University Place

[gentle music] - Jenny Pederson: Welcome to today's "History Sandwiched In" program.

My name is Jenny Pederson, and I am the public programs manager with the Wisconsin Historical Society.

A quick note that opinions expressed today are those of the presenter, and not necessarily those of the historical society or its employees.

Also, thank you to the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, who is here today, and for the support in identifying and sharing authors for this program, including Jesus.

Thank you also to PBS Wisconsin, who is here today with Jesus's permission to record and stream his lecture to include it as part of the University Place programming, available on PBS Wisconsin channels as well as online.

A few notes for if you are gonna be looking for this program in the future.

Please note that you will find the program titled "Obreros Unidos: Roots and Legacy."

That is the title that you would put in the search bar.

So now to the reason that you are all here today.

Today it is an absolute pleasure to welcome author, historian, and activist Jesus Salas, who is presenting "Obreros Unidos"-- "United Workers"-- "The Roots and Legacy of Wisconsin's Farmworkers Movement."

Jesus's presentation today is based on his book Obreros Unidos: The Roots and Legacy of the Farmworkers Movement, pictured here, a recipient of not just one but two publishing honors: the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Award for Multicultural Books and the 2024 Hamlin Garland Prize in Popular History.

I also want to take a moment to spotlight a documentary based on Jesus's memoir titled Roots and Legacy.

This documentary is associated with Adelante!

and presented by Milwaukee PBS.

It is premiering and available for viewing this month.

To learn more about that program and to learn some more history about this, excuse me, to learn some more history about this topic, please do check out milwaukeepbs.org.

And now I am finally getting to your bio.

There's so many good things to share.

Jesus Salas founded Obreros Unidos and was the first Latino CEO for United Migrant Opportunity Services.

He taught bilingual courses at Milwaukee Area Technical College for two decades, was a lecturer at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, and later served as UW System regent.

Salas lives in Milwaukee, where he continues to be active in Latino community organizations.

Salas is a third-generation migrant worker and was part of a stream of individuals and families that seasonally journeyed from the Texas borderlands to the Great Lakes to harvest a wide variety of crops that fueled the agricultural economies of this region.

In riveting detail, he describes the brutal working and poor living conditions in these migrant camps.

Taking inspiration from Cesar Chavez, Salas organized the first sustained effort to organize migrant seasonal workers in the Midwest.

This transnational movement went beyond the fields to have a lasting impact on building sustainable, urban, community-based organizations in Wisconsin, providing needed social services and empowering Chicanos and Latinos to access and take advantage of programming at post-secondary institutions in Wisconsin, including UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison.

Please join me in welcoming Jesus, and enjoy the presentation.

[audience applauding] - Jesus Salas: Thank you, thank you very much.

Thank you, Jenny.

And we'll start with some maps.

Here we have two maps.

The one on the upper right is a map of the Texas frontier in the 1840s.

And the reason I include this is because I'm showing the first generation of migrant workers there.

That is, my grandfather's migrating from the state of Coahuila to the state of Texas.

At one time, by the way, these two areas were one state of the states in Mexico.

You can see how they were joined.

My grandfather was, made his way through that community up in the northern part of the lower map.

That is the state of Coahuila, Piedras Negras-- or translates in Spanish "black rocks."

The border town in the Texas side is Eagle Pass.

He travels approximately 35 miles to the semiarid lands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande.

Artesian water has just been found, and they're recruiting Mexican laborers to come in and work in the area.

And this is the beginning of the three generations, because he homesteaded in this area called the Winter Garden.

And the reason they call it the Winter Garden, and these are four counties that I'll show you a census map so you can see the growth of these, of this area is because they can grow crops when no one else can, or that is, they converted this semiarid land into a garden, this whole four-county area.

And I was born, and my grandfather homesteaded that area that is covered in red.

On the census, you can see when he gets there in the early 1900s, he crosses the border in 1906 in Zavala County.

We're the last county in the map from left to right.

And these are huge areas that we're talking about.

The area in Zavala County is almost 800,000 acres, and there was only 792 people.

So it is a huge track of land.

But look at the population increase between 1900s and 1930s.

So there it is.

It goes from less than 1,000 inhabitants to over 10,000.

And of course, two reasons.

Principally, the Mexican Revolution begins in 1910, and the chaos that follows after 1910 until the early '20s.

And of course, the outmigration of the northern part of Coahuila.

By the way, most of the migrants that are coming into the southern part of Texas that we're talking about are from the neighboring states, Coahuila and the northern Mexican states.

This phenomena of people coming in from Central America and crossing the border was unheard of at the time.

Even folks from the southern part of Mexico, there was no, internally, there was no migration.

