- Today, we are pleased to introduce Sergio Gonzalez
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters,
and are not necessarily those
of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the museum's employees.
Sergio M Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate
in the Department of History
at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
His research and teaching interests include labor,
working class, and immigration history.
His primary research focuses on the development
of Latino communities in urban areas
in the American Midwest with an emphasis
on the religious communities Latino immigrants developed
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throughout the 20th century.
His article, "Interethnic Catholicism
"in the Transnational Religious Connection:
"Milwaukee's Mexican Mission Chapel
"of Our Lady Guadalupe, 1924-1929"
will appear in the upcoming winter edition
of the Journal of American Ethnic History,
and he is currently completing a book manuscript entitled,
"Mexicans in Wisconsin"
for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
So if you could all please join me
in welcoming Sergio Gonzalez.
(audience applauding)
- Buenas tardes. - [Audience] Buenas tardes.
- Ah, buenas tardes, all right.
That's the extent of the Spanish for the day
for those of you who thought it'd be bilingual some.
Well, a little bit more mixed in.
Thank you all for being here today.
It's a beautiful day outside,
and I know it took a little bit of effort probably
to come out from the sunshine and spend an hour in here,
so thank you for being here.
We're gonna spend the majority of our time today
in the 1920s, which is where the story of Los Primeros,
Milwaukee's first Mexican community, takes place.
But before we go back nearly a hundred years,
I'd actually like to start with an event
that happened this year.
Raise your hand if you're familiar with the events
of February 18th of 2016.
Okay, so quite a few of you.
So for those of you who don't know,
El Dia Sin Latinos occurred on February 18, 2016,
when over 20,000 people, including immigrants,
their native born sons and daughters,
and their allies took to the streets,
here around the Capitol, and then eventually inside of it,
to protest what they believed to be anti-immigrant
and truly anti-Latino legislation.
And they were protesting specifically two bills.
The first was AB450, Assembly Bill 450,
which would have allowed police officers
to question anyone they suspected
of committing a crime about their immigration status
and then detaining them for deportation
if they thought they were here undocumented.
The second bill that the people were protesting
on that day was Senate Bill 369,
which eventually did pass,
and that one blocks counties statewide
from issuing local IDs
to people who can't access state versions.
What we saw on February 18th was part
of a multi-year process of anti-immigrant legislation
that really kind of first started in Arizona with SB1070,
and we've seen pop up throughout the American Southwest,
the American South,
and parts of the American Midwest as well.
However, the collective action of the people that day,
the 20,000 people-plus that stormed the Capitol,
successfully defeated the more kind of odious
of the two proposed bills, AB450,
and also brought to light the growing power
of the state's Latino community.
Now, for many Wisconsinites,
this may have been the first time
that they've caught a glimpse of so many Latinos
in their state.
And they may have even considered this kind of,
an anomaly, and abnormality,
and they might've thought, how did this happen?
How could there be so many Latinos in this state?
I've traveled throughout the country,
and when I tell them where I'm from,
and I tell them that my parents are both Mexican immigrants,
the first thing that I'm invariably asked is,
I didn't know there were Latinos in Wisconsin.
(audience laughing)
They may have mistakenly thought this community
was a new one, and in some ways they would be correct.
Latino's share in the state's overall population has grown
from about 2% in 1990,
to 3.5% in 2000,
to 6.3% in 2013.
The Latino community,
and specifically the Mexican community,
which is the focus of our talk today,
however, has a history in this state
that reaches back over a hundred years.
And interestingly enough, the anti-immigrant legislation
and this kind of anti-immigrant atmosphere
that led to the development of these bills,
also reaches back over a hundred years
in this state's history.
The response from the Latino community,
as you might imagine, also goes back to those time
of Los Primeros, the first Mexicans who came to this state.
So what I'd like to do today is
to give us a brief introduction to that history,
drawing from some of the research
that I've done for my dissertation and for my upcoming book.
And we're going to learn a little bit about Los Primeros,
Spanish for the first, primero is first.
The original pioneers who came from Mexico
to establish roots and make the first Mexican community
in Milwaukee.
In order to give the protest
that occurred this year a little bit of context
and, perhaps, open discussion afterwards
for where our state's Latino community might be going,
moving forward.
