The Chicago Socialist Campaign, a collaborative effort by activists and socialists from many movements and organisations in the city, has announced the candidacy of one of Chicago’s most well-known and respected community activists for city council.
Jorge Mujica, an award-winning journalist and long-standing labour and immigrant rights activist, will challenge one of Chicago’s most politically connected and unaccountable aldermen for a city council seat.
The campaign is directly challenging the Democratic Party political machine by running Mujica as an openly socialist candidate. Below is the May 1 statement announcing Mujica's campaign. Visit his campaign website for more information
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One of Chicago’s most well-known and respected community activists is challenging one of Chicago’s most politically connected and unaccountable aldermen for a seat on the city council.
The race pits Jorge Mujica ― an award-winning journalist and long-standing activist for labour and immigrant rights ― against one of the city’s most powerful aldermen, the 25th Ward’s Danny Solis.
Solis has drawn the ire of local residents for supporting school privatisation, corporate pinstripe patronage and developer deals that are driving up rents and displacement in the heavily immigrant and working class ward.
Mujica, who is fluent in both English and Spanish, was one of three core conveners of Chicago’s historic immigrant rights marches in 2006, which put an estimated 1 million people on the streets to call for humane, fair immigration reform. He ran for the US Congress in 2009, representing the immigration movement in the electoral arena to counter the Third District incumbent’s refusal to take a firm line on basic human rights for immigrants, including those without documents.
Mujica emigrated to the US from Mexico in 1987. He worked first as a journalist in Chicago at several Spanish-language newspapers and at both Univision’s and Telemundo’s local Spanish-language TV outlets. He won two first place awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publishers for his work.
In the past 15 years, he has also worked extensively with labour unions in election campaigns, organising efforts, pickets and strikes. He also belongs to several community groups that address immigrant rights issues, ranging from remittances to the right to vote from abroad.
He works as lead strategic campaigns organiser for Arise Chicago, a non-profit group tackling systemic poverty and the needs of low-wage workers with the support of a broad coalition of faith-based and labour groups.
This time, Mujica is not running as an independent Democrat, but as an openly socialist candidate. His campaign has won support from perhaps the nation’s most prominent socialist elected official, Kshama Sawant, who recently won a seat on Seattle’s city council as a socialist in a campaign that drew national attention ― and support.
Mujica’s campaign has launched a website that he and his supporters are fleshing out with information on core issues and his legislative agenda. This includes support for a US$15-an-hour minimum wage in Chicago, opposition to public school privatisation and neighbourhood school closures, legislative steps to end wage theft for low- and middle-income workers and a policy to oppose development that drives displacement and undercuts affordable housing for the residents of the ward’s neighbourhoods.
Muica’s campaign will not accept funding from corporations, developers or Chicago’s political machine bosses.
Local residents have been working for months to pull together a coalition of community activists and grassroots groups willing to support a truly independent, openly socialist candidate, free of the shackles of a Democratic Party elite that routinely prioritises profits for their politically connected donors over the daily needs of ordinary people.
Mujica said: “A growing number of Chicagoans live pay cheque to pay cheque in neighbourhoods that are economically depressed, disenfranchised from city services and polluted by fat cats like the Koch Brothers petroleum coke operation.
“Republicans and Democrats alike are incapable of raising real solutions because both parties represent the interests at the root of the problem: corporate education profiteers, real estate developers and poverty-wage employers.
“We live in a working-class city. It is our labour, skills, ingenuity and pride that built this city, and that keep it running every day. Yet most of us are overworked and underpaid.
We face a real crisis ― not one of resources or possibilities, but of priorities. Until we create our own political voice, working people will remain locked out of political power, left to protest on the sidelines.
“We need to declare our independence by creating a real alternative to Democrats and Republicans: a socialist one, grounded in a commitment to put people before profits.
“Real change is never handed down by politicians. Real change is won by people standing together and building movements.”
Campaign supporters include education activists, immigrant rights activists, housing rights activists and local residents fed up with the incumbent’s dismissive approach to local community members’ wishes ― from the struggle to preserve Whittier School’s beloved La Casita Field House to local calls for more accountability from real estate developers.