Most of the folks that were coming across the border were from the northern states, in particular the state of Coahuila, that shared a lot of commonalities with the state of Texas, as at one time they were joined.

Now, after the 1930s to 2006, you'll see the population levels out.

Actually it continues to grow, but there's so much outmigration that is going on that it actually stays the same.

That is, people are moving in, but as many people that are moving in are people moving out also.

And you'll see when I show you another map of the, what will eventually be called the Midwestern migrant stream, there will be over 100,000 migrant seasonal workers coming from this area into the Great Lakes region.

So this amount of people that we're seeing here, 10,000 from Zavala County, La Salle, Frio, and Dimmit, does not really depict the amount of people that are coming through the borders and into the Great Lakes region.

When we, the third generation, when I spent 10 years as a migrant worker, there were over 100,000 migrant workers coming into the Great Lakes region.

Into the state of Wisconsin, there were 15,000 of us coming, over 5,000 of us into the central Wisconsin area.

Now, there are a couple of things that we want to just touch upon.

The Great Depression just dislocates this whole settlement that had been going on for the last two decades.

And of course, the Republican candidate for president is talking about this massive amount of deportations that he wants to undertake for the immigrants in this country.

I don't know exactly how he's going to do it.

There's over 60,000 Latinos, and 25% of us have someone that is undocumented in the family.

But we'll see.

But there was, at that time of the Great Depression, Mexicans were the scapegoated for the Great Depression, and there was a repatriation.

And then the schizophrenia of the immigration policies will change, and you'll see, when the Second World War starts in the beginning of the 1940s, there is a need for manpower.

So we make a treaty with the United States and the so-called Bracero Act, or the guest worker.

Mexican workers will be recruited to come in and help us while our men and women are in uniform.

And then lastly, the rooting of apartheid.

There is a system of segregation that is established during this period of time, that is, during the Great Depression in my generation, and I want to touch upon that also.

This is the, these are pictures taken by the Farmers Service Administration.

You can go into the Internet and find these and other images of the poverty, of the malnutrition, of the sickness, untreated sicknesses.

I selected these two because there was a photographer that came to our hometown in the 1930s.

So these are pictures of my community.

These are pictures of, the one on the left, I wouldn't even call this a home.

I call this a shelter because it's just a makeshift shelter for the migrants that are coming in.

We still had, in my generation, still had adobe structures, dirt floors, et cetera.

And that's what you have on the image on the right-hand, upper right-hand column.

That is a grandmother and a grandchild heating themselves.

And that's the way we heated ourselves in my time, that is, in the late '40s and 1950s.

We would burn mesquite outside, bring the coals inside the home, put some dirt, three or four inches of dirt in the bathtub, and then put the coals on top, and everybody sitting around the bathtub heating themself.

One of the questions was, "Well, weren't you concerned about carbon monoxide?"

The windows were so drafty, the doors were so that we didn't have to worry about air, fresh air coming in.

This is a picture of the repatriation.

And I just, this occurred between the Depression, that is, in 1929 until the late '30s, and we don't know exactly how many people were deported.

I've seen data from 500,000 to over 2 million.

But, of course, the problem was that the Mexicans were blamed for the economic downturn and the loss of jobs, and they were repatriated.

And really, the term "repatriation" is not an appropriate term because most of the children and youngsters that you see in these pictures were born in the United States.

They weren't repatriated.

And, of course, as I indicated earlier, during the Second World War and the scarcity of workers, there's a treaty with the United States, and braceros, male workers, guest.

Bracero from the word brazo, right, as some of you that know Spanish know the term.

And you see the, during the war, and I've done some research on this topic.

During the war, only about 40,000 or 50,000 braceros are coming into the United States.

The Mexican government didn't want to send braceros into the state of Texas because of the maltreatment of the native Mexican Americans, but eventually, they conceded after a couple of years.

But look at after the world war, when the economic boom, we're bringing hundreds of thousands of braceros.

Two things occur as a result of this.

The processors that are bringing the foreign workers, one, to keep the wages down and to break the unions, to stop the the farmworker unionization.

Just a couple of shots.

We have the ignominity of having a prisoner of war camp in our community, or that is a family internment camp.

What to do with the prisoner of war camps after the Second World War?

A great and ideal place for a segregated elementary school for Mexicans.

So my brothers and I went to the, that building in the foreground, and I chose this picture because of the, that was my elementary school from first through fifth grade.

And I found a picture there.

They named the school-- they wouldn't call it a former prisoner of war camp, but there was an airport that was next door to the prisoner of war camp that would bring in supplies, right?

So they named the segregated school the Airport Elementary.

So we all went to the Airport Elementary, not to a former prisoner or internment camp.

Also, the poll taxes were instituted once Mexican Americans became the majority.

And, of course, they could take over any of the local governments in the four counties that I indicated.

