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Latest addition to the collection features Milwaukee Latino community activist

The newest addition to PBS Wisconsin Education’s Wisconsin Biographies collection, Roberto Hernández: Working for La Comunidad, is available online now.

Watch the animated video, read a digital book with audio, view galleries of historical images and more at pbswisconsineducation.org.

Hernández’s story focuses on the fight for better educational opportunities for members of Milwaukee’s Latino community during the 1960s and 70s.

“As a community builder and justice seeker, Roberto Hernández worked with others to peacefully create change for working-class people and marginalized groups, shaping Wisconsin and United States history,” executive producer Ryan Hendricks said.

Hernández grew up in a Mexican American family in Texas. His family was part of the migrant labor workforce that did important agricultural work throughout the country, including in Wisconsin. Hernández eventually came to Wisconsin and went to school in Milwaukee.

A chance meeting with an activist while in college set him on the path to advocate for better educational opportunities for fellow Latino students and a lifelong commitment to advocating for housing rights, employment rights, bilingual education and educational opportunities.

Hernández helped push the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to establish the Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute in 1970, which was renamed in his honor in the 1990s.

Wisconsin Biographies is a collection of free-to-use, educational, online media resources to enrich social studies and literacy curriculum through the stories of notable people in Wisconsin history. All of these related resources and all of PBS Wisconsin Education’s free-to-use, standards-aligned, Wisconsin-focused material are available to access at  pbswisconsineducation.org.

PBS Wisconsin is a service of the Educational Communications Board and The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

PBS Wisconsin is a place to grow through learning on WHA-TV, Madison; WPNE-TV, Green Bay; WHRM-TV, Wausau; WLEF-TV, Park Falls; WHLA-TV, La Crosse; and WHWC-TV, Menomonie-Eau Claire.

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