I'm gonna go back farther than Los Primeros,
before 1920s though, to introduce you
to an important figure,
a man who kinda has a singular place
in Wisconsin's history.
And so this man actually predates the establishment
of Milwaukee's first Mexican community.
His name is Raphael Baez.
Raphael Baez was born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1863,
and he actually came to Wisconsin in 1886.
His story is very different from the stories
of Los Primeros who came in the 1920s
for a number of different reasons.
Number one, he was recruited to come to the United States
as a classically trained musician.
He was actually living in Mexico City at the time
that the was found by the CD Hess Opera Company,
a national American opera company,
and he was a classically trained violinist.
He was recruited to come to the United States
to perform music.
And so in 1886, he came to the United States,
and he settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of all places.
And he was a composer.
He was an organist and music and choir director
for churches and synagogues throughout the city
of Milwaukee.
He was also a tutor and a professor.
We can actually count him as being
the first Latino professor at Marquette College,
now Marquette University, in 1892.
And he was also respected and active member
of the city's civic scene.
He was a member of the Jefferson Club.
And for you political fans, at the turn of the century,
the Jefferson Club was the most important,
Democratic party organization in the state.
He was actually on the music committee
for the Jefferson Club, maybe helping set the music
for the political party, I don't know.
His story, as I said, though, was atypical
from that of the stories we're going to hear
for the rest of today's talk.
He was a highly skilled, highly educated in classical music.
He was recruited here to come to serve in these number
of different positions as a director of choirs,
and as an organist.
And probably most important, as you'll see today,
he also gained a pretty fairly well respected position
in the state's community,
and, specifically, in Milwaukee's community.
The majority of the early Mexican immigrants,
however, that came after Baez in the 1910s,
didn't come as classically trained musicians,
and they didn't come to work as composers.
The majority of them came to work
in the state's agricultural industries,
many arriving by way either of Mexico
or by state's in the southwest, in the American southwest.
Employers in Wisconsin in the sugar beet industry
were actually the first to recruit large numbers
of Mexicans in the 1910s,
and they called these workers [speaking in Spanish],
which is someone who picks beets,
in larges numbers to fill positions
that had formerly been held by Germans, Belgians,
and Russians in the state's beet fields.
And Mexican who came to Wisconsin in the 1910s came
to work all over the state.
We have reports of them working in Green Bay,
and Fond du Lac, and Oshkosh throughout the 1910s.
And they actually had their largest concentration
in those first two decades of the 20th century
in Waukesha and the surrounding area,
where they worked both in agriculture as well as
for companies like International Harvester,
the Werra Aluminum Foundry, the Waukesha Foundry,
and General Casting Company.
This early Mexican migration and immigration, however,
to the state was pretty minimal,
as groups of 10s or 20s, and many times they didn't stay
for too long and they went back to Mexico.
It wasn't really until the 1920s
that we saw the first big growth
of Wisconsin's Mexican community.
And to kind of understand how it is that Mexicans came
to arrive to Milwaukee in the 1920s,
we have to get a little bit
of immigration and political history.
So I hope you can keep up with me, and if not,
raise your hand, and we'll try to fill in the spots.
So the settlement of Los Primeros in Milwaukee was
in many ways facilitated by changes
in national immigration law.
At the national level throughout the first two decades
of the 20th century, federal legislators were wrestling
with fundamental questions
of how immigration helped shape the character of the nation.
And when I saw character, I mean a few different things.
Federal legislators, and social commentators,
considered questions of how immigrants shaped the cultural,
the linguistic, the religious,
and the racial character of citizens of the United States.
So this is a story that some of you might be familiar with.
Rapidly increasing numbers of immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe arriving
in the United States at the turn of the century
were the reason that a lot of these questions
were coming up.
And with more and more immigrants
from these countries settling in urban centers
like Milwaukee, questions of who was an American,
and what qualified someone for becoming an American,
occupied the minds of many.
So drawing upon nativists, xenophobic concerns
of increasing number of hyphenated Americans,
Irish-American, German-American, Italian-American,
in other words, people who define themselves
by dual ethnicities or dual understandings of their identity
in the years following World War I,
federal legislators came to define who was desirable
for entry into the United States
upon racial and ethnic distinctions in order
to better maintain a national American character
and a national American identity.
