Celebrate Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month with PBS Wisconsin

September 24, 2024 Sigrid Peterson Leave a Comment

Between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, the United States officially celebrates Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month, inviting us to honor the diverse contemporary experiences, identities, histories and contributions of Hispanic and Latina/e/o/x Americans and people living in the U.S.

PBS Wisconsin invites you to explore these unique stories and celebrate with us. This celebration begins with understanding that these nomenclatures — Hispanic and Latina/e/o/x — cannot fully encapsulate people with roots in such widely diverse and vast geographies, encompassing the present-day Southwestern United States to the southern most tip of South America.

This is why you will meet people who variously identify as Hispanic, Latino or Latina (or their gender neutral preferences Latine and Latinx); by their country of origin (e.g. Mexican, Honduran, Chilean, Nicaraguan, etc.); and/or by one of hundreds of Indigenous cultures, and/or combinations of individual ethnicities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Hispanic and Latina/e/o/x people constitute the fastest growing population in the United States. This September and October, PBS Wisconsin is highlighting broadcast and streaming premieres, along with programming and resources to honor diverse Latine communities who enrich our state and nation.

New this month on broadcast and streaming platforms

Hispanic Heritage Awards

Celebrate the recipients of the 37th annual Hispanic Heritage Awards. The evening includes performances and appearances by Hispanic and Latine artists and visionaries. Streaming Friday, Sept. 27. 

Roberto Hernández: Working for La Comunidad

Brand new to PBS Wisconsin Education’s ongoing Wisconsin Biographies series is the story of Roberto Hernández (1944-1994), a Latino Civil Rights activist and significant figure in the broader struggle for racial and ethnic equality in Milwaukee.

As a Mexican American student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s, Hernández worked alongside a diverse group of Milwaukee activists for the educational and social needs of Latinos in the city. They fought to expand the outreach resources of UW-Milwaukee to support Latino student success, expand bilingual education, as well as aid struggles for fair housing and better employment conditions. Today, the Roberto Hernández Center at UW-Milwaukee continues the work he and his fellow activists began across Southeastern Wisconsin.

PBS Wisconsin Education’s new animated biography of Hernández, to be used in classrooms (Grades 3-6), not only tells his story in both English and Spanish, but comes with a suite of classroom learning resources including discussion questions, a historical image gallery and a new Wisconsin Biography e-book.

Additional programming

University Place

Our virtual lecture hall series includes several episodes that explore the past and present of Wisconsin’s Latine communities.

In Mexican Migrant Workers in Mid-Century Wisconsin, Dr. Sergio González — now assistant professor of history at Marquette University — discusses how Mexican citizens and Texas-born Mexican Americans were recruited to work in Wisconsin’s agricultural, industrial and transportation industries in the mid-20th century. He also devotes a University Place lecture to historically situating Milwaukee’s first Mexican community and describing how anti-immigrant and racist discrimination in their workplaces and neighborhoods forged mutual aid and ethnic pride.

Latino Wisconsin documentary

Latino Wisconsin highlights the fastest growing population in the state and documents the impact that Latino Wisconsinites have on their communities — bringing life and growth to rural towns and urban centers, reviving struggling main streets, filling classrooms and nurturing new generations of state leaders. Latino Wisconsin shows the resiliency of Latino Wisconsinites, who have flourished through decades of structural racism and anti-immigrant sentiment and emerged as a crucial force reshaping the future across our state.

¡Adelante!

PBS Wisconsin is grateful to our partners at Milwaukee PBS for inviting us to stream their monthly series ¡Adelante!

Hosted by Andrea Rivera de Vega in Spanish with English subtitles, the show amplifies the voices of Latinos across Wisconsin and celebrates their complexity. A recent episode featured an interview with Julia Arata-Fratta, mayor of the city of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, who moved from Argentina and has been a resident of Fitchburg since 2004.

Recent episodes of ¡Adelante! focus on new immigration policies and the forthcoming November elections in partnership with Marquette University’s Civil Dialogues program.

VOCES

In 2024 Latino Public Broadcasting launched a new season of VOCES on PBS. The acclaimed documentary series presents new and established filmmakers to feature the best of Latino arts, culture and history, and takes a deep dive into current issues impacting Latino Americans. In From Here, From There (De Aquí/De Allá), VOCES profiles Luis Cortes Romero, the first undocumented attorney to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

PBS Wisconsin Food

Latine food is as diverse as the geographies and ethnicities of the people who prepare it. Beatrice Alvarez writes a wonderful “ABCs of Latino Cooking” for PBS this month, and PBS Food invites you to find —using its recipe filters — Caribbean, South American, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, Dominican, and Ecuadorian dishes to make at home.

Decolonizing Dinner

Decolonizing Dinner explores how reconnecting with traditional Indigenous foodways preserves heritage and identity, and counters the historical and contemporary erasure of Indigenous cultures. Featuring Cocinera Sujhey Beisser of Five Senses Palate, Chef Elena Terry of Wild Bearies and Chef Anthony Gallarday of Tavo’s Signature Cuisine.

Check out more of our PBS Wisconsin and PBS Food content for Hispanic and Latine Heritage month from Wisconsin Life and Wisconsin Foodie.

Latine Sounds

PBS Wisconsin Education’s Re/sound: Songs of Wisconsin project is a partnership with the Wisconsin School Music Association (WSMA) to invite students to build connections between music, identities, culture and emotions. It includes video interviews with Wisconsin musicians, performances, audio files and educator guides that can be used in English Language Arts and Music classrooms (Grades 4-8).

In this installment of Re/sound, Wisconsin musicians Richard Hildner Armacanqui and Juan Tomás Martínez show how they weave together their experiences, travels and cultures to make their eclectic music, and perform a song — “El niño que quiere jugar” (The Child That Wants to Play) — inspired by Richard’s experiences with his son and children’s instinctual sense of play.

Both artists were also featured on a 2018 episode of PBS Wisconsin’s 30-Minute Music Hour performing in their Latin Fusion ensemble Golpe Tierra.

Catch more great Latine music from PBS Wisconsin by watching PBS Wisconsin Concerts on the Square: Viva Tiempo Libre and The Cavern Sessions: Ozomatli.

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Hispanic and Latine Heritage month is a reminder to work every day of the year to uplift these widely diverse voices, and to center them in our understandings of American culture, politics, art, history and becoming. Find more Latine stories all year across PBS platforms and in our PBS Wisconsin Voices collection.

 

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