Five years ago, Latinx politicians were a united front calling for diversity in the judiciary and lambasting then-Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke for appointing a white judge to a majority-Latinx Cook County subcircuit.

In 2020, some of those politicians put their support behind Appellate Judge Jesse Reyes, who was the only Latinx candidate in a crowded field for a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court. Reyes’ pitch to voters was simple: It’s time for a Latinx justice on the state’s highest court. He came in second in a seven-way race.

This year, with another of Cook County’s three seats on the court up for grabs, Latinx politicians are divided, with some supporting Reyes, who is again running on a platform of the need for Latinx representation on the highest court; some backing the Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate, Joy Cunningham; and some withholding their endorsement altogether.

The division highlights ideological differences within the Latinx community about what it means to be Latinx and what it looks like to have representation in the judiciary. Reyes’ argument that he is the candidate who represents the Latinx community is complicated by the fact that Cunnigham, a Black woman, also has Latin American roots: Her mother was an immigrant from Panama.

But perhaps because Cunningham and Reyes have so much in common — both are Democrats, veteran judges, earned degrees at the John Marshall Law School the same year, and have been rated highly qualified by bar associations — there have been few other points of contention between them. At forums, fundraisers, and in interviews, both candidates keep coming back to questions about race, ethnicity, and identity.

“I’m merely a reflection of the Latino community’s dreams and aspirations of having a place on the bench of our state’s highest court,” Reyes said at a political event last year.

The injection of race and identity into judicial contests is not new. The battle for a seat on the Supreme Court has become one of the last frontiers in the Latinx community’s fight for political influence in Cook County. At the same time, Black elected officials are fighting to hold on to hard-won positions on the court.

The efforts by communities of color to see themselves represented on the highest court were on display in 2020, when the Cook County Democratic Party backed a Black justice’s bid to replace the lone justice of color ever elected to the bench. It was on display again in 2022, when Burke retired and selected Cunningham to replace her until the November election, a move decried by more than a dozen Latinx community groups. And it’s on display now that the party has chosen to back Cunningham in the March 19 primary election.

In an interview with Injustice Watch, Cunningham said the focus on race is divisive.

“Justice Reyes has injected ethnicity and race into the contest, and I think that that’s wrong,” she said. “I think the highest court in our state is better and more important than personal goals and personal firsts.”

Reyes says he is running to represent the interests of the growing Latinx community in Cook County, who account for one-quarter of the population.

“The reason I’m doing this is because this is an opportunity for our community,” he told Injustice Watch. “Our community, the Latino community, are the ones that are calling out to the Cook County Democratic Party … and saying, ‘We need a Latino to be slated for the Illinois Supreme Court.’”

Latinx politicians are not an unified voice

Among those backing Reyes is U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, who was part of the first wave of independent, Mexican American political leaders in Chicago. Garcia garnered national attention in 2015, when he pushed first-term Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff in an ultimately failed bid to become the city’s first Latinx mayor.

Despite Garcia’s endorsement, the Cook County Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted to back Cunningham over Reyes at their slating event last August.

Campaign finance records offer a window into Cunningham’s efforts to get the party’s endorsement. Her largest contributor is the law firm of Larry Rogers Jr., who is running with the backing of party heavyweights for his sixth term on the Cook County Board of Review. His firm contributed $60,000 to Cunningham. Records show Cunningham hired a political consultant who is also a full-time employee at the Board of Review.

In the two and a half months before the vote, Cunningham contributed $21,000 to local Democratic Party leaders, with most of the money going to committeepeople directly involved in candidate slating and their ward organizations. The contributions also included $2,500 to the Chicago Latino Caucus Foundation, a nonprofit run by the city council’s Latinx members.

Cunningham, who has outraised Reyes by a more than 3-1 margin, said those contributions were mostly tickets to campaign dinners and fundraising events, where she was trying to meet the officials who would make decisions about slating.

Chicago Ald. Michael Rodriguez, 22nd Ward, the foundation’s chairman and the highest-ranking Latinx politician in Cook County Democratic Party, was one of the politicians calling for more Latinx judges in Cook County in 2019. At a press conference denouncing the appointment of a white judge in a majority-Latinx subcircuit, Rodriguez spoke and read a statement from Garcia, a political mentor and a former alderman of the 22nd Ward, calling the appointment “alarming and disturbing.”