And so Congress passed two pieces of legislation
that radically altered the face of immigration
for the ensuing four decades,
and that's the map you see on the right over here.
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921,
and then followed by the Immigration Act of 1924,
drastically limited the number of immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe,
and curbed all immigration from Asia.
Suddenly stopping this immigration flow, however,
caused a major headache, and problem for business owners.
Ending immigration from those parts of Europe
was basically shutting off the spigot,
turning off all sources of labor for their businesses.
And so in the build up to the passage of these two laws,
growers and industrialists throughout the United States,
and specifically agriculturalists,
demanded access from Congress to importable labor
that would be inexpensive and that would be easily accessed.
And so thanks to lobbying from these business interests,
Congress decided to solve the problem
by exempting all immigrants from the western hemisphere.
So that'd be Canada.
You can imagine that's not really what they had in mind,
specifically Latin America.
And so those two areas, the entire western hemisphere,
Canada and all of Latin America was exempted
from these quotas.
And due to Mexico's proximity to the United States,
legislators argued that Mexican immigrants
would be less likely to attempt to permanently remain
in the country.
They said, well, look, Mexico's right down the way,
they'll come and do their work,
and then they'll head back when they're done.
And, thus, they would pose a minimal threat
to national cultural and racial homogeneity,
to this idea of an American identity
or an American character.
The popular term for immigrants coming from Mexico
at the time was this idea of birds of passage.
Right, you know how a bird migrates according
to the seasons.
And so legislators argued that Mexicans would come
to work as temporary migrants during peak levels
of employment, considered when the planting season
and the harvesting season,
and then they would return home to Mexico
when they were no longer needed.
So during the 1920s,
because of this changes in immigration law,
about 50 to 100,000 Mexican immigrants made their way
to the United States annually.
This is a dramatic jump.
Milwaukee companies were not immune
to the changes in immigration law.
Faced with declining immigration from Europe,
and increased industrial needs following World War I,
many Milwaukee companies looked south for new workers,
both for African American workers in the US south,
but also, more importantly for our discussion today,
recruiting laborers of Mexican descent from Mexico
and the American southwest.
So here's what companies would do.
Companies would send down what were known as enganchistas.
Enganchista means someone who hooks.
Enganchar means to hook or to grab.
And these were labor recruiters.
So they would send them down either to the border region
or directly into Mexico.
And these Enganchistas, they promised Mexican men,
many of them who were single and young,
they promised them the opportunity to travel
to the United States to find stable employment.
And so these labor recruiters went down
to a number of states,
specifically to the central parts of Mexico.
So they went to states in Mexico,
including Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Michoacan,
Zacatecas, Nuevo Leon, and Jalisco,
which is actually where both of my parents are from.
These men would sign contracts,
and they were usually limited term contracts.
So they'd say you can come to work to Wisconsin
for six months to a year, and then your contract expires
and you'll head back.
But here was the rub, here was the problem.
These contracts were often in English.
They weren't translated into Spanish.
And what the workers were not told in Mexico
when they were signing these contracts
is that they were actually being recruited as scabs
to come up to Wisconsin
to help replace the unionized workforce.
Now, for those of you who know Milwaukee's history,
Milwaukee has a rich and long union history.
Milwaukee was a stronghold of labor power throughout
the turn of the century,
and up really until pretty recently.
And so I'll give you one example.
On the left over there
is one of the Pfister & Vogel tannery sites.
Anyone familiar with Pfister & Vogel tannery?
All right, so Pfister & Vogel, in the spring of 1920,
they sent down their enganchistas, their labor recruiters,
to Mexico in the midst of a strike
that we initiated by the Polish and Slavic workers.
And they recruited trains full of Mexican men to come
to Wisconsin, to come to Milwaukee.
These men were of course hoping to find stable work,
and instead they were greeted at the train depot
by striking workers who were ready to kill them.
So you can imagine the type of tone that set
for these two communities from the onset.
Pfister & Vogel management obviously was worried
about protecting their investment.
They paid a lot of money to send labor recruiters
down to Mexico to grab these workers,
and they were afraid of retaliation
on behalf of Polish and Slavic workers.
So what they actually did is
that they didn't let the Mexican workers leave the factory.
