Community activist and labor organizer announces independent bid for 25th Ward Aldermanic seat

Letters to Editors

“Solis has sold our communities out for too long,” says community activist Jorge Mújica in announcing independent campaign as socialist candidate in challenge to corporate darling incumbent.

CHICAGO, IL – 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 Mújica — an award-winning journalist and long-standing activist for labor and immigrant rights — against one of the city’s most powerful aldermen, the 25th Ward’s Danny Solis, who has drawn the ire of local residents for supporting school privatization, corporate pinstripe patronage and developer deals that are driving up rents and displacement in the heavily immigrant and working class ward.

Mújica, 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 as a counterweight to the 3th District incumbent’s refusal to take a firm line on basic human rights for immigrants, including those without documents.

Mújica emigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1987, working first as a journalist in Chicago at several Spanish language newspapers and at both Univision’s and Telemundo’s local Spanish-language TV outlets, winning two first place awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publishers for his work. In the last 15 years, he’s also worked extensively with labor unions in election campaigns, organizing efforts, pickets and strikes, and also belongs to a number of community organizations that address immigrant rights issues that range from remittances to the right to vote from abroad. He currently works as lead strategic campaigns organizer for Arise Chicago, a non-profit organization tackling systemic poverty and the needs of low-wage workers with the support of a broad coalition of faith-based and labor groups.

Mújica is also running this time not as an independent Democrat, but as an openly socialist candidate. And his campaign has won support from perhaps the nation’s most prominent independent 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.

Mújica’s campaign has launched a website that he and his supporters are fleshing out with information on core issues and his legislative agenda — which includes support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage in Chicago, opposition to public school privatization and neighborhood school closures, legislative steps to end wage theft for low and middle-income workers, and a policy of refusing to support development that drives displacement and undercuts affordable housing for the residents of the ward’s neighborhoods, which include Pilsen and parts of Chinatown, University Village, Little Italy, Tri-Taylor and the near west side.

Mújica’s campaign will accept no 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 projects willing to support a truly independent, openly Socialist candidate free of the shackles of a Democratic Party elite that routinely prioritizes profits for their politically connected donors over the daily needs of ordinary people.

“A growing number of Chicagoans live paycheck to paycheck in neighborhoods that are economically depressed, disenfranchised from city services, and polluted by fat cats like the Koch Brothers petcoke operation,” says Mújica. “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 labor, our skills, our ingenuity, and our 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.