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MEXICANS IN CHICAGO: A NEW KIND OF POLITICS

Influence on both sides of the border

Activists' political power is rising in Chicago and their homeland, as they seek reforms through marches and money

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By Antonio Olivo and Oscar Avila

Tribune staff reporters

April 6, 2007

To outsiders, the men and women gathered inside a sleepy West Side restaurant may have seemed unlikely power brokers: a janitor, a real estate agent and others hardly known outside their circuit of neighborhood dances and back-yard barbecues.

Jose Luis Gutierrez, who plotted strategy with the group as a soccer match flickered on a nearby TV, was himself a wholesale grocer until last year.

But Gutierrez is now a top aide to Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and he was joined at the table by leaders of Chicago-area Mexican immigrant clubs, the engines behind a new political movement that is making itself felt from Illinois to Michoacan.

Gutierrez received smiling nods when he likened the political muscle of the region's 563,000 Mexican immigrants to the power of Irish-Americans in the 19th and 20th Centuries, who came to control the Chicago machine.

In May, the strength of Mexicans will be on display when many of the region's 300 immigrant clubs -- known as "hometown associations" -- will help organize a march in downtown Chicago a year after their political coming-out party, demonstrations that flooded the Loop last spring and charged the national immigration debate.