They actually put up cots inside the factory walls,
and they made the Mexican men sleep inside the factory
for fear that if they left the building,
they would meet trouble
with the city's European origin communities.
And so it got so bad that the Pfister & Vogel
tannery company actually hired instructors
from the YMCA to come in and do classes and do recreation,
so that the Mexican men wouldn't get bored
in their off-hours
So this was the opening introduction
of Mexican workers to Milwaukee.
They're scabs.
They're here to take our jobs.
You've probably heard some of that before.
Soon, other Milwaukee companies followed the lead
of the Pfister & Vogel tannery company.
So the Bucyrus Company, Harnischfeger Company,
the Ladish Company, Allis-Chalmers,
England Steel, Northwestern Coke,
and then railroads like the Milwaukee Road
and the Northwestern Railroads sent labor recruiters
down to get Mexican workers to come to the United States.
Well, as worker recruitment for Mexico grew
across the country, Americans soon realized
that this promise from federal legislators
and industrial owners of Mexican simply being birds
of passage was an empty promise.
You can imagine, if you come to the United States
and you find stable work,
regardless of the discrimination you might find,
you find stable work and good paying jobs,
you might decide to stay here to help better provide
for yourself and for your family.
And so as more Mexican immigrants decided to settle
in the United States and not go back to Mexico,
not kind of fulfill this idea of the birds of passage,
questions of assimilation and racial acceptability,
once again, rose to the forefront
of conversations regarding immigration,
except this time it wasn't Europe, it was focused on Mexico.
And so Americans debated whether
the country's new immigrants could be integrated
into American society,
or if they should be excluded once again
to protect national identity.
And these questions were definitely on the mind
of Milwaukeeans throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.
Besides settling in one
of the most ethnically heterogeneous,
one of the most ethnically diverse places in the country,
Milwaukee, the city of Milwaukee,
Mexican workers experienced
a much different settlement experience
from that of European origin immigrants.
Marked less by growing access
to social and political power
and marked more by ethno-racial discrimination,
economic exclusion, and social isolation.
So institutions across the city,
and we're talking about the media, social services,
and public schools, viewed Mexicans more as a problem
to be solved than a community to be welcomed into the city.
Numerous editorials from the Milwaukee Journals
throughout the 1920s.
Everyone knows the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, right?
So in the 1920s,
the Milwaukee Journal published editorials,
advocating strongly for the expansion
of these quotas that have been imposed on Europe
to Latin American, specifically to Mexico.
And I'm going to hold off on discussing a reading
from them because, quite honestly,
they're pretty disgusting editorials,
but I'll just mention that they used terms
like mongrel and half-breed when they refer to Mexicans
and the reasons why quotas should be extended to the south.
I would like to turn, however,
to a more comprehensive justification.
Probably one of the longest reports that was prepared
in Milwaukee advocating for the extension of quotas
or at least to keep an eye
on these Mexicans arriving in Milwaukee.
And that comes from a 1930 report prepared
by the International Institute,
which was a settlement agency organized by the YWCA.
And this report was prepared by a social worker.
Her name was Agnes Fenton,
and Agnes Fenton surveyed members
of the community on Milwaukee's south side where a lot
of Mexicans were settling.
And she interviewed police officers, teachers,
and medical professionals.
And here's what her final report asked Milwaukeeans.
She asked Milwaukeeans, "Do you know how intimate
"an American problem the Mexican has become?"
Her report depicted an immigrant group that threatened
to disrupt the cultural and social character of the city.
She portrayed Mexicans as lazy, uneducated,
unscrupulous, and ultimately as being undesirable
for integration as citizens.
And she commented that this racial group,
which she referred to constantly as peons,
was darker skinned and of lower intelligence
than Europeans who had proceeded them.
Her findings marked Mexicans as racially
and culturally non-white, as dangerous,
and, thus, as being unworthy of integration.
And through her conversation with city officials,
she additionally stoked fears
of potential public safety concerns.
So, reporting from conversations
with the city's police officers,
her survey stressed this inherent criminality
among Mexican immigrants.
And this is what she said,
she said, quote, "The Mexican is law-abiding
"as long as he knows he is being watched."
