✊🏽Get to know Vicko Alvarez, the socialist organizer who is running for 15th ward alderwoman. | _KellyGarcia__ 📸 Eddie Quiñones👇
She never liked the spotlight. At five feet tall, Vicko Alvarez could easily be overlooked in a crowded room—and she’d be perfectly fine with that. But on a brisk morning in October, Alvarez walked along a row of bungalows in Chicago Lawn, studying a map of the newly redrawn boundaries of the 15th Ward, where she’s hoping to become the next alderperson. She carried a clipboard with ballot petitions, a “Make Your Mama Proud” tote bag slung over her shoulder.
But while she was finding fulfillment outside the classroom, her grades were slipping. “I almost got kicked out,” Alvarez recalls. Asked what it was like attending a predominantly white institution as a Latina, Alvarez says she didn’t love it, adding that she was far from a model minority. It was only among the workers on her campus that she found community and purpose.
“It was like, wow, somebody within my immediate community is about to win this seat that before felt so distant from my own reality,” Alvarez said. In July, Alvarez announced she was running to be alderperson of the 15th Ward as a Democratic Socialist in the 2023 municipal elections. The two-term incumbent, Alderperson Raymond Lopez, had announced months earlier that he would be throwing his name in the race for mayor. For residents of the south-side ward, Lopez’s departure is an opportunity to reimagine possibilities under new leadership.
Lopez has been challenged twice by candidates of the progressive field. During a runoff in 2015, Lopez beat former police officer Rafael Yañez, who told thehe supported reforming the department. When Lopez sought reelection in 2019, he was again forced into a runoff by Yañez and young progressive candidates such as Berto Aguayo, who described Lopez as “reactive” to community violence instead of interested in attacking the root causes of the issue.
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