As a member of the party’s powerful judicial slating committee, Rodriguez supported Reyes, but he switched his support to Cunningham once the party voted to endorse her, as is expected of Democratic committeepeople.

At an interview in his Little Village ward office, Rodriguez said Cunningham, as a woman of color, presented a “very nuanced view of the judiciary” and earned the support of the party.

Rodriguez said he still thinks representation matters, and he wants to see Latinx judges with lived experiences on the court. He pointed to progressive candidates of color he and the Democratic party have backed for circuit court seats, including former immigrant-rights and tenant-rights attorneys.

“The judiciary has been male, pale, and stale for far too long,” Rodriguez said. “Electing people from the community who understand from a nuanced point of view what litigants and plaintiffs and victims of violence are going through is extremely important.”

But Rodriguez’s split from Garcia, his political benefactor, highlights the internal divisions. Other Garcia acolytes, including U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, have endorsed Reyes.

Wilfredo Cruz, a Columbia College Chicago sociology professor and author of “Latinos in Chicago: Quest for a Political Voice,” said Latinx politicians have historically not been a united front. In the 1990s, the Hispanic Democratic Organization was launched to support former Mayor Richard M. Daley and Latinx candidates aligned with him, pitting them against progressive Latinx politicians.

“There is a saying,” Cruz said, “In politics, there are no permanent enemies or friends.”

Reyes also listed Northwest Side Ald. Ruth Cruz, 30th Ward, and Lower West Side Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th Ward, as supporters, but both told Injustice Watch they have yet to endorse a candidate.

“It’s good to have more representation,” Sigcho-Lopez said. But, he added, representation isn’t everything. “They might look like us, sound like us but not vote for us.”

Reyes said he was surprised by Sigcho-Lopez’s response because the alderman helped him collect nominating petition signatures. “Why did he help me get signatures if he didn’t want me to get on the ballot?” Reyes said.

It’s difficult to determine how much the endorsement of Latinx politicians matters to Latinx voters, who don’t always follow their political leaders. In the most recent Chicago mayoral election, more than half of Latinx voters casted a ballot for Paul Vallas, despite many Latinx political leaders endorsing now-Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Reyes said he spends a lot of time in Little Village and feels confident he has the support of Rodriguez’s constituents, who overwhelmingly supported him in his earlier run for the Illinois Supreme Court.

Race is nothing new in judicial politics

This isn’t the first time voters and politicians have been asked to consider race and ethnicity on the Supreme Court.

The state didn’t get its first justice of color until 1990, when Charles E. Freeman became the court’s first Black justice. When Freeman retired in 2018, he was still the only justice of color to sit on the court.

Justice P. Scott Neville Jr., who is Black, was appointed to temporarily fill Freeman’s seat until the 2020 election. That year, Reyes and five other candidates, three white and two Black, challenged Neville in the primary. Neville, who had the backing of the Cook County Democratic Party, emphasized the importance of diversity on the bench and maintaining the gains made by keeping him on the court.

It’s not uncommon for political campaigns in Chicago to highlight race, as marginalized groups have had to fight for political representation, power, and jobs, said veteran political consultant Delmarie Cobb.

But Cobb said marginalized groups have been kept from positions of power and, rather than work together, they fight each other — a fight that only benefits white politicians.

“Racism is part of our culture’s DNA, and it’s infused in everything we do, whether we like it or acknowledge it — it’s here,” Cobb said.

In 2022, when two of the six white justices retired, the racial composition of the court changed. Lisa Holder White, a downstate Republican, became the first Black woman on the court, followed by Cunningham, who was appointed to take over the seat of Burke, the wife of former Ald. Ed Burke.

With three Black justices on the seven-person court, calls for Latinx representation have grown. When Cunningham was appointed, a coalition of Latinx groups stated its dismay at Latinx people being excluded from the state’s highest court.

“Our community has made great strides in electing judges,” Juan Morado Jr., then chair of the Latino Leadership Council, a political action committee dedicated to supporting and advocating for Latinx candidates, said in the coalition’s press release. “This took decades of hard work, education, and judicial seniority to ensure we were represented in our court system. It is important that the highest court in Illinois is reflective of the state population that it serves, and right now, it isn’t.”

