Talk to Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and you’ll soon learn a lot of them really love La Isla.
Maybe even as much as I love the royal-blue waters of my own debt-choked ancestral homeland, Greece.
For decades, though, Puerto Ricans here and elsewhere have been deeply divided over the future of the tropical paradise, with some independentistas going so far as to take up arms for the cause.
Now, the dispute has led to a spectacular war of words between a clout-heavy Democratic state representative from the Northwest Side and a leader of one of the most prominent Puerto Rican community groups in the city.
Juan Calderon, chief operating officer for the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, filed a complaint against Assistant Illinois House Majority Leader Luis Arroyo with the state’s legislative inspector general on Thursday.
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Calderon alleges that Arroyo threatened to cut funding for his and other community groups who opposed Arroyo’s resolution in favor of Puerto Rican statehood. Calderon says he wants Puerto Rico to remain a U.S. commonwealth.
According to cell phone records that Calderon attached to his complaint, he got a call from Arroyo’s office about an hour after speaking against the pro-statehood measure at a legislative hearing in Springfield on March 15.
“I received a threatening call from the representative,” Calderon wrote in the complaint. “Mr. Arroyo said in no uncertain terms that he noted all of us who spoke against his resolution and promised that there would be retribution. In other words, community-based organizations with links to those who disagreed with him in public will not receive state-funded grants.”
Calderon says Arroyo told him he had self-interest at heart when proposing the pro-statehood resolution in the Illinois House.
“Arroyo’s motives for promoting the resolution and crushing opposition are not simply a power grab; they are related to his personal finances — as he confided in me,” says Calderon, who’s also on the board of the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture in Humboldt Park.
“As he is planning to purchase a retirement home on the Island, he hopes to curry favor, or in his precise words, ‘win brownie points’ with the [pro-statehood] administration, which he expects will help him secure a better deal on a better home to enjoy during his retirement.”
Arroyo has a very different view of the conversation.
He says he was unaware of Calderon’s complaint until I called him Thursday, while he was driving back home from the capital.
“Wow, that’s shocking,” Arroyo told me. “That’s a total fabrication.”
Although Calderon says he’s not for Puerto Rican independence, Arroyo says the allegations against him are driven by pro-independence activists in Chicago who “are really desperate.” Arroyo blasted them for “living on Division Street and trying to dictate what’s going on in Puerto Rico.”
“We have family members that are for statehood,” Arroyo says. “The young, progressive Puerto Ricans want statehood because they will get more money. Puerto Rico is in a [fiscal] crisis.”
As for his retirement plans, he says he has no intention of living in Puerto Rico. “I’m building a house in Florida and I’m moving to Florida.”
In an interview, Calderon said he was speaking out to protect funding that now goes to a shelter for 25 homeless LGBTQ kids, 75 part-time jobs for young adults, after-school programs and HIV and hepatitis prevention.
“I was appalled by the discussion that took place,” Calderon says. “He can’t get away with making threats to non-profit organizations.”
It’s fine to maintain interest in the homeland. But Illinois, not unlike Puerto Rico or Greece, has plenty of financial problems of its own.
Precious time in Springfield could be better focused on our severe local woes rather than old-world beefs.
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