So my grandfather, I have poll taxes from 1913, 1915, 1919.

And the 1913 were kind of unable to be read.

And then I found the 1957 from my mom and dad.

So for four decades, Mexican Americans were kept out of the political process by the charging of poll taxes for each adult member.

Now, I don't know who my grandfather voted for or if he voted, but the reason that it was instituted was to prevent them from participating in the political process.

So he was, like, a walking-around target when they found out that he and some of his neighbors were paying poll taxes.

Well, the Great Depression and the working conditions, including the conditions of segregation and maltreatment of the Mexican Americans initiates a migration.

I have this map, and the spot, that red spot in the middle of Texas, that's that Winter Garden area that I indicated to you a little bit earlier.

You can see how it spreads out into other areas.

That is, my wife's family used to go straight up now present-day Interstate 35 into the Dakotas, in between the river, Red River Valley, between the Dakotas and Minnesota.

You can see some of them went to Florida and then joined the migrant stream up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

Others would go into the Northwest or up and down the Pacific Coast.

But we came primarily to the Midwest.

And the first stop that we made was the harvesting of asparagus in Henry, Illinois.

Then we would go to hoeing and thinning sugar beets in Hartford, Wisconsin, before herbicides and planters were, the technology was made available so they could space the sugar beets and other crops, and you didn't have to thin them out.

But after hoeing and thinning sugar beets, we'd go to central Wisconsin to the cucumber harvest into the Waushara and Portage County area.

And then in early September, the Lower Lakes region to do the tomato harvest until the frost would chase us down, early cotton harvest in the upper Mississippi Delta, and then the late cotton harvest in Lubbock, Texas, or that is the Panhandle.

My dad, the second generation of migrant workers.

There's my dad in Milwaukee in 1942 with his buddies.

They had found the Milwaukee barrio and they were out having a great time.

My mother joined my father.

He had come in as a young man with some of these fellows in the late '30s, but he got married to my mother after my first, my older brother was born.

He, an infant, my brother joined him and his uncles, and they made it up to Hartford, Wisconsin, to hoe and thin sugar beets.

And lo and behold, the war, 1941, of course, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the Second World War starts.

So in 1942, my uncle is hoeing and thinning sugar beets.

And I believe the Selective Service is in Fond du Lac at that time.

I don't know why.

But he signs up for the Selective Service, and he gets a letter that he's being called to report for service.

So they rush back to Texas, and they said, "No, no, no, you signed up in Wisconsin.

"You have to go back to Wisconsin.

You're going with the Red Arrow Division."

So you can see that symbol in my uncle's shoulder there, where he serves with the Red Arrow Division in the Pacific, including the occupation of Japan.

And this is the third generation.

That's my mom and dad at the Waushara County Fair.

We're harvesting cucumbers.

And there's the workforce on the right-hand side.

I would ask you, if we had time, to see if you could identify me.

– Audience Member: Yeah.

– Jesus: But on the top... [laughs] Somebody says, "Yeah."

On the top, from left to right, is my brother Manuel, then Carlos, and I'm in the last one on the right.

And then the three younger ones, Francisco, Luis, and the far right is my brother Rudy.

And we, the farmers here in the state of Wisconsin, very few of them built housing for migrant workers.

We were housed in every conceivable structure that you can find in a farm lot, right?

I'm talking about barns, sheds, warehouses, et cetera.

I choose this one because it's really unique.

[chuckles] I hope some of you youngsters don't take my remarks to heart, but...

In the following remarks, but we grow great cannabis here in the state of Wisconsin.

During the Second World War when the Japanese take over the Philippines, we can no longer get manila rope, which was used by the United States Navy.

So where are we gonna get the rope for the United States Navy?

So they did an analysis, and they built half a dozen of these hemp plants in the state of Wisconsin to develop the fiber to be able to provide the Navy with the rope that they needed.

What to do with the industrial hemp plants?

Housing for migrant workers.

The first three years that we came, that's where we lived.

And the only saving grace about this, it's the only place in the 10 years that we ever went that we had hot water.

Of course, we had to all shower bare-ass in front of strangers that we never met.

But other than that, it was great.

It was really noisy because it was built-- these cavernous, you know, multistory buildings, plywood on, you know, every eight feet there were a unit.

And of course, there were six of us-- I showed you the picture of my brothers and I-- and my mom and dad.

So we occupied two of those units.

And every time we opened up, the plywood hitting the door, it was just noisy.

And you know, if it was a rainy day and then everybody, all the children in the middle of this cavernous buildings, because the units were on the side.

So that was really, like I said, the only saving grace was the, that we actually had warm water to bathe.

This was the hoeing and thinning of, I think this is cucumber.

Yeah, this is cucumber, cucumber plants.