In an Injustice Watch interview, Morado did not dismiss Cunningham’s Latinx roots, but said he would like a Supreme Court justice who is active in the Latinx community, someone who has advocated for the community’s empowerment and who can be a “shining example” for other Latinx people.

“One of us in the court would make a huge difference, especially someone espousing the fact that they really are from the community and are proud,” Morado said.

Whose lived experience counts as Latinx?

The outcry over Cunningham’s appointment by some Latinx community leaders highlights the differences in how the candidates have talked about their identities and the complex — and sometimes contentious — questions about whose lived experience counts as Latinx.

Racial and ethnic identity is often complicated because many people don’t neatly fit one category. The constant changes in the U.S. census classifications of race and ethnicity underscore the complexity. “Hispanic” was not an ethnicity category until 1970. And it wasn’t until 2000 that people could choose more than one race to describe themselves.

What’s more, not every person who is Black and Latinx chooses to identify as such. A 2020 survey from the Pew Research Center revealed about one in seven Afro-Latinx people do not identify as Hipanic or Latinx, largely due to their distinct life experiences and prejudice within the Latinx community.

In previous campaigns and public speeches, Cunningham has identified as a Black woman. The biography on her campaign website notes she was “the first African American woman” to serve as president of the Chicago Bar Association.

In an interview with Injustice Watch, Cunningham discussed her childhood in New York City and recalled eating avocados, mangos, papayas, and plantains her family would buy from a Latin American market in East Harlem. But she also said, like many children of immigrants in that era, she wanted to assimilate and be seen as American.

“We tried to make sure the other kids didn’t see we were eating this stuff because it wasn’t American,” she said. “I always wanted pizza and Chef Boyardee ravioli and the stuff that the kids were eating.”

Before seeking a law degree, Cunningham was a critical care nurse who, she has noted, volunteered at Planned Parenthood. After law school, she worked in private practice and later as a high-ranking attorney at a hospital. She was selected as a Cook County associate judge in 1996 and heard civil trials before moving back to the private sector as general counsel of Northwestern Memorial Healthcare. She became an appellate judge in 2006, a role she had until 2022, when she was appointed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

“In my view, having somebody who comes to the table with broad, deep experience in lots of different sectors of practice that represent things that come before the supreme court, that is vastly more important, in my view, than being the first Latino or the first of anything,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham said her opponent’s call for a Latinx person on the Supreme Court benefits one person — Reyes.

“If you really look deeply at it, it is a self-serving prophecy that gives Justice Reyes an opportunity to achieve his own personal goal,” Cunningham said.

Reyes vehemently disagrees. He said his run is not about ego. “I’m a humble guy. I’m from the neighborhood; I go back to the neighborhood; I don’t put any pretenses; I don’t put any airs. I’m just a regular guy, and the reason I’m doing this is because this is an opportunity for our community,” he said.

Reyes was born in Chicago and raised in Pilsen and Bridgeport. His father is from Mexico City, and his mother is from Dallas. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, after which he said he had to defer college to help his family financially. He worked a number of blue-collar jobs, including driving a cab.

Reyes spent nearly a decade working for the city of Chicago’s law department before being selected as an associate judge in 1997. He worked his way through various assignments in the Cook County Circuit Court hearing traffic, domestic violence, criminal, and foreclosure cases, and he was eventually elected as a circuit judge. He was elected to the appellate court in 2012.

Reyes said he has worked tirelessly to advance the careers of Latinx students, attorneys, and judges. As an attorney, he represented organizations supporting Latinx veterans and law enforcement officers and an organization supporting women’s rights. He founded and runs the Diversity Scholarship Foundation, a nonprofit promoting diversity within the legal profession mostly by offering scholarships to law students.

“I think what the voters should consider is someone who has been progressive and aggressive in terms of making sure that there’s access to justice,” Reyes said.

No matter who wins the race, Democrats will maintain their 5-2 majority on the Illinois Supreme Court, as there are no Republicans vying for the seat. And the Latinx community would have representation — albeit not exactly the representation some want.

In that way, the race highlights the diversity of the Latinx experience.

“Like any other group, we don’t all think alike,” said Cruz, the sociology professor.

Injustice Watch reporter Kelly Garcia and senior reporters Maya Dukmasova and David Jackson contributed to this report.

Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story misstated the part of New York City where Joy Cunningham grew up.

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