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19 The Reckoning C hicago was a city that so emphatically defined itself in black and white that it seemed absurd that its Latino population could dominate local politics as they did for a brief moment in early 1986. Before there was Council Wars, a suit had been filed in federal court charging that the city’s ward map discriminated against black and Latino voters. A judge agreed the map was discriminatory and ordered that special elections be held in seven of the city’s fifty wards. All seven were represented by allies of Vrdolyak. And like that it was possible that the council standoff might end. Actually, it was the second time a federal judge had reached the same conclusion . The city reconfigures its ward boundaries every ten years based on census data, and in 1982 a different judge had concluded that the new ward map drawn by the Byrne administration and approved by the City Council diluted the voting power of its black and Latino citizenry.1 The map was redrawn before the 1983 election, but a U.S. appellate court ruled, in 1984, that the initial judge’s remedy did not go far enough. “Supermajorities”—majorities of at least 65 percent—should be established, according to the court, to deal with past 1. The new ward lines had been drawn in such a way as to divide several Latino neighborhoods into two or three pieces so that, though one in every seven Chicagoans was Latino, according to the 1980 census on which the new map was based, no ward had a Latino majority. Under that same redistricting plan, the number of majority black wards fell from nineteen to seventeen, though the city’s black population had increased by a hundred thousand between 1970 and 1980. 222 Chapter 19­ discrimination. Three wards should be at least 65 percent black, and four at least 70 percent Latino. The other side immediately appealed. The question was who would pay for those appeals. The twenty-nine thought the city should foot the bill—after all, it was the city that was being accused of bias—and tried any number of gambits to pressure the Washington administration into doing so. The Vrdolyak side even threatened to pull its support from the $180 million infrastructure bond that the administration had fought so hard to champion. But the city had already spent an estimated $1 million fighting the case by the time Washington took office, and he wasn’t about to spend another dime of public money on the case. So Vrdolyak had the Cook County Democratic Party pick up the legal costs, until a clever gambit was used by the Washington side. The administration petitioned the court to allow its lawyer to take over the case—after all, they were the city, and as the Vrdolyakers had been arguing, the city was the defendant in the case. The judge agreed, and the city quickly dropped its appeal. A special election was ordered for March 1986, to run concurrently with a regularly scheduled primary. “A welcome development ,” Vrdolyak said of the judge’s decision, now that the aim was to impress the Latino voters who would decide his fate. Latino Chicago is concentrated in two communities that stretch along either side of the black west side. The city’s Mexican Americans tend to live in neighborhoods sandwiched between the west side and the city’s southwest side, and the city’s Puerto Ricans in communities between the west side and the northwest side. There are those who will tell you it is no coincidence that they live in a sort of buffer zone separating black from white. A Mexican American family might not be as desirable as a Ukrainian one, but they are not nearly as bad as a black one. There was a time when the big-city machine was a refuge for immigrant populations. Mayor Anton Cermak gave rise to the political machine that would come to bear the name Daley. Cermak, elected in 1931, had two years of formal schooling before going to work selling kindling from a horse-drawn cart. “Pushcart Tony,” Cermak was derisively dubbed by the Wasps who had dominated city politics until then. The ruling Wasps spoke paternalistically of protecting for their own good these beer-swilling urban ethnics who didn’t seem to know any better. “It’s true I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I came over as soon as I could...

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