She supported her report with so-called academic
and pseudo scientific articles by eugenicists,
who emphasized the quote-unquote "Indian character"
of Mexicans as being a justification for exclusion
in order to demonstrate their racial incompatibility.
The report is long.
It's multiple pages, and you can actually download a copy
of it through the Wisconsin Historical Society.
It's online.
I recommend, if you're interested, to read more of kind of
the attitudes at the time, you log on and you grab that.
But I would like to end with one quote from Ms. Fenton
from that report.
She said, quote, "While the social workers are afraid
"that the peons will not mix with our native population,
"the eugenists are afraid that they will.
"It is certain that interbreeding cannot be prevented.
"That might be considered a happy ending
"if the quality of our racial stock was not lowered
"in the process.
"If the stock of the Mexican is as good as ours,
"there can be no scientific objection,
"but there are, however, competent and impartial observers
"who consider the peon inferior to the whites,
"both physically and mentally."
You're getting a taste for the scene
in Milwaukee in the 1920s for Mexicans.
Even beyond dealing with social services agencies
like the International Institute,
Mexicans face harsh prospects
in finding their own spaces throughout Milwaukee
that might not be marked by exclusion and by segregation.
Juana Danas, who arrived in Milwaukee in 1927,
recalled in a 1974 interview
that Mexicans weren't allowed inside
the south side's Gem Theatre.
On the rare occasion that Mexicans attempted
to buy a ticket and enter the establishment,
white patrons would run them out,
they would yell racial slurs at them,
and then they would physically assault them.
Mexicans also learned to be weary of the police,
of the city's police department,
who would arrest Mexicans after dances
on trumped up charges of drunkenness.
And their interactions between Mexican men
and European-American women also served
as a point of contention.
Remember that fear of miscegenation,
of intermixing between races.
Their interactions with Italian and Polish men usually led
to confrontations in social settings.
So Porfirio Gonzalez remembers socials
at the Wisconsin Roof, which was a bar,
a popular bar on the near south side,
where members of different European origin groups
and Mexicans, quote-unquote (speaking foreign language),
which means they got into fights over dances
with European-American women.
Despite discrimination, however,
Mexicans continue to come to Milwaukee,
and specifically in search of better economic opportunities.
And the recruitment of one Mexican worker
to the city typically led to the creation
of a chain migration,
as those who successfully secured employment,
sent word back home that there were better opportunities
in Wisconsin.
And eventually the recruitment
of single men as workers led to the arrival
of entire families from Mexico.
So through 1910,
there were fewer than 50 foreign-born Mexicans living
in Milwaukee.
By 1927, that number had risen to over 3,000 Mexicans,
and by the end of that decade, that number was anywhere
from 5 to 7,000.
So the community really grew over those 10 years.
Newly arrived Mexicans settled
in neighborhoods nested around their workplaces
on the near south side.
So a lot of them settled around the Walkers Point area,
the River West area, and Merrill Park.
And their neighbors many times included
the more established ethnic communities
of earlier German and Polish immigrants,
but they were usually more recently arrived immigrants,
like Norwegians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Greeks,
Bulgarians, Serbs, and Slovenians.
Mexican children, this will be surprising to you
after what we've heard, but Mexican children, of course,
didn't have a great time arriving
at the public schools in Milwaukee either.
They caught themselves in what I called linguistic catch-22.
Spanish-speaking students encountered resistance
from public schoolteachers and administrators complaining
that the city's newest immigrants weren't doing enough
to integrate themselves into American society.
How they would have done so, I'm not sure.
The story of a young child
who attended Vieau Elementary School demonstrates
those difficulties.
Like many Mexican children who came to Milwaukee
in the 1920s, this student didn't speak any English,
and he struggled to keep up with his American peers
and his classes.
In response to this child's difficulties,
the child's teacher demanded
that he return home until he learned English,
at which point he would be allowed back in class.
The educational experience
of Mexican children differed greatly
from those of German and Polish students
in the late 19th and early 20th century.
And there's quite a bit of irony in the situation here.
European immigrants who had settled previously had fought
for Milwaukee's public and parish schools
to use native language along with instruction in English,
elevating their own cultural linguistic heritage
to the same as American and English standards.
Milwaukee's schools, before the arrival
of Mexicans to the city,
at this point had a national reputation
for the progressive language immersion programs.
