Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2269

Valley Park's first Hispanic alderman? Martha Rodriguez hopes to smash this municipality's glass ceiling."My main issue is overcrowding," says Whitteaker, a boisterous good old boy who admires Bill Clinton ("He's so good he could sell a blind man a pair of sunglasses") and drives a truck for a local excavation company. "You got one guy and his wife that settle down here, have a couple kids, and before long you have Cousin Puerto Rico and Taco Whoever moving in. They say it's their cousins, but I don't really think they're all related. You see fifteen cars in front of one house — that's pretty suspicious."

It's a Friday afternoon in February, and Whitteaker is enjoying a lunch of hamburger pizza and Bud Light at JJ Twigs Pizza & Pub in Valley Park, a predominantly white enclave twenty miles southwest of St. Louis. It's too cold to tackle his day-job chores, so instead the 47-year-old Democrat attends to municipal business or, as he likes to put it, "fathering the city."

Ridding Valley Park of illegal immigrants — especially of the Hispanic variety — has been Whitteaker's largest endeavor. Last July the mayor orchestrated the Valley Park Board of Aldermen's unanimous passage of a controversial ordinance declaring that "illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates, contributes to overcrowded classrooms and failing schools, and destroys our neighborhoods, and diminishes our overall quality of life."

continued:
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2007-02-28/news/valley-park-to-mexican-immigrants-adios-illegals/print