Bob Sabonjian will be New York Times tomorrow

[fedupinwaukegan]

i have heard some people feel this is being spun as only a latino victory. please remember that that is the way the media is selling it. EVERYONE involved in the campaign knows how hard EVERYONE worked.

I have seen the same. Many outside sources have been claiming this as exactly that -a Latino victory and statement against anti-immigrant programs. I'm getting them in my 'Waukegan google alert.' I'm going to start depositing them here so we can keep record about what they say about us.

There was a caller on WKRS that said it well. Kate. They are trying to divide us, make it an us and them victory.

So stay tuned to hear what others have said about us. But soon they'll go away and we can get down to business.

The South Chicagoan
From Guanajuato and Jalisco to Chicago and beyond

Friday, April 10, 2009
Illinois town could be a sign of the future

For decades, the town of Waukegan, Ill., liked to boast that it was the birthplace of the famed comedian Jack Benny.

While the town isn’t ashamed of being the home of the radio and television comedian, there is evidence that it has a new reason to boast – the fact that its residents showed an ability this week to look toward the future, rather than dwell on the past.

IN ELECTIONS HELD Tuesday, Waukegan residents voted for a new mayor. Now the fact that they voted out of office the incumbent is not, in and of itself, unusual. Every election sees some government officials who fail to hang onto their offices because they don’t grasp the conditions of their surroundings.

But in the case of Waukegan, it was the fact that the soon-to-be-former mayor was insistent on pandering to those people in his town near the Illinois/Wisconsin border on the issue of immigration that wound up coming back to bite him in the nalgas.

Richard Hyde always took pride in implementing regulations in his town that solidly put him on the side of the nativists when it came to the immigration issue. One policy of his that particularly offended the growing Latino population in that area was the granting to local police the ability to arrest people solely on suspicion of immigration law violations.

Those are federal laws, and the federal government has a special agency (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) whose duty is to enforce them. Local cops who might very well be capable of handling the radar gun to determine whether someone is exceeding the speed limit or figuring out if that teenage kid is trying to hide a baggie of marijuana are not going to know the nuances of immigration.

I ALSO AM aware that had federal authorities tried to come into Waukegan and enforce local laws, Hyde and his political allies would have been the first people to scream about a government gone mad – overstepping its bounds into an area that ought to be none of its concern.

That same logic applies to any local government that thinks it ought to be playing “immigration officer” with its local cops.

This was all about creating the image for the Anglos that the police would protect “them” from this growing foreign hoard. And if it served to put people whose sense of their immigrant self (even if born in the U.S., some people have a strong sense of where their families come from) in an uneasy state of mind that they might leave the area, that was a side benefit – as far as the old mayor was concerned.

Hyde told the New York Times this week that all he did during his time as mayor was “listened” to what his local residents (or at least the residents who were inclined to agree with him) said.

BUT HYDE WILL soon be gone, replaced by a new mayor who says he plans to drop a lot of the restrictions whose purpose was to make the growing Latino population (which in Waukegan is what comprises much of the immigrant element) feel unwelcome.

It could be that the growing Latino population finally built itself up into a large enough element to start voting for its interests. If so, then this is going to be the pattern that will be seen over and over in communities across the United States.

Places are going to find these newcomers are strong enough to stand up for themselves, and that it would be best to work with them – rather than try to postpone what is truly the inevitable.

But in the case of Waukegan, there also was a sense that a sizable number of non-Latino people saw the absurdity of such ordinances and how they did nothing more than give their hometown a black eye. Getting rid of such ridiculous attempts to keep the community dwelling in the past is the way to move forward into the 21st Century.

ACTIVISTS WHO WERE organizing people to oppose the hostile immigrant measures estimate that about 31 percent of the people who voted earlier this week in Waukegan were Latino. By comparison, about half of Waukegan’s 91,000 residents have their ethnic roots in a Latin American nation.

It means Waukegan isn’t at the point yet where the Latino population can elect “one of its own,” although activists in the community say that is their long-term goal.

And when the day comes that Waukegan gets its Latino mayor, there’s a good chance that Jack Benny will still be thought of fondly in the town. Not everything from the past was bad, not even his perpetual jokes about being a mere “39 year old.”

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