In midmorning, the light reflecting off North LaSalle Street’s towering buildings pours into Tonantzin Carmona’s small office in Chicago’s City Hall. Poised and welcoming, Tonantzin clears the Starbucks cup to one side and ignores the steady ping of incoming emails. She looks every bit her age — 24 years. Last April, Mayor Rahm Emanuel named Tonantzin director of his Office of New Americans. While rancorous debate about immigrants surges across the United States, Mayor Emanuel has declared that Chicago “will be the most immigrant-friendly city in the country.” Some view Emanuel’s line in the sand as smart; others are enraged; nearly everyone sees it as bold. His rationale is succinct: “Chicago can accelerate its economic growth over the next decade by supporting businesses and ensuring that its workforce is ready to fill employers’ needs,” the mayor writes in his Chicago New Americans Plan. “The city’s immigrant population will be a key component of both of these economic growth strategies.”
To succeed, Tonantzin has to stand in the immigrants’ shoes, bring their lives to light, and convince the skeptics that including immigrants in the city’s vision helps everyone. It’s her responsibility to put pragmatic policy to work and deliver progress.
Emanuel’s 50-member advisory committee, drawn from Chicago’s business, academic, civic and philanthropic communities, named the plan’s strategies over the course of his first year in office. Tonantzin helps the mayor realize those target priorities.
Tonantzin grew up in Little Village, Chicago’s prominent Mexican neighborhood. She was “vocal” as an elementary schooler, she says, and competitive: “a nerd who was not afraid of being smart.” She loved sports. Her dad encouraged his two daughters to be tough and opinionated; he was adamant that they take an upfront role, never behind the scenes. Tonantzin’s mother, aunt and grandmother were all activists on that front. Her grandparents, “second parents” according to Tonantzin, drove her and her sister to school, even though they could see the schoolyard from their home. “They were strict and protective,” she says. “My family relentlessly focused on education as the vehicle for success.” Teenage pregnancy, violence, gangs and drugs, typical urban forces, were part of the neighborhood’s cultural fabric.
You’d be safe in saying that without a motivation unusual for any 13-year-old, Tonantzin would not have left her tight neighborhood for Milton. “I wanted to open doors for Latino and immigrant youth,” she says. “Even when I was new at Milton, I was making videos in English and Spanish to send home, so more kids would apply.” Milton was “huge, strange, filled with people walking around using these polysyllabic words,” says Tonantzin. It wasn’t easy, but she kept her footing and “devoured and absorbed everything,” including running for office and serving.
She wanted to be closer to home for college. “At Northwestern I could gain experience and exposure, see where in Chicago I could put my foot,” she says. She majored in political science and Latino studies, preparing explicitly to serve.
Tonantzin immersed herself in the activities of Northwestern’s Latino community. Working for her father’s management consulting firm at the same time, she learned about research on a deadline; problem solving; and the range of issues that confront businesses and organizations. She was known and primed for action when she learned about a policy associate’s position in City Hall.
Putting aside preparation for the medical school exam, Tonantzin took a shot at the position and was rewarded. “They needed a generalist,” Tonantzin says. “You name it — affordable housing, transportation, public health, sustainability — I researched and worked on whatever policy needs came up. City/county collaboration became my project. With the city’s chief of policy and my county counterpart, we convened and managed 15 cross-department teams, helped them come up with action steps to move the mayor’s and the Cook County board president’s agenda. We ended up with a $70.9 million savings, just through conversations — collaborating, reducing redundancy, targeting the delivery of services better.”
Absorbed in the city, but still passionate about her neighborhood, Tonantzin regularly badgered Adolfo Hernandez — a Little Villager who preceded her as director of the Office of New Americans — to bring her in on projects that affect immigrants. When he moved on, Tonantzin was the perfect internal candidate for his position.
Economic growth is the lead issue in the Mayor’s New Americans Plan, mainly because success in that domain would prove the underlying argument: that providing immigrants with equal access to opportunities ultimately benefits everyone.
The plan moves on to initiatives that serve youth and neighborhoods. Perhaps because they emerged from the broad-based advisory group, the goals often seem to be small in scale, pragmatic, accessible, common-sense changes. If you want to support small-business entrepreneurs, for instance, make food cart licenses easier to get. If you want to increase naturalization applications, provide help to pay the $680 application fee, a barrier for most immigrants. To connect new immigrants with key city services, adopt a policy that makes sure all city departments have a plan for providing services in the top languages spoken in Chicago neighborhoods — Spanish, Polish, Mandarin, Tagalog [Filipino], Russian and Arabic. Throughout the city, promote alliances and connections, sensitize agencies, improve processes.
Support for undocumented youth excites Tonantzin more than anything else. These are high schoolers whose older brothers and sisters may well have been among Tonantzin’s friends in Little Village. While she has been able to develop her own talents, and follow an ambitious plan, these kids feel invisible and live with the abiding fear that their parents may be deported.
She talks about partnering with staff from the Chicago Public Schools, building awareness, clearing the pathway for young people to work toward college and play a role in the city’s future. A move as obvious as educating school counselors about students’ eligibilities can clear up confusion and put options into play. Students need not be documented — or show documentation — to apply to college, for instance. They do qualify for instate tuition, but not state or federal aid.
The city established nearly 23,000 volunteer, internship and job opportunities for, “DREAMers,” undocumented youth, brought to the United States as children. Because of President Obama’s DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), young people with work authorization can build work experience and a college education. Students at Curie Metro High School established a “DREAMer club,” linked up with other high schools, and held a statewide “DREAMer conference” with more than 200 participants. They pulled together resources for students and families, to help them get to college.
Tonantzin tells about having heard several of these students who came to City Hall and talked with Mayor Emanuel about the internship program. Why was it important? They essentially said, in Tonantzin’s words, “It feels great to feel welcome, to be openly acknowledged. I feel like I have at least one foot in society, even though one is out.”
“They deal with constant backlash,” Tonantzin explains, “about who they are. Yet they say, ‘This is my home, and I want to contribute. I might not be a citizen of the United States, but I’m a citizen of Chicago.’”
Supporting immigrants, particularly undocumented youth, is difficult, Tonantzin admits. “Picking up angry voicemail messages and hearing personal insults is hard. I do understand where they’re coming from. So many people don’t have opportunities; so many are intensely worried about their future.”
Frustrated by Washington’s inability to craft comprehensive immigration reform, Tonantzin points out how much is left to local governments with limited resources and so many needs to meet. “Without national policy, we struggle with loopholes and gaps,” she says. “Talented individuals are held back. We have to get creative; we could be much more productive focusing money and energy in other ways.”
By convening, narrating and navigating, Tonantzin thinks she’s made connections that may not have happened, or that wouldn’t otherwise have been as frequent or effective. Some people don’t view policy as a solution to problems, but Tonantzin feels that municipal governments are the laboratories of innovation. “I’ve seen firsthand how an idea can come about and turn things around.”
“That was what drove me to venture from Little Village in the first place,” she says. “I am a young, brown woman, and people underestimate me. I should not question or be apologetic about who I am. The women I’ve known, in immigrant communities, get things done. They begin by looking out for their children; they get involved and take off from there. I want to get more involved in policy, in law, to be a role model for other Latinas.”
— by Cathleen Everett