Four times during her term, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has invited applications for aldermanic seats that opened due to a resignation. A committee interviewed them before she interviewed finalists and made the decision. She appointed four relative moderates, in terms of Chicago politics—two with family connections to the ward, three women of color, two Millennials, one gay man. They call themselves the Newbie Caucus.
All of them said that Lightfoot was dealt an extremely challenging hand by fate and faced additional difficulties due to her race. None of them were willing to endorse Lightfoot during the interviews.
“I am laser-focused on the six opponents that I have,” Alderperson Nicole Lee (11th) said.
“I’m focusing on my race,” said Alderperson Anabel Abarca (12th).
“I am only concerned with my election,” said Alderperson Monique Scott (24th).
“I’m staying totally focused on my own race,” Alderperson Timmy Knudsen (43rd) said. “It’s important because I have not been elected. So why am I endorsing anybody?”
The 11th Ward office, 3659 S. Halsted St., is also Cook County commissioner John P. Daley’s (D-11th) office and the ward Democratic organization’s office. It’s stacked with Daley family memorabilia.
The ward’s local organization is helping Nicole Lee out with her campaign. It’s the first one in a very different 11th Ward that now includes all of Chinatown. Bridgeport has long undergone demographic changes, thanks to Asian migration from the north and Latinos from the southwest side, and the ward is now majority-Asian.
Lee’s grandparents immigrated to the United States. Her mother owned a Chinatown beauty shop. Her father, Gene Lee, founded Chinatown’s Chicago Dragons Athletic Association and was former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s envoy to the Chinese American community, a conduit for Chinatown residents to City Hall.
In 2014, Gene Lee pled guilty to embezzlement and tax fraud charges; federal prosecutors said he stole money from a community group, spent it on personal uses, and didn’t pay taxes.
“I’m very proud of my father. I’m very proud of all his contributions,” Alderperson Lee said. “He’s a human being. He’s paid for his mistakes at this point. He owned them. He’s taken responsibility, and we live in a country where you’re allowed to do that.”
11th Ward alderperson Nicole Lee Provided
Before her appointment, Lee got a public policy master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Harris School and worked in corporate philanthropy as a United Airlines executive. She also served on the Haines Elementary Local School Council.
She said she spent the first months of her tenure “really and truly getting my arms around what it is to be the alderman” before budget season came around last fall. “This is the leg up I’ll have if I win,” she said. “The budgeting process was really educational. Every single department had to come sit before you and talk about what they’ve done, where they were the year before, what they’re asking for now and the changes, and you’ve got to really drill people on that.”
She spent time asking about Asian American promotion rates and employment trends in the city bureaucracy, something she said Asian American city employees repeatedly thanked her for. She noted that the city’s top economic officials, Budget Director Susie Park, Comptroller Reshma Soni, and Chief Financial Officer Jennie Huang Bennett, are all Asian women but that only around 2 percent of Fire Department employees are Asian American. She expects improvements and said she wants to work with the leadership to make them happen.
Crime remains her top local concern. Lee tells people that she, the mayor, and the police cannot fix the issue alone, comparing herself to someone trying to extinguish a forest fire with a water gun.
“What we need to do is try to smother this from a lot of different angles, big and small,” she said. “Oftentimes when I’ve been on some of these public safety calls, especially with the new district council conversations and the people who were appointed to the board, a lot of the conversation was leaning more towards the left than to the middle, where I tend to sit. I had to say, ‘I live in a community where everybody in my community, for the most part—people that I talk to—want more police, that we don’t have enough, because we don’t feel protected.’ In Chinatown especially.”
Anabel Abarca was former alderperson George Cardenas’s chief of staff.
I personally believe I was chosen because I knew how to get the job done on day one,” she said. “And I don’t think anybody else, either in the race or prior, during the application process, can say that. No one else had run a ward of 55,000 residents. And that is valuable experience because we had a seamless transition.”
She’s the daughter of immigrants from Guerrero state and Mexico City who met in Chicago while working at a restaurant. She remembers translating for her mother as a child when they went to City Hall on an errand for their auto repair business. They sent her to Chicago Public Schools through Taft High in Norwood Park. After not fitting in as a city kid with bright-red dyed hair at a small liberal arts college in rural Iowa, she transferred to DePaul.
Before a law degree from Loyola, Abarca got a master’s in public administration from Arizona State University, during which she worked for then-beleaguered Arizona State Senate and Maricopa County Democrats at a time when the local sheriff and state government were racially profiling Latinos.
“It’s one thing to be able to go to Arizona and come from parents who are Mexican, but it’s another thing to realize that so many of the Latinos at the time were being completely ignored,” Abarca said. “And when the party doesn’t have enough Spanish speakers, people feel left out.”
12th Ward alderperson Anabel Abarca