of the immigrant masses and you've got a new cocktail in the world of Chicago Latino politics.
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