GOP Candidate thrives on family values and her Hispanic heritage

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ELECTIONS
'I want to make sure everybody is heard'

GOP candidate thrives on family values and her Hispanic heritage.

By SARAH ROBERTS, Rockford Register Star

ROCKFORD -- Gloria Cardenas Cudia doesn't cook, at least not well.

She admits it -- just as she cops to the fact that she can't sing or play an instrument either.

Cudia used that analogy in 1983 -- long before any of her high-profile political runs -- when she, husband Frank and two friends formed Fiesta Hispana, Rockford's annual celebration of Hispanic culture.

Today it fits perfectly with her political philosophy as she makes a bid to become Rockford's next mayor.

"With the fiesta, I realized I didn't need to know everything. I just needed to know how to bring the folks together who wanted to have that experience. I knew I could be a bridge," Cudia says. "With politics, it's all part of the same passion that I have. The bridge part is this: I want to make sure that everybody has access to the table and is heard. There is a silent majority out there that is never heard, for whatever reason. They want to be heard, and I know I can be that voice."

That sense of community and family is the common thread that runs through Cudia's conversations, whether the topic is a neighborhood playground, making time for dinner with her husband or running for political office.

She cites the death of one of her older brothers, Arnoldo, who was killed at age 20 in Vietnam, as an inspiration.

"Look at where we are today thanks to all the people who gave their time and their money and their lives," says Cudia, 54. "One of my brothers was killed in the war in Vietnam, and I can't help but thank him for giving his life so that all of us can have the freedom to speak our minds, and here is his little sister in this big-profile campaign."

It is a campaign that, as of late October, Cudia said she wasn't interested in. Rockford Ald. Doug Mark and then former state Rep. John Hallock were considered front-runners for the Republican mayoral nomination.

By December, the Republican Party had not put up a candidate. Political watchers were preparing for a two-way rematch between Democrat incumbent Doug Scott and independent Larry Morrissey when Cudia switched gears and announced her candidacy.

This mayoral run is Cudia's third high-profile political race. She was appointed to the Rockford Park District Board in 1990, then won election to the Rockford School Board in 1997. She finished the last year of her School Board term as president. A year later, in 2002, she unsuccessfully challenged state Rep. Chuck Jefferson for the 67th District House seat.

"If I had my way, I would help elect everybody else," she says. "But there are times when, if nobody else is stepping forward, then my thinking is this: I truly believe in leading by example. Here I am president of Northern Illinois Republican Women. I'm also the chairman of the Republican National Assembly's Winnebago County chapter, and our whole reason for existing is to elect Republican candidates. We were down to the wire, and we didn't have a candidate. I had been approached several months earlier, and I thought 'We can't not have a candidate,' and so I decided to step forward."

Cudia knew she faced an uphill battle from the start. Republicans have not won a mayoral election since 1969, when Ben Schleicher was elected to a fourth term, and Cudia has struggled to raise cash in the three months that she's been campaigning.

State campaign disclosure records show Cudia with roughly $4,500 in her war chest, compared with Morrissey's $150,000 and Scott's $50,000.

Cudia also had to contend with members of her own party pledging their support to her opponents. Cudia says she's taking it in stride, acknowledging that Republicans, both locally and statewide, are suffering from infighting and scandal dating back to former Gov. George Ryan's tenure.

"Even now, as I'm hearing some Republicans say they are supporting Larry Morrissey, I don't take it personally," Cudia says. "Who I take it personally for is my party, because we have an incredible philosophy that is beyond measure. I feel badly for them rejecting my party, which is supposed to be their party."

Cudia is no pushover. She's cordial to her opponents and is often the first of the candidates to initiate the obligatory handshaking at debates and forums. Her message and demeanor, meanwhile, have become progressively stronger and more confident throughout the campaign.

Cudia, who describes her political style as servant leadership, says that in the next four years, Rockford will achieve only what its residents demand. She sees herself, again, as the bridge between the community and the success she wants to resonate throughout generations to come.

"Whatever I do, whether it's as a mayor or as a volunteer baking cookies or building a playground in southwest Rockford, whatever it is, it's always about our future," Cudia says. "It's planting our seeds and hoping that there's a good harvest in the future."

