Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez is running for alderman in Chicago’s thirty-third ward, which mostly covers Albany Park, a working-class immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side that has slowly begun gentrifying in recent years. She is up against Deborah Mell, who was gifted the seat by her father, longtime alderman Dick Mell, in 2013.

Rodriguez-Sanchez was born in Puerto Rico and lived there for almost thirty years until, as she explains in this interview, she was forced to leave by austerity measures that decimated the island’s public school system, where she worked as a drama teacher. Upon moving to Chicago, she has worked as a youth community-theater director and been involved in immigrant rights organizing and tenant organizing. Her rhetoric about the urgent need for socialism and winning a Chicago for the many is bold.

“I get this feeling that all of these dinosaurs who haven’t been meeting the needs of the working class, I think they’re done,” she recently told the Chicago Reader.