But, of course, they didn't seem to extend
that same sort of progressive idea
to the newly arrived Mexican immigrants.
These experiences, however,
didn't deter early Milwaukee Mexicans
from looking to create their own social, economic,
and religious spaces.
Artur Morales,
one of the Pfister & Vogel company's earliest recruits,
who had arrived in the early 1920s,
managed to save and borrow the $2,000 he needed
to open Milwaukee's first Mexican grocery store in 1925.
And that is Artur Morales' store on the near south side.
The Abila family also opened (speaking foreign language),
which served as a grocery and a general store,
a restaurant, and an importing location
for peppers and herbs as well as kitchen goods,
like la tamalina, which is used to make tortillas.
You can imagine you weren't going to find la tamalina
in random Milwaukee stores.
The Abila's restaurant also served
traditional Mexican dishes,
like enchiladas, frijoles and chiles.
Now, I've painted a pretty negative picture,
you might say, of this settlement experience
for Milwaukee Mexicans, but I don't want you to think
that every single relationship that Milwaukee Mexicans
had with the general community was an antagonistic one.
And so what I'd like to do is actually point towards one
of the brightest spots for Milwaukee's Mexican community.
It's what my primary research looks at.
And that is the development of a religious home.
Milwaukee Mexicans found common ground
with the city's European-American community
through a shared Catholic faith
and the creation of Spanish language,
quote, "pioneer missions"
in the mid 1920s.
This first Mexican Catholic parish right here,
this is Holy Trinity, and I'll talk about Holy Trinity
in a second.
But the first Mexican Catholic Parish
that Mexicans eventually created helped meet the cultural,
spiritual, social, and linguistic needs
of the Mexican community throughout the period.
And it was only possible through interethnic collaboration.
In 1924, Mexicans began attending
Holy Trinity Catholic Church on the near south side.
The church's fraternal order of the Knights
of Columbus noticed this growing Mexican community,
and they reached out to the new congregants.
And after consulting with Mexican community leaders,
the Knights of Columbus decided
to sponsor a Spanish language mission
in 1924 during holy week.
So this was a Mass, this was a series of Masses
that were conducted completely in Spanish by a,
I believe he was German-American Jesuit priest
who spoke un poquito espanol, right?
So he did his best to trudge through
a Spanish language mission,
but this was really the first time
that Milwaukee Mexicans felt any sort
of invitation to the city's community.
Frank Gross, a parishioner from Holy Trinity
and an active member of the Knights of Columbus,
took the lead.
He was very interested in Mexican culture.
He took the lead, he spoke Spanish fluently,
in working with Mexican community leaders
to provide regular Spanish language Masses.
Gross, Frank Gross, he contacted the office
of the Archbishop, Sebastian G. Messmer,
who provided a little bit of financial support
from the archdiocese, and then he also reached out
to Catholic social organizations,
like the Society of St. Vincent De Paul,
to help provide for the physical welfare of the community.
Together, Frank Gross and Mexican community leaders created
the Mexican branch of the Knights of Columbus,
which was called El Club Mexicano, in 1924.
And this was, without a doubt,
the first Mexican-led organization in Wisconsin's history.
El Club offered the city's Mexicans the first space
to celebrate their national heritage
through ethnic Catholic traditions
and through community dances.
In 1924, the committee brought the community together
to commemorate the Battle of Puebla
in early May through prayer, dancing,
and singing in an event sponsored by the Knights.
Organized as a celebration of national identity,
advertisements included images that emphasized pride
and Aztec heritage and past military victories.
So imagine this: after years of the type
of discrimination and prejudice they faced
on the south side, they actually have an opportunity
to express and to celebrate national and ethnic heritage.
Mexican leader and Frank Gross continue
to collaborate throughout 1925,
and developed a welcoming spiritual home
for Mexicans through Spanish language Catholic Masses.
This is actually from 1924.
This is a dance that the Club Mexicano held
in September of 1924.
They recruited Spanish-speaking priests
from around the Midwest to help lead services,
usually from Chicago,
where the Mexican community was much larger,
and their work led to the December 1925 mission,
which was the most successful event organized up to date
in the Mexican community.
The celebration was devoted in honor
to Mexico's patron saint, Guadalupe.
