¿Que Pasa?

By Rachelle Bowden in News on Jun 4, 2004 11:38AM

Chicagoist was noticing a theme in the papers..

First off, Vicente Fox (who Chicagoist thinks is kind of foxy!) has a scheduled visit to Chicago this month to take part in a ceremonial ribbon cutting of the new Mexican Consulate that opened earlier this year on the West Side. This $8 million facility is huge and will be used for everything from Mexican tourism information to legal advice for the Mexican community. It is the largest Mexican Consulate in the world and at one time it was processing more than 1,000 official IDs to Mexican immigrants in a day - that's more than any other office in the US. Chicagoist once heard that Chicago has the 3rd largest Mexican population in the United States, but we're not entirely sure if that's accurate. We do know that there are about 3/4 of a million Latinos in Chicago, that most of them are Mexican, and that that means that about 26% of our population here is Latino.

Secondly, Marco Morales (def. not foxy!), a once-prominent Chicago businessman turned fugitive, was captured recently in Mexico and is being held in a jail there. In 1996, Morales was the first person charged in Chicago's famous Silver Shovel investigation. He plead guilty to ditributing 2 pounds of cocaine and to charges of fraud and bribery. Morales has admitted that he paid bribes to a high-ranking city Transportation Department official and in return won a lucrative subcontract to raise sewers on Chicago streets.

Lastly, Chicagoist was in many discussions over the weekend concerning the La Pasadita restaurants on Ashland. There are 3 of them. Two on one side of Ashland and one on the other. We've been hearing conflicting stories, but think we've finally gotten to the bottom of it.. The one farthest south on the west side of the street is the one that's best, yeh? Until we find out for sure we'll be sticking to Flash Taco for our late-night Mexican fix.