Maria Quiñones Sanchez

Seventh District City Council candidate, Democrat

by Brian Hickey

It's hard to believe that, two months into the Cocktails With series, nobody had mentioned a rather important aspect of the looming City Council primaries. (Such is la vida political in a mayoral-election year.) When voters head into the booths, they'll decide which potential councilmembers will head the local redistricting efforts in 2010.

This has long been an important issue in the fightin' Seventh, which is not only home to the occasional political-corruption indictment (former councilmen Harry Jannotti and Rick Mariano) but also to absentee legislators (former state Rep. Bill Rieger, who discovered that jamming pieces of paper into statehouse voting machines leaves the impression one actually voted).

This is what Maria Quiñones Sanchez talks about as she examines a map of the district she'd like to lead. There's a nice big chunk of land down around Second Street, from Frankford along Hunting Park to beyond Mascher. Then, there are little broken nooks along Castor up to Grant. In some places, the district is as narrow as an intersection.

This makes for some difficult campaigning, what with both the distance a candidate needs to cover, and the pockets of Russian and Brazilian newcomers who aren't easy to connect with. But if Sanchez is intimidated, she doesn't show it as she polishes off a Corona quicker than I could drink one of the city's tastiest margaritas — at Tierra Colombiana Restaurant & Bar on North Fifth. In fact, the Latina candidate who bills herself as "the Right Leader at the Right Time" sees it as a noble challenge of sorts.

"They're facing many of the same issues as Latinos, with the language barriers in the schools, and wanted to get engaged in the process," she said.

Though she's often been lumped in with the city's upstart reform — or progressive — movement, Sanchez is hardly a newcomer. Despite unsuccessfully challenging Mariano in 1999, she boasts of more than 20 years of community service as a founding member of the Statewide Latino Coalition and, as regional director for the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, helped register nearly 32,000 new voters locally for the 2004 elections.

A Temple grad and married mother of two, she's affable, engaging and seemingly knows half the people in a restaurant where an Irish-looking outsider was asked for his order en Español. In many ways, the Seventh is on the fringes of mainstream Philly society, which is why she can't understand why, during last year's special council elections, Danny Savage was installed in Mariano's vacated seat.

"Is this where you put the most inexperienced councilperson?" she asked. "This is the kind of district that will hold the entire city back if we don't fix it. As much as they've tried to divide us, we're going to piece it back together."

This is why, she says, she's taken a block-by-block campaign approach. Helping frame herself as a political outsider, she mentions how Savage has "called Bob Brady a genius, so he's tied in," without devolving into a mudslinger. She's also been heading to house parties as a way to share her message of more cops, smaller class sizes along with bilingual programs and protection of small-business corridors. With a focus on wooing female voters, she said, "If I can get those women, I can get a household." She also enjoys watching some — read: white — voters shift from closed-minded to willing to vote for a Latina after giving a speech. Evoking Obama, she noted, "The ruler we're being measured by is different, but I hope to prove that whites will vote for people like me. ... A friend told me the hardest part is getting people to believe you can win. I think we're going to do that."