That work ethic was instilled in Cudia by her parents, migrant workers from Uvalde, Texas, who would pack up their six children each summer and follow the crops throughout the Midwest -- sugar beets in Minnesota, cucumbers in Wisconsin and tomatoes in Ohio.

In the migrant camps, the Cardenas family stayed in one- or two-room shacks with no indoor plumbing. Gloria's mother, Eloisa, would rise at 4 a.m. to prepare enough food for breakfast and the lunch the family would eat in the fields. The workday lasted from sunup to sundown.

The money the Cardenas family made during crop season supported them throughout the rest of the year. The children went to a segregated school in Uvalde while their parents supplemented the family income by working in factories. Augustin, with a third-grade education, was a general laborer. Eloisa, who had a sixth-grade education, worked in a blue-jeans factory.

"It was a normal way of life," Cudia says. "We didn't know there were other jobs, but my parents did. They knew that we could have a better life."

The summer Cudia turned 13 was her first and last working in the fields. After visiting relatives in Elgin, the family decided to stay in Rockford.

They settled next door to the Ortiz family, and Rudy Ortiz became a regular contributor to the Cardenas boys' music sessions. Twenty years later, Ortiz would stand next to Cudia as a founding member of Fiesta Hispana.

"When she presented the idea, we thought, 'Yeah, great idea, everybody's got the same idea, but you've got to do a lot of things,'" Ortiz says. "I went down a list of all the things I could think of, and she said the same thing: 'We can get it.'

Gloria attended West High School, as did a certain "tall, good-looking Italian" named Frank Cudia.

The two agree they met on a blind date; Gloria was a sophomore, Frank a senior. Circumstances surrounding that night are a bit hazy, though.

Frank says Gloria was his best friend's girl at the time. Gloria says the other guy was trying to decide between her or her fair-haired friend, and in the end, picked the blonde.

Either way, that date led to a "very spicy" marriage that celebrated 35 years in January.

"I thought she was kind of cute -- she had long, black hair almost down to her knees," Frank says of his date. "We pretty much stayed together after that."

"You put a Mexican background with a Sicilian background and it's a lot of fun," Gloria says.

During this campaign, she's tacked up a weekly list of her meetings, debates, forums and other commitments -- 15 so far this week, Frank counts -- so that he knows where she is. Despite the hectic schedule, the two still carve out time each day for a meal together before the next appointment.

"The best thing is that she doesn't need a large crowd of people to influence her. If one person has something to say, she wants to hear it," Frank says. "She doesn't dwell on which way the wind is blowing. She's not going to change over to one side because that's where most of the people are. Her decision is going to be based on what's going to help the community."

Cudia first grasped the power of community service in her first job at Rockford Medical Clinic. She was a file clerk, working in the records department in the clinic's basement, when she received an emergency phone call from internal medicine.

A Cuban patient was having a diabetic attack, and doctors couldn't understand the woman or her husband. Cudia translated, and the crisis passed.

A short time later, the ear, nose and throat department was paging her in the basement.

"As I was leaving, Dr. John McPherson came out -- I'll never forget it -- and he said 'Young lady, I have to talk to you.' I was scared," Cudia says. "He said, 'Do you realize what you've done? You have an incredible gift, an incredible asset. You can do so many things with this second language that you have. You can change lives. You keep it up. You're going to do really well with your languages.'

"And he left. He didn't even spend 30 seconds with me, and it totally changed my life around."

Today, Cudia has channeled her bilingual talent into a position as outreach coordinator for the Park District, where she helps ensure that minorities have equal recreational opportunities.

She's also an ordained minister who performs wedding ceremonies at her business, the Amor Wedding Chapel on Charles Street, which offers customized ceremonies in English or Spanish.

Serving as mayor would allow Cudia to reach far beyond her current scope of community service and build Rockford into one of the country's most successful cities.

The challenge, she says, is that "we don't think big enough. We are so paralyzed by this negativity in our community. We're paralyzed by our poor self-image, and we don't move. I want to break those bonds that are here and say, 'You know what, we can get really excited about what we've got here.'"