The British had a name for what has become of Cicero. They called them “rotten boroughs,” or districts with so few voters that a small, well-organized faction dominated the political apparatus.
Parliament solved the rotten borough problem with the Reform Act of 1832, which reapportioned the English countryside according to population.
Chicago once had rotten boroughs called “plantation” wards. These were districts, during the ’50s and ’60s, in which longtime Democratic ward healers–guys like Jake Arvey and Ed Quigley–continued to run things long after whites had moved out and blacks had moved in.
Congress solved the plantation problem with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, among other things, requires that political boundaries be drawn so as to give minorities a better-than-even chance of electing their own.
Suburbia’s rotten boroughs, however, will not be so easily solved. In fact, the phenomenon is sure to spread across this and other metropolitan areas as large numbers of non-English speaking immigrants move into affordable, blue-collar suburbs like Cicero, Summit and Stone Park. This prompts whites to flee in the familiar re-segregation game. But over at village hall, the political old guard quickly discovers their positions are in no jeopardy. The new folks, it turns out, do not vote.
So the old guard stays, taking especially good care of the dwindling number of old-timers who do vote and who form their political base. As for the newcomers, well, they are not, shall we say, catered to. In the extreme case of Cicero, Mexican-American residents allegedly were being fleeced like sheep. Freelancing cops, perhaps with the knowledge of political higher-ups, allegedly shook down Hispanic motorists, sometimes extorting hundreds of dollars from undocumented non-citizens by threatening to alert federal immigration agents. A towing company with ties to Cicero Town Hall allegedly did a brisk business hooking cars in Hispanic neighborhoods–whether illegally parked or not–and by gouging the intimidated owners when they came to reclaim their vehicles.
This is not to say that Hispanics are being exploited in every one of the many west and south Cook County suburbs that now have a sizable Latino population, yet negligible Latino political representation. But wherever and whenever a large part of of the population does not participate in the political process, the stage is set for neglect, if not abuse.
The reasons behind Latino non-participation are many and complex. Non-citizens can’t vote, of course, and undocumented workers, for obvious reasons, want as little to do with U.S. officialdom as possible. Countries like Mexico, moreover, are not hotbeds of participatory democracy. There is a pervasive cynicism, carried here from the old country, that the powers-that-be will go on ruling, and ruling corruptly, no matter what the little people do.
“Traditionally,” observes Peter Skerry, an expert on minority politics with The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., “immigrants don’t come here to participate in the political process. They come here to work and to raise families.”
Once upon a time the great urban political machines reached out to immigrants, Skerry says, recruiting them with precinct captains, helping them apply for citizenship, registering them to vote. Now television commercials have replaced precinct captains and no one is knocking at the door.
So it is that Cicero, a suburb that will be two-thirds Hispanic by the 2000 census, has a Lithuanian-American town president (Betty Loren-Maltese) who was handed the job by her Italian-American husband, the town’s late Republican wheelhorse and crony of the previous mayor. So it is that, until five years ago, there were no Hispanic-Americans on the seven-member Cicero Town Board, and that the two now there were handpicked by Loren-Maltese.
It would be easy to be oh-so-politically-correct, and blame the problem of Hispanic powerlessness on the white establishment. And indeed, there’s no excuse for the three-year backlog of citizenship applications at Chicago’s federal courthouse or for the failure of towns like Cicero to reach out to Hispanic residents.
But at the risk of “blaming the victim” (a crime of which I surely will be accused) my take is that Hispanics and Hispanic leaders must take responsibility for much of this mess. It’s an inescapable fact that illegal immigrants, though they may be great workers, make lousy citizens. Yet many Hispanic leaders and their white liberal allies wink at the problem of illegal immigration as though it were no problem at all.
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As for becoming a citizen and registering to vote, what’s really stopping the majority of foreign-born Mexican-Americans in the Chicago area from becoming citizens? Long lines and waiting periods? Or a fundamental ambivalence about who they are and what they want to be?
(And what’s the rush, now that they’re teaching in Spanish at the public schools and carrying Telemundo on TV? Manana.)
The shabby treatment of Hispanic-Americans in Cicero–in all of America’s Ciceros–is a national disgrace. It’s a disgrace fed by white prejudice and exploitation. And by the unwillingness of too many Hispanics to become citizens and vote the bums out.