Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and the legacy of Jose ``Cha Cha'' Jimenez, a beloved community organizer and activist, founder of the Young Lords, and one of the architects behind Chicago's original Rainbow Coalition. To this day, the Rainbow Coalition is remembered as a powerful model of multiracial unity and solidarity that continues to inspire all of us. Cha Cha was born in Puerto Rico and eventually moved with his family to Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood in the midst of the city's planned urban renewal. Today, we would call it gentrification. Cha Cha and his peers faced housing and educational discrimination and harassment at the hands of the police and were motivated to create the Young Lords street organization to protect themselves and their Puerto Rican neighbors. Under Cha Cha's leadership, the Young Lords evolved into a political organization that hosted free breakfast programs for children, free community medical clinics, and other projects of survival. Through his work, he connected with other activists organizing in their own low- income communities across the city. On April 4, 1969, Cha Cha co-led an effort to form the Rainbow Coalition, an anti-racist, multiracial, working-class movement uniting the largely Puerto Rican Young Lords in Lincoln Park, the Black Panther Party on Chicago's South and West Sides, and the Young Patriots representing poor Appalachian Whites in the Uptown neighborhood.…”