And this is the long hoe.

Because, you saw the age of my brothers and I, what our parents used to do is cut the hoe to 12 to 18 inches.

They called it el cortito, right, the "short one."

And then, we had no strength in the upper part of the body, so we hoed and thinned sugar beets, cucumbers, whatever the crop was.

Using the hoe, of course, is backbreaking, backbreaking your back.

I talk extensively about the work in the first part of the book.

As I told you, the different schools that I attended, my father and my parents were insistent that we were not gonna have a fourth generation of migrant workers, and he put us, everywhere we went, we were enrolled in school.

I was telling the young man that's sitting in the back there that I went to three different schools during the school year.

And this is the asparagus harvest.

I went to school in Henry, Illinois.

In Waushara County, I went to school in Wautoma High School.

In Crystal City, of course my hometown, I went to school in Crystal City High School.

So I graduated from eighth grade in Henry, Illinois.

And I got a completely different perspective about life in general, whereas, in Texas, I never sat in a classroom with somebody that wasn't a Mexican.

Even after 1955, after the picture I showed you, that was 1954.

In 1954, the Supreme Court orders the school desegregation, so I was, I went to the desegregated schools in Crystal City, Texas.

We were all in the same building, but here's the way they integrated the schools.

There was 6-1, 6-2, 6-3, 6-4, and 6-5.

The non-Latinos were in 6-1.

Some of the Latinos and Anglos were in 6-2.

All the rest of us were 6-3, 6-4, and 6-5.

We're in the same building, but I never went to school with anybody that wasn't Mexican until I got here.

And then to be invited to, on Sundays with my friends.

There's a picture that I have.

I won't show you, but I met this young woman by the name of Toni Booth, and she was in the eighth grade graduation picture, and we were dancing after the graduation.

There's a picture of Toni and I dancing.

Just something, just two young folks dancing, but something that was completely, by custom and by law, prohibited by law in Texas is going on here in Henry, Illinois.

So just as an example.

That had a lot to do with my orientation in a very positive way.

Well, I returned to the migrant camps because I graduated from Wautoma High School, attend school just for about a year at Oshkosh State at that time.

I was behind 'cause, you know, it took me years to catch up to a level, but-- and I only went for about a year and a half because the venue for a successful relocation was a small restaurant in downtown Wautoma, just six or seven tables.

The owner of the restaurant had hung herself in the kitchen, poor woman, and nobody wanted to get in.

And here my dad said, "Oh, what a great opportunity."

I said, "Dad, you're not serious.

"We're not gonna go in there.

"It's empty, nobody wants to go in there.

That lady hung herself."

And here, no, here we go, making tacos in central Wisconsin.

And I'm waiting on tables, and somebody comes over in a suit and says, "Are you one of the Salases that used to be a migrant worker?

"Can you take us to the migrant labor camps?

We have a demonstration program for child care services."

So here I am.

And for the next three years, we have this demonstration program in Red Granite, Wisconsin, for child care.

And for the next three years, working in child care centers.

Then in 1965, a federal grant makes available United Migrant Opportunity Service to provide child care centers for migrants in the state of Texas.

By the way, it's still going on.

But it returned me to the labor camps, and of course I had been working alongside these workers.

And this is where the union starts, because for the first time, people start telling me, "Oh, Jesus, this is what's going on.

We're not getting paid."

You know, here I'm talking to them about getting the kids out of the field and sending them to school, and they're telling me about not getting paid properly, the problems with the housing, injuries in the field, et cetera.

And then the other thing that-- what did I do?

The other thing, oh, there we go.

The other thing that occurs in 1963, my hometown, the Mexican Americans obtained a franchise, and they conduct what Professor Shockley from the University of Wisconsin-Madison calls a political revolt in a south Texas town.

By the way, that's a book by Professor Shockley and UW-Madison.

And there starts a political revolt.

So I start going back, the return to the labor camps and the political revolt occurs before my orientation and my organizing of farmworkers.

So just to give you an idea that I didn't go back immediately and start organizing farmworkers.

There were a number of events that occurred.

One of them is that on the fourth year of working with this child care programs, et cetera, somebody brings me a paper from California, and he says, "Hey, look what "this guy by the name of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in California are doing."

They're marching from Sacramento, from Delano to Sacramento, protesting the working and living conditions of the grape workers who were on strike in Delano.

And I said, "That's what we need to do to start changing."

'Cause I'd been working four years now, 10 years as a migrant worker, four years, you know, trying to improve their working conditions by working with their families and children, and it wasn't working.

So here we go.

We're gonna organize a protest march from Wautoma, 80 miles to Madison, Wisconsin.

I was afraid because the, I was afraid that the, the way the, that I knew the workers were treating the migrants, that if we organized a protest march, those families would be thrown out of their labor camps.

