By Mark J. Redmond

When Linda Coronado picked up the phone, she was met by the sound of her grandfather’s voice: "I need for you to vote a particular way."1 Coronado was upset. "Who’s gonna [sic] know? How’re they gonna [sic] know?" she replied. "You just have to do what I tell you to do. Not ask you, but what I tell you to do," her grandfather responded. "Because if you don’t, it could be my job."

For Coronado, a life-long resident of Chicago’s 14th Aldermanic Ward, this was a formative political experience. It was the 1960s, she had just turned twenty-one, and she was finally eligible to vote. Eager to express her opinions, the last thing she wanted was to be told how to vote. "I was livid, I was absolutely livid," says Coronado. But Coronado also knew that she needed to obey her grandfather’s wishes. "I didn’t know it for any particular reason, or even theoretically. … But intuitively what I knew was that they would know how I voted. And the fact that my grandfather could lose his job as a result of me not voting the way he needed me to vote was going to be … significant."

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