Latino Wisconsin

(mellow techno music) - There's been Latinos and Mexicanos here since the '20s.

We call them Los Primeros.

- Some people thought we shouldn't have immigrants here.

- Booming demographic responsible for 100% of the population growth in the area.

- We could apply for immigrant, racial and worker justice.

(speaks in foreign language) - The joke right is if you're not related to a Latino, you still (mumbles).

(upbeat techno music) (mellow strings music) (traffic buzzing) (mellow strings music) - It's not a unskilled job.

It's a skilled job.

(cow moos) My family settled here in 1857.

They were from Switzerland and Germany.

I'm fifth generation dairy farmer.

We milk 500 cows 24 hours a day.

If you grow up in the business, and you're used to getting up at four o'clock in the morning, it's not so bad, but if you haven't grown up in this business, it's not clean, it's cold in the winter, and it's hot in the summer.

Initially, when we had 300 cows, we needed six or seven employees, and that was a struggle.

We tried to be the best employer around.

We still do, but it was hard to find people, and it kept getting worse.

In the last 10 years, I probably had 150 people apply for a job here.

Two of them have been Americans.

One said he couldn't work on weekends.

So, I talked to a friend of mine over in Minnesota that had Mexican employees, and I asked him, "How do you access these people?"

He told me, "Look in the back of the Hoard's Dairyman."

There was an ad.

I think three, four days later, Manuel showed up in Winona on the bus.

I picked him up, and he was fabulous.

He worked as hard as I did.

He knew what he was doing.

It's like milking cows.

I used to milk cows.

And they do a better job than I do.

Servero started working here, I think in 2000 or 1999.

And he's working here today.

His son works here, Federico works here.

His brother-in-law, Roberto, worked here.

Each of us have to get to know immigrants, and to get to know them as people, rather than just as this group.

So, I go to Mexico every three years to visit the families of my employees.

And we just counted them.

There were 17 different people from that little village that have worked here.

Our highest-paid employees, we have a differential for the night.

He makes $38,000 a year.

Marco just came recently.

He'll make about 29 to $30,000 this year, plus a place to stay, health insurance.

They work 60 hours a week, so, he's probably making nine to nine and a quarter an hour starting.

When somebody comes to work for us, I ask for their documents.

They usually present me with a Social Security card and a green card, which is actually pink.

What my immigration attorney has told me is that if you're a reasonable person and you look at the documents, and they look reasonable, accept them.

I've been called lots of bad things, been called a slave-trader and everything else.

It's frustrating.

I figure that if I'm going to attract Americans to do the job, I would have to pay $20 an hour.

At $20 an hour, in the last 10 years, I would have made money in two years.

So, basically, I've been out of business.

I mean, that's just the way the facts are.

- The cows need to be milked twice a day, so, the dairy industry is in our corner now, saying, "Hey, do something about immigration reform because the workforce that we have is not protected under existing law."

(yelling protest slogans) - So, we are here because we are making a strong stand against an anti-immigrant law that would turn local government into an arm of immigration and legalized discrimination.

Now let us hear from dairy farmer, John Rosenow.

(cheering) - In recent times, the last 20 years or so, we, the Wisconsin dairy farmers, have found someone who wants to do what we love.

They find the work rewarding, just like I did, when I got out of college years ago.

They just want a job that allows them to pursue their dream.

(cheering) I'm a realist.

I understand the political climate.

I've been to DC half dozen times to testify.

Certainly, there's some risk.

Somebody gonna come and steal all my employees because maybe their documents aren't real or something like that.

That's a risk, but if we don't say anything, we're not gonna accomplish anything.

- What happens is gonna really set a tone for politicians that are right now building their political careers on racism and anti-immigration politics, to really question their political future.

- 80% of the milk harvested in Wisconsin is harvested by immigrants.

And that's a big deal.

(mellow banjo music) (whirring) - We could not operate our industry without this seasonal workforce.

That's why people from Texas, years ago, have come