So we did "Juntarnos para ser reconocidos," that top sentence, "Let's get together to be recognized."

"Hablar para ser oidos," "Let's speak to be heard."

"La raza tiene causa," "Our people have a cause."

Notice there's no locations, there's no date for the rally 'cause we're gonna have a rally in order to get volunteers to participate in the 80-mile march.

And this is the only way we can do it without letting anybody know what is going on except ourselves, 'cause it's all done by word of mouth, except the Catholic priests that allowed me to use a former parish hall in order for the union to meet.

So here we are, hundreds of people show up.

We do with the little poster.

And this is the rally, and we got several dozen.

We only-- this is really something.

There's a question, once you see the marchers in the next picture, "Where are the women?"

And I said, "You know, "when I'm up there asking for people to march, we're afraid to include women in the march."

"You shouldn't have been."

And I said, "Well, we were at the time."

This is 1966.

And we only asked for male participants to come up, and it was 80 miles, and we were gonna walk 20 miles, 20 miles a day.

There were no sanitary facilities, nor did we have any-- it was going to just on the side of the road kind of a thing.

So you see the pre-Columbian eagle of Chavez there.

Kind of crude.

And underneath it, Chavez allowed me to use NFWA, which was the name of the farmworkers at that time, the National Farm Workers Association.

So here we're demanding just the enforcement of the-- Wisconsin had some of the wonderful social legislation that few states had.

We had a minimum wage that covered migrant workers.

We had a housing code that covered migrant workers.

We had workmen's compensation that they're not gonna exclude.

But it wasn't enforced.

So the first part of this organizing was to get the enforcement of these laws.

We're...

The canning companies in the area, after the march, thought it was, like, a call to arms.

People here at this potato processing plant.

"Oh, Jesus used to see the problems that we're having at this potato processing plant."

This is in Almond, Wisconsin.

This is the James Burns processing company.

And so I didn't know how to organize a union, but at that time that we're on strike, the local brewer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John Schmidt, ascends to the state AFL-CIO.

He invites me to the state AFL-CIO that inaugurates his candidacy, and he provides me with a lawyer and says, "No, Jesus, two ways.

Either you have an election or you have membership cards."

So we start signing-- this is John Schmidt.

We start signing membership cards.

The processor finds out about them, and he has the workers sign an affidavit that they don't belong to the union.

And if they don't sign it, they get fired anyway, just like saying they belong to the union.

We have Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission that covers migrant workers.

By the way, when the industrial workers get the rights to a union, they exclude domestic workers, they exclude the farmworkers, they exclude other groups.

The only two states in the Union that farmworkers can organize legally: the state of Wisconsin and Hawaii.

So we're the only ones in the continental United States that can organize legally a union.

So I complained to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

And I didn't know how it works, and it takes months.

This isn't until we complain and they don't get heard.

This is in October.

They don't have a hearing until 12/15/1966.

Most of the workers can't hang around for the hearing, but we convince two or three families to stay so they can testify about the mistreatment.

And the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission finds James Burns unlawful interference, unfair labor practice.

So now we're in the books.

So we continue organizing farmworkers with the support of John Schmidt, in the picture that I just showed you.

And what do we do?

We start organizing cucumber workers.

So we go after the multinational, after Libby, McNeill, and Libby.

And now that we got a mouthpiece, right, we say, "All right, why don't you, don't go out on strike "because you'll get your workers fired "like you did in the potato processing plant "for not showing up to work.

"Do a walkout during the noon hour.

"That's their right to be able not to be at work "during the noon hour.

"And then call for an emergency hearing of that same agency that heard you last December so that you can get a vote."

And we win the certification election 405-8.

And I'm sure those eight were errors 'cause we had the unanimous support of the farmworkers.

Well, I just want to show you just very rapidly what kind of union we established, because we didn't have very many resources, but I'll show you.

Because the only organization that I had any experience-- I had never belonged to a union, but I belonged to a mutual aid society because that was the only organization that was allowed under apartheid in Crystal City, Texas.

So the mutual aid society was a funeral society that handled the burial of the Mexicans in the city of Crystal City.

And it was a benevolent.

It was a dues-paying organization.

That's what we need to do.

Obreros Unidos is gonna be a dues-paying membership organization, a benevolent society.

So this is what inspired me about it.

We published a newspaper, La Voz Mexicana.

Here we are selling the newspaper in downtown.

Isn't that a great picture of that youngster, barefooted, selling the newspaper, La Voz Mexicana?

Fred Kessler, assemblyman from the Milwaukee area, helped me organize a group of about half a dozen lawyers to come up and get this Wisconsin legislation to be enforced, filing minimum wage complaints, filing workmen's compensation, filing complaints under housing conditions.

