It’s been a lackluster primary season, with front-runners in both parties apparently headed toward victory. But a 32-year-old lawyer from Pilsen named Frank Avila has made it the occasion of the opening shots in his war on the Hispanic wing of Mayor Daley’s machine. He isn’t running for office, though his father is, and he promises to keep fighting after March 19: “I’m not in this for the short run.”
By the 60s his family had moved to the north side, along with other near-southwest-side residents displaced by the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago. “My grandmother didn’t miss a beat,” says Avila. “When she got to Uptown she hooked up with the 46th Ward regulars.” That organization was headed by another pretty rough bunch–Jewish and Irish politicians with west-side roots. “As a kid growing up, I met all the Uptown regulars,” he says. “My family helped elect Billy Marovitz as state senator. We generally worked within the regular organization.”
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Avila says he would probably have been given a cushy job with the city if he’d been willing to play along. But he wasn’t. “I despise what those guys represent–it’s the worst sort of plantation politics,” he says. “The bozos that Mayor Daley imposed on our community were never part of the legacy of Latino politics. They picked guys who are dumb and dependent, who will do what they will tell them. Reyes and Sanchez are very open about it, because they’re so damn arrogant.”
“I took Danny to court,” says Avila. “Come on, a rule’s a rule. It says you have to live in the district, and he doesn’t live in the district. So he shouldn’t be allowed to run.”
Avila went one step further, suing Sandoval and Reyes on the grounds that the “dual candidacies of defendant Sandoval do constitute a conspiracy to subvert the public will as he is seeking nomination and election to incompatible offices, one of which he does not intend to serve in.” In March a judge ordered Sandoval removed from the ballot for water reclamation commissioner.
