7/19/2021
UPDATED 7/19/2021 Editor’s Note: I’ve chosen to update this article to better report the situation.
Bitter-sweet news for the BloNo Left. Ward 6 Bloomington Council Member, Jenn Carrillo pulls a Sarah Palin by resigning from their elected position only half-way through. In a Pantagraph exclusive, Carrillo announced their plans to step down from their seat at the end of August. Unlike Sarah Palin though, all evidence points to Carrillo being forced to resign against her will as her home was sold out from under her.
For months, speculation among both the Right and the Establishment in Bloomington, swirled obsessively over a sign in Alderperson Carrillo’s yard stating the house was for sale. Carrillo quickly released a video expressing the unlimited amounts of queerness and Mexicaness that emanate from their domicile, as evidence it was still theirs.
However, it appears the rumors were true. Carrillo’s home was sold out from under them. City code mandates that a council member “live in the ward from which he or she is elected.”
“My announcement today is bittersweet,” Carrillo said in a statement. “I am both elated to have found a beautiful new home for me and my family that keeps me in the community I love, and deeply saddened to announce that I will not be able to continue representing Ward 6 on the Bloomington City Council.”
“While it makes sense that we want elected officials who actually reside in the places they represent, the rules around residency and holding office presume a level of housing stability that only homeowners of a high socioeconomic status are afforded,” Carrillo said. “Tenants have always been a small minority on the city council, and with my departure they will be completely devoid of representation.”
Carrillo’s open seat will now be filled by Mayor Mwilambwe who must received the consent of City Council. Mwilambwe is likely to appoint an establishment, neo-liberal to the position. It would be the greatest irony if he appointed Karen Schmidt, an elected official who served for many years before losing to Carrillo by 42 votes in 2019.
Carrillo’s resignation comes after a tumultuous year for the council member. For the past year, Carrillo has done everything in their power to alienate many of their most useful supporters amongst BloNo’s Left.
They were always a pariah amongst their colleagues, but this wasn’t a deficit in our minds. This culminated in May with an unofficial sanction against Carrillo by Bloomington City Council. The condemnation came in the wake of the 2021 Local Election Results where all of Carrillo’s slated candidates, the People First Coalition, lost. Carrillo released a public statement saying they hoped to make Ward 3 Sheila Montney’s and Ward 5 Nick Becker’s lives “a living hell” and referring to them as dangerous authoritarians because of the $12,000 they each received from the local police union.
None of this was particularly new to Carrillo or the BloNo Left. Most of us don’t care about respectability politics in the first place knowing it’s largely used to silence legitimate criticism by oppressed peoples. The fact she was a pariah amongst them was a pro, not a con.
Then, #Jenngate happened, where Carrillo publicly targeted and condemned the Bloomington-Normal chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (BloNo DSA).
Did you miss the exciting phenomena that was #JennGate? Worry not for you can still re-live all the straw-people, red herrings, reductio ad absurdums, and ad hominems that transpired:
Beyond their existing relationship with BloNo DSA being seriously damaged, this public display showed most of the center-Left in BloNo the destructive tactics & strategies Carrillo was willing to use against the very comrades that made history and got them elected in the first person. If you burn enough bridges, you eventually realize you’re actually on an island all your own (along with the 15-30 social keyboard warriors that dogmatically agree with everything Carrillo says regardless of evidence).
As mentioned above, this is bitter-sweet. I and many others are happy that what we consider abusive behavior by Carrillo will have far less of an impact because of the reduction in political power they have. Despite this, I was humbled by one comrades comments to me, “Whether we like it or not, they were one of the few council members who believed in leftist causes. Causes that many of us also believe in. We want to have the same outcomes, though certainly we disagree on how to get there… Consider this— we cannot work towards each other’s demise. It’s not a useful cause.”
My comrade is right, of course. We now have no tenant representation on City Council, Carrillo being the only renter. Furthermore, Carrillo’s home being sold out from under her is likely part of a new neo-liberal strategy of primitive accumulation. Since the pandemic, private equity firms and other Wall Street organizations have been buying up property like crazy creating a seller’s market for homeowners. Wall Street is then converting these into rental properties in order to subvert the mid-20th century American Dream of homeowner-ship. This will create a permanent renters class without the stability and wealth-creation of homeowner-ship beholden to Wall Street interests and landlords hundreds of miles away that have no interest in upholding tenant rights.
Had those bridges not been burned, the Left could have easily supported a squatters campaign for Carrillo which would highlight this national shift in wealth. Carrillo’s house being sold out from under them highlights the enormous barriers tenants, the working class, immigrants, and people of color must endure to get representation on public bodies.
One local Leftist organizer, Roberto Garcia, who has criticized Carrillo on several occasions, said, “All in all, their departure is a loss for tenants, for poor, for working class folks. Their situation, being forced out like this is not good for any of us.”
Carrillo released a longer statement on a blog post about their recent journey. Some highlights worth reflection:
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