And there's Allen Samson there, standing in a white shirt.

And the gentleman that's raising his hand is Michael McCann, who'd just graduated from Harvard and eventually would become a district attorney for the county of Milwaukee for the next 20-some years, taking the oath of individuals.

I had been going back and forth to Madison because that's where the funds came from during the years that I worked in the daycare centers.

And I met this wonderful woman by the name of Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush.

At that time, the university hospitals were tied with the University of Wisconsin, so we had a reception to raise funds for migrant workers.

And this doctor by the name of Dr. Goodfriend showed up at the reception, and we were talking about health conditions and the lack of-- and he said, "You know that we have a blue bus?

"There is a STD epidemic "that is going on here among the students "at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "and we have the blue bus and we take it over, "and we park it up on Mifflin Street.

"But it's a whole laboratory.

"And why don't you find me a place in Wautoma, "and we'll open up a clinic and we'll do analysis, blood testing, X-rays, whatever."

And here we go.

That's the bus right next to the parish hall they opened up.

By the way, 50 years later, it's still going on.

It doesn't look like that anymore.

It's a huge, huge complex.

But that's Dr. Goodfriend, medical students, interns, et cetera.

They would do the analysis, the intake at the parish hall, and then they would do the testing inside the bus.

And that's actually the bus where that takes place.

We opened up a gasoline co-op because soon as the migrants came in, all the prices of gasoline would come in and the workers wouldn't have any place to change the oil and take care of the vehicles.

So this place was empty, and we opened up a co-op, and you had to be a member, and you got-- look at the price of that gasoline in 1968, huh?

31 cents a gallon.

And they were making money out of that, so you can believe that.

But there are a couple of things that happened that got us involved, and not sidetracked, but got us involved.

Eva Valenzuela, on the left-hand side of that picture, was wearing our button, our union button, Obreros Unidos.

And she was working for Jon Wilcox, who was the assemblyman from the area.

By the way, later named by Tommy Thompson to the to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to get an idea of kind of Supreme Court justice he was.

He fires his family for wearing a union button in the labor camp, right?

And so we set up a tent city right by the downtown park of Wautoma.

He said, "Any other people "that you fire for being union members, "we're gonna fill the whole doggone town full of tents.

"He said, 'So it's up to you.

"'You want to keep on firing migrant workers who are a member the union.'"

And Eva, just a courageous woman.

She would, for the next couple of Saturdays, would led rallies on behalf of people wearing their union buttons.

And attended by families.

You can see both...

I have another picture of that.

There were so many children that would show up that we had to have treats with them just to keep them occupied during the rallies.

And remember that election that I showed you that we won 405-8?

Libby, instead of negotiating over the 700 workers in that three-county area, moved their operations out of state.

And just like a lot of industries, this is going on throughout the state of Wisconsin, by the way, where union workers are losing their jobs, and they're moving industrial and manufacturing jobs are going down South to right-to-work states where they don't have to face unions.

And that work is too cheap.

They go across Mexico and into Asia eventually in order to avoid paying workers their due wages.

But here, we're trying to force Libby to come back to the negotiating tables and sign an agreement, but they refuse to do so.

So, finally, Chavez tells me, "Look, you're doing a great job, but this is your fourth year, "and you still don't have a contract.

"Why don't you help us get a contract in California?

And once we get the," he's doing, we both started the same year.

"Once we get the contract in California, then I'll come back to Wisconsin and help you get yours."

I believed him, right?

Who was supposed to know that grape boycott was gonna go on for five years?

All right.

But anyway, here goes Jesus Salas to Milwaukee to organize a grape boycott.

Father John Maurice had the archdiocese-funded Centro Hispano host us in the back room there to run the grape boycott.

And here he introduces us at a Mass.

"Are you sure, Father, that it's all right if I go up there?"

We're all wearing the thunderbird symbol of the farmworkers.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We just want to introduce you to the community."

"Okay."

What is going on in Milwaukee?

They've been marching for the last two years for an ordinance of open housing.

So here we have an intersection with the farmworkers and the civil rights movement in Milwaukee.

And Father Groppi and I become close, and here in front of Kohl's Food Store.

Very few people know that Senator Kohl's family kept us out in the cold there for months.

He wouldn't take his grapes off the table.

But that's another story.

Father Groppi tells, "Jesus, you're doing a great job.

"You got the leaflets going.

"You tell people not to buy grapes, you know, "when they go into the store, write to the growers, "you know, to negotiate with the farmworkers.

But you gotta do something different."

"What is that?"

"Little bit of a direct action."

"What is that?"

"Well, go to the doggone parking lot "and stop the customers from coming in.

Why do they have to go into the grocer?"

"Well, that's a great idea."

So anyway, this is what's going on in the Black civil rights movement.