And a celebration of Las Posadas, just a few days later,
represented a public renewal
of their shared Mexican religiosity and history.
After living through five years of racial antagonism
on Milwaukee's south side,
the city's Mexican community saw in the image
of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the celebration
of her feast day, a powerful symbol
of ethnic collective solidarity.
So with momentum and enthusiasm growing
within the Mexican Catholic community in Milwaukee,
Milwaukee's Mexican leaders
and white Catholic laity and clergy came together
to plan a development of an independent chapel
that would be capable of supporting the Mexican community
in the spring of 1926.
And here's where it gets really interesting,
or at least I think it does.
The decision to create a new chapel
for Milwaukee's Mexican Catholics in 1926 coincided
with the beginning of a war in Mexico initiated
by the government against the Catholic church,
called the Cristero War, La Cristiada.
Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles saw
in the Catholic church a direct challenge in his attempts
to solidify control, and so in February of 1926,
he ordered the enforcement of a series
of anti-clerical provisions.
In response, Catholic protesters rose up
in arms throughout northern and western Mexico
through the summer of 1926, with cries of Viva Cristo Rey,
Long live Christ the King.
The ensuing war, and the persecution of Mexican Catholics,
captivated Milwaukee's Catholic community.
And so this is from the Milwaukee Catholic Herald,
which was one of the Catholic publications.
And we see over there, an advertisement from the Compass,
which was the Milwaukee Knights of Columbus periodical.
And so what the Knights of Columbus actually did
is connected their fundraising efforts
for Milwaukee's Mexican community with fundraising efforts
for Mexican Catholics abroad.
Right, so they said in order
to protect Catholicism across the world,
we actually need to support Mexican Catholics here
in Milwaukee.
In the midst of the Cristero War,
things began to falling into place
for Milwaukee's Mexican community when they are able
to secure two necessary things
for building a religious space:
their own committed physical location,
and a spiritual leader.
So exiled clergy, especially foreign-born priests,
such as the Chilean reverend Ernesto Osorio Aguirre,
were fleeing Mexico throughout the period,
and Aguirre is right here.
And Aguirre was living in Texas at the time in 1926,
and he answered the call
to become Milwaukee's Spanish-speaking priest.
And then Archbishop Messmer proceeded
to cover the $9,000 cost needed
to purchase an old storefront on 5th Street,
which was then Grove Street.
And so, on December 12, 1926, Archbishop Messmer,
along with Reverend Aguirre,
led the dedication of the Mexican mission chapel
of Our Lady Guadalupe, held in accordance with the feast
of the patron saint of Mexico, la Virgen de Guadalupe.
For the next two years, Our Lady Guadalupe's Masses took
on a distinctly political tone in response
to the continued persecution of Catholics in Mexico.
It became a cross-ethnic political space
for Mexicans and Milwaukee's European origin community
to track geopolitical events
that affected the entire city's Catholic community.
So from the opening of this chapel
until the end of the La Cristiada, the Cristero War in 1929,
congregants gathered every single night
to pray for Mexican Catholics abroad.
By 1929, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported
that the chapel had become, quote, "the general headquarters
"for all of the activities of Mexican life in Milwaukee."
Besides the church, like many European immigrants
who had made their home in Milwaukee,
Mexican community members also created a number
of mutual aid societies known as mutualistas.
These organizations served partially as civic groups,
as well as places to celebrate cultural
and ethnic identity.
However, they were usually just spaces
to spend time with compatriots.
So there were two mutual aid societies I'd like to mention.
The first was La Sociedad Mutualista Hispano-Azteca.
The first one to pop up,
and I want you to notice the American flag along
with Mexican banners in the background, right?
So there's this idea of dual citizenship
or of understanding of dual allegiances.
And the second was (speaking foreign language),
which was founded a little bit later in 1929.
These organizations were responsible for establishing
the city's first Spanish language newspapers,
which included El Sancho Panza,
El Boletin Informativo, and El Mutualista.
And El Mutualista was the most popular of those newspapers.
And that's over there on the left.
And Mutualista covered a wide range of things.
New stories, poetry, editorials, religious essays,
and patriotic appeals to the community.
Mutual aid societies also took on the role
of social functionaries, funding and hosting dances
and celebrations for the city's Mexican community.
