Wall Street Journal piece on Archer ignores the politics behind the Astroturfed “rebellion” against the safety project

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Streetsblog Chicago has followed the controversy over Brighton Park’s Archer Avenue Complete Streets project since early December. We kept track of the dozens of weekly dueling rallies for and against the initiative, which ended last month.

Today the Archer issue finally got national attention with a new Wall Street Journal article by Chicago reporter Joe Barrett. Unfortunately, in his article for the centrist-to-center-right newspaper, Barrett didn’t mention that the protests near a progressive alderperson’s office were promoted by the “moderate to conservative” lobbying group Urban Center, which has an an ulterior motive.

The title of Barrett’s is “Chicago’s New Bike Lanes Spark a Rebellion from Businesses.” The first sentence reads, “When Maria Moctezuma learned that a project on busy Archer Avenue would replace on-street parking with bike lanes and reduce traffic from two lanes to one, she mobilized residents and grabbed a bullhorn to protest.”

Sounds like a grassroots uprising, right? Not quite. This situation is more like Astroturfing.

Let’s clarify a few things. The Maria in question has previously gone by “Maria Martinez” when quoted in reports on the demonstrations by the Chicago Tribune and NBC Chicago. She also uses the name “Maria Yzabel” on the Archer Guardians of Brighton Park Facebook discussion group.

However, last month I did some Internet sleuthing and determined that her legal name as of May 2025 was actually Maria Isabel Moctezuma. It appears that, until recently, using her real surname in news reports just wasn’t her bag.

Moctezuma also goes “Maria Martinez” on her business card for Friends of Claudia Zuno, a 12th Ward aldermanic campaign organization.

Zuno was also a regular at the weekly demonstrations near Ald. Julia Ramirez’s office. Ramirez is a Chicago Teacher’s Union-friendly progressive, who signed off on the Archer project. Zuno is using understandable discontent over the current state of Archer as a wedge issue.

Barrett doesn’t mention that, while the opponents blame the new Archer protected bike lanes for recent traffic congestion, in reality a massive utility project, on several blocks southwest of the ward headquarters, is largely at fault.

Zuno showed up regularly to the demonstrations for two months before she announced her candidacy against Ramirez last February 16. So did the weekly protests inspired her aldermanic ambitions? Nah, it appears it was the other way around.

Zuno, in knit cap, protesting in front of Ald. Julia Ramirez’s office at the first anti-Archer project demonstration on December 8, 2025. Photo: John Greenfield

From the start, the weekly protests in front of or near the 12th Ward headquarters were promoted with mass texts and press releases by Urban Center, which has a pro-charter school agenda. Its CEO Juan Rangel resigned in disgrace from his previous job as head of UNO Charter Schools after the Securities Exchange Commission accused him of fiscal impropriety and fined him $10,000. After the the 2024 presidential election, Rangel wrote a very flattering op-ed about the president-elect, “How Latinos found their voice in Donald Trump.”

Screenshot of a 2014 Sun-Times editorial about Rangel’s alleged fiscal misconduct as UNO Charters CEO, and Zuno’s campaign flyer.

Last May 25 the Chicago Tribune reported that Rangel “said he spoke to Zuno, a longtime family friend, about running for alderman about a year ago.” So that would have been before the second Chicago Department of Transportation community meeting on the Archer initiative on June 16, 2025, which helped make the project a done deal, and severals months before the weekly rallies.

In other word, it seems the weekly protests didn’t give Zuno the idea to run for alder. Rather, it appears the plan to run Zuno against Ramirez inspired the demonstrations against the Archer project she approved. But this political background is completely absent from Barrett’s narrative.

Moving on, here’s a major factually incorrect statement in the WSJ article. “Jose Luis Maya, the owner of Deportes Maya [4434 S. Archer Ave.], has sold jerseys, shoes and soccer balls on Archer for 24 years,” Barrett wrote. “Previously, roughly a dozen parking spots existed on his block. Now there are just four.”

In reality, as you can see from the photo below, locking southwest on Archer last month on the same block where Deportes Maya is located, there are way more than four car parking spaces on Maya’s block, just not on his side of the block.

Last April, in response to feedback from merchants, Ald. Ramirez worked with CDOT to modify the protected bike lane to restore 17 car parking spots of Archer, including the four on Maya’s side of the street. These are located a one-minute walk from his store.

I notified Barrett and his editor about this mistake. If the author and the paper care about accurate reporting, they will edit that passage to make it reflect reality.

An amusing sentence in Barrett’s article is, “Moctezuma, of the Archer Guardians, became known as ‘Megaphone Lady.'” Streetsblog coined that nickname back in January.

What the advocates interviewed by WSJ think of the article

Lifelong Brighton Park resident Gil Campos co-organized the weekly rallies in support of the project. “My main issue [with the WSJ piece] was that he made it seem like  they ‘Archer Avengers’ [the advocates’ nickname for the Archer Guardians opponents] are the ones that got City Hall to replace parking spaces along Archer Avenue, when it was Julia that [requested] the changes,” he said.

Archer project boosters at a rally last March. Photo: Dixon Galvez-Searle

Campos also questioned the article’s implication that the Complete Streets project has lowered sales. “[Barrett] left out the fact that ICE played a role in people not patronizing local businesses.” 

Bridgeport resident Andrew Mack, an organizer with the 11th Ward Safe Streets Union whom Barrett also interviewed, also told Streetsblog he had a problem with the published article. “To drivers, parking is everything,” he said. “But to people who walk or cycle in these neighborhoods, safety is the most important thing. If I’m walking to the library with my five year old, parking is the furthest thing from my mind; the safety of my child is paramount. It’s beyond unfortunate that safety only gets one sentence in this entire story.”

Read the Wall Street Journal article on their website, Bluesky, Twitter, or Facebook.

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