All heads turned when city treasurer Miriam Santos walked into the auditorium at McAuliffe elementary, a largely Latino school near Humboldt Park. The reaction isn’t surprising; Santos has drawn starstruck attention almost everywhere since she won reelection in April with over 80 percent of the vote. She’s as close as one can come to being a political sensation in Chicago: a Hispanic lawyer with an MBA who’s backed by white ethnic firefighters and cops; a Democrat wooed by Republicans; an attractive, intriguing woman with barely concealed aspirations for higher office; the only local politician to take on Mayor Daley and win; and, for what it’s worth, the best treasurer the city’s had in a long time.
She stood sideways, addressing both the graduates onstage behind her and the audience of parents and younger students in front. The audience hushed and leaned forward a bit to catch her words.
Her father was disabled in a work accident, and the family bounced back and forth between Gary and Chicago looking for jobs, living in old, drafty apartments in humble working-class neighborhoods. “I always had some sort of job in a factory or a restaurant,” she says. “I had to work. We needed the money.”
“Looking back, I can see why she advanced,” says 43rd Ward alderman Charles Bernardini, who worked with Santos in the state’s attorney’s office. “I’m not a big believer in fortune falling in our laps. If a person has talent, opportunities don’t come out of the blue. Miriam was like a lot of us. She worked hard and was respected. She made good connections and she impressed people.”
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Other people who were then engaged in the grunt work of political activism are less generous. “When we needed people to work the trenches building Hispanic politics, Miriam wasn’t there,” says one independent Latino politician who prefers not to be named. “She wasn’t there for any of the big campaigns or causes. She never knocked on doors or worked a precinct. She wasn’t a presence in the community.”