So two special dates stood out for celebration,
Cinco de Mayo and then the Mexican independence day.
And this is what we see right here.
This is September 16, 1930,
and this is the first Mexican parade in Milwaukee.
This is a celebration of Mexican Independence Dday
through the Bay View neighborhood, 1930.
So by the late 1920s and early 1930s,
it really seemed like Milwaukee's Mexican community
had found a foothold in the city.
Remember we said about 5 to 7,000 Mexicans.
They've got a church base, they've got businesses,
and they've got a social scene.
Not a happy ending.
This all comes to a halt with the Great Depression.
The ramifications of the Great Depression dug deeper
and deeper into the city's economic opportunities
throughout the early 1930s.
So, for example, in 1933,
only a quarter of the wage earners in Milwaukee
across the city still had a job,
while only one out of every five families
was actually already on some form of welfare or state aid.
Because most Milwaukee business viewed Mexicans
as simply surplus labor,
they were usually the first ones fired
from the city's factories and tanneries.
Faced with high unemployment with the onset
of the Great Depression, Milwaukee's Mexican colony began
to shrink very quickly.
Felix Gonzalez remember in 1975 interviewed
that a large majority of the single men who had come
to Milwaukee in search of work,
ended up leaving on their own,
but a lot of the families that had come weren't able
to pay their way back because it was so expensive
to go back to Mexico.
So they were forced to hunker down in Milwaukee.
Depleted county welfare resources
and rising anti-immigrant settlement also fueled crackdowns
on both documented and undocumented immigration
throughout the period.
Local elected officials worked
with federal immigration officers
to search for Mexicans on the county welfare rolls
and line them up for deportation.
And regardless of their citizenship status
or their documentation status,
many of those suspected, quote-unquote "public charges"
were apprehended and then taken for deportation proceedings
in Chicago, oftentimes without any form of due process.
By 1933, Milwaukee's Mexican community had been reduced
to fewer than 1,500 people,
as many Mexicans either returned on their own
or were forced back through these deportations.
Nationally, the repatriation
of Mexicans during the Great Depression led
to the deportation of anywhere
from 500,000 to two million people back to Mexico.
And I'll just note that a lot of those people
were actually American citizens,
some of them born in this country
or people who had achieved citizenship status.
In fact, a few decades ago,
California actually issued a formal apology
because of the repatriation of Mexicans
during the Great Depression.
In Milwaukee, it wouldn't be until the years
following World War II
that Milwaukee's Mexican community would recuperate
and grow, but we'll have to leave
that story for another talk.
So we're almost done here, but before we go,
I'd like to return to El Dia Sin Latinos protest
from earlier this year.
In a number of ways, Los Primeros,
the first Mexicans to make their home in Milwaukee,
encountered a sense of anti-immigrant fervor
both from their settlement experience in the 1920s
and then in the possible repatriation they faced
in the 1930s.
These challenges were driven by a number of factors.
Fear of the other, fear of change,
fear of a loss of economic opportunities,
and then, of course,
at times just unabashed discrimination and racism.
Those fears that drove cause to push Latino immigrants out
of Wisconsin communities nearly a hundred years ago,
I believe, are still in some ways apparent today.
Not only in these pieces of anti-immigrant legislation,
but also, of course, in calls for mass deportations
and walls along our borders
from certain presidential candidates.
But here's the thing, throughout the history
of Wisconsin Latino community there has always been a spirit
of perseverance.
At times, people turned inward,
as they did in developing mutual aid societies
or their own businesses.
At other points, however, they found allies
in their surrounding communities who were willing
to stand with them, as they did in the development
of Our Lady Guadalupe mission chapel
and as they did on the steps
of the Capitol just a few months ago.
There's a saying in the immigrant rights movement:
(speaking foreign language),
which means we're here and we're not going anywhere.
So regardless of these efforts to drive away immigrants,
census and demographic reports
are painting a very different reality.
They show us that no population will grow faster or larger
than the state's Latino population,
which today stands at about 336,000 residents
but will grow to nearly one million people by 2060.
And Wisconsin Latinos,
those who are here today and future generations,
have Los Primeros to thank for laying down the roots
to endure and (speaking foreign language).
Thank you.
(audience applauding)