These are the tactics that they're using.

Well, to make a long story short, we get a little bit of direct action and we get thrown in jail.

But we don't know anything about getting arrested.

You never want to get arrested on a Friday night, 'cause you have to stay there until Monday when there's no judges that adjudicate issues on weekends.

You don't wanna do it without the mouthpiece.

You wanna let lawyers know if you're gonna be doing some direct action that lead to an arrest.

You wanna have a lawyer handy, right?

You wanna have some money because they're gonna charge you bail.

Otherwise they're not gonna let you out.

So here we go, well, anyway.

But these are some of my heroes.

These are some of the individuals that helped me in the North Side.

That is, from right to left, Assemblyman Lloyd Barbee, an attorney, and he sued the Milwaukee Public Schools over the desegregate.

Vel Phillips, just an extraordinary woman.

The first African American to sit in the Milwaukee City Council.

Orville Pitts, Milwaukee County supervisor.

All of them are wearing union buttons and supporting Obreros Unidos.

And Lloyd helping me out in the rallies that we're having as a master of ceremonies, integrating rallies both for Latinos and for African Americans.

And while we're down there, that agency that I told you got funded for daycare, United Migrant Opportunity Services, well, they had, this is part of the war on poverty that began with Lyndon Johnson and President Kennedy and the maximum feasibility of participation by the poor, right, was not being followed by UMOS.

All of the top administrative positions were non-Latinos.

There was no members of the board that were migrant or former migrant workers.

"Come on, Jesus, help us."

To make a long story short, I did help them.

And what did the non-Latino administrators do?

They all resigned, imperiling the funding and hoping that Washington would send the money to them rather than to the United Migrant Opportunity Services.

But the board supported me and offered me the job.

So I said, "Look, I'll just take it for two seasons.

"I'm not interested in being the chief executive officer "for a poverty program.

I wanna get back to what I was doing."

But we reorganized the board and changed UMOS into a migrant advocacy.

And of course, the education had, the retraining, changing the job descriptions, et cetera.

We fielded the first candidate for office, started doing voter registration, getting out the vote.

This is Dante Navarro in the middle there.

Esequiel Guzman to his right.

And then I'm with a taco in my mouth beside Esequiel.

But we were doing enough work so the governor pays attention to us.

So here we are.

Governor Lucey is touring the barrio, and we're finally getting some attention in terms of that issue that I was telling you about.

But we were a little bit more anxious to do it.

And this is the time the Republican-dominated legislature wanted to dismantle the-- just like all these wonderful legislation that we had, there was an extensive support for helping the indigent.

But now they were changing that.

They were saying that Mexicans were moving into Milwaukee, and Blacks, in order to take advantage of welfare.

Can you believe that, after 10 years of migrating as a farmworker and all the years that we spent supporting migrant workers, that notion that we were coming here to Wisconsin to be on welfare, just so outside the wall.

But the 30 days before we could receive aid was crucial, because that meant that we couldn't assist the workers in the relocation assistance, and we needed that.

So we marched to Madison, and Groppi and I and three other welfare recipients got ushered out of there under the National Guard with bayonets.

The Milwaukee welfare demonstration led to the arrest of Ernesto Chacn and Jos Puente.

And hundreds of people are marching on our behalf.

And after months and thousands of signatures, I wasn't arrested for any damages to the, or Groppi, to the state Capitol.

It was a civic-- But some goodhearted person, never knew who it was, ended up paying for whatever alleged damage that we did, and we didn't do any.

But Governor Lucey pardoned Chacn and Puente for their arrest when they came to the aid.

Well, taking over, you know, United Migrant Opportunity Service, how could we get those people to advance in those programs if they couldn't get their certificate for teaching in the Milwaukee Public School system, if they couldn't apply for those jobs or those community agencies that were taken over because University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and University of Wisconsin-Madison was closed to us?

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, out of 25,000 students, all of the Latinos could sit around one table.

So first we had to access, open up the doors, so that we could get in there and really make our agencies viable by enrolling in them.

And it took us two years.

They would open up the doors, but they wouldn't conduct the programs.

And the same thing here in Madison.

They would open up the doors, but they didn't want to, they didn't want the academic courses.

So here we are camping out, following Groppi's notion about direct action.

We're protesting.

After months of picketing, we decided to sleep outside, camp, go on a fast.

And they had the guards out in the front of the chancellor's hall, and so that we could use the bathroom as we were sleeping there.

And one of the young men that wanted to use the bathroom said, "Jesus, "the guard for the night has left, and the guard for the morning is not here, and the door is open."

So we walked in there and took all of our blankets in there, and we started calling up the phones.

We didn't go into the chancellor's office.

It's just to the reception area.

By the time they found out what we had done, we had hundreds of folks in there, as you can see.

And that ended the picketing and the camping and the fasting because they agreed to establish the Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute.

And it's still going on at this time, 50 years later.

Here we are celebrating and planning what are we gonna do with the Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute?

And up there in the entrances of the hall, there's hundreds of people here.

This young lady and others like her, dressed in Mexican folkloric costumes, come up, take the microphone from my hand, and said, "We're not gonna put up with you, macho."

"What are you talking about?"

The women are upset that this male-dominated organizations that were set up and all the activity, the way we handled this, they're not gonna put up with it.

And they want, as part of the planning session, an all-women's discussion, so they can come up with some recommendations by the end of the day that will support some of their demands.

And there's other pictures of this activity.

But just to give you an idea of what we had to suffer through, right, in order to, but it was a great, the greatest thing to happen to our community because it kept us intact, right?

This is something that occurred within the community and we were all the better for it.

There's other things that occurred.

The desegregation of the Milwaukee Public School system and the establishing of the-- we demanded the establishing a bilingual programs in the celebration of Fiestas Patrias, and they wouldn't do it, so we started walking out, emptying all the schools in the nearby neighborhood and marching on the 16th of September and the Cinco de Mayo holiday.

Now, we didn't invent the celebrations.

Ever since Mexicans have been in Milwaukee, they've been celebrating on Cinco and the Diecisis.

But what we did is we politicized it.

We used the events of the Diecisis and of the Cinco de Mayo to advance the issues that we had in the community.

And look what we would do after the marches, just hundreds of folks would just come in, and we would have rallies afterwards and put our demands and get people engaged in what were the issues of the day, including, we were a little bit impatient with Governor Lucey.

He was a good friend of ours, but a little impatient in terms of what was going on.

We wanted the migrant labor law to be instituted, and he didn't get the votes in the first session, and we decided that we wanted to picket.

The same thing, now I'm graduated.

I left the UMOS and graduated from UWM.

I'm now enrolled in UW-Madison.

We've been picketing since 1975 for Chicano studies.

We've gone through the whole rigmarole, advisory committee's recommendation, et cetera.

Here's 1983.

And now this is the second Letters & Science.

It was Cronon, now it's Shain.

And we're negotiating in the next picture.

The number of people that he gave us to teach academic courses were not prepared.

Nobody had ever thought of a Latino studies course or a Chicano studies course.

And we wanted the hiring to go on, and eventually it did.

These are collaborations that we did.

The war is going on.

The Contras in Nicaragua are being destabilized.

Reagan orders the invasion of Grenada, following up on Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic.

And we're collaborating with other groups.

And here, in Spanish, we're saying the union hace la fuerza, or "results in strength" or "makes strength," in la fuerza a la victoria, or that "strength to victory."

And these are the legislative initiatives.

We eventually amended the University of Wisconsin budget to include Chicano studies.

And they were pissed-- excuse me, they were angry.

They were angry that we were able to have that relationship with the Democratic Party to be able to convince them to amend the University of Wisconsin-Madison budget to include a line item for $50,000 to begin academic courses for Latinos.

And initially, they didn't want that money.

They took, they gave it to the School of Education.

School of Education used it for recruiting.

So it took us years to get it back.

And finally we're, the University of Wisconsin Regents last year proposed that the Chicano studies program be offered a major for the first time.

This is a necessary road in order to get a department, so we're on our way.

We passed the migrant labor law that you saw that march when we were a little bit impatient with the governor.

The Chinese students in San Francisco went to the Supreme Court, Lau vs. Nichols.

And they said that anyone with those issues having to do with a native language had to be, those schools had to institute a bilingual program.

So we pursued and instituted a bicultural, bilingual bill, and it passed, and the migrant tuition bill in 1984.

The first three were done in the '70s, and the last one we-- completely MEChA.

This is MEChA, the student organization, passed the migrant tuition bill.

Anybody who's worked from three to five years as a migrant worker should be considered for qualifications of residency as a state of Wisconsin resident, as a migrant tuition, which was the precursor to the DREAM Act, or that is, children of the undocumented who are qualified, the mere fact that their parents are not documented if they graduate from a bona fide high school and are qualified should be admitted as residents.

And we finally got Governor Doyle here to pass it.

And Voces de la Frontera leader Christine Neumann-Ortiz is to the governor's right, and I'm to the left.

But the Republicans rescinded the bill.

In 2010, Governor Walker rescinded the DREAM Act and also took away the opportunity of undocumented to get licenses.

So here are University of Wisconsin students demanding licenses for the undocumented if they are able to pass a safe roads test, the stopping of the INS raids, and tuition remission for children who are qualified can come in and enroll in the UW system.

And that's the end of the road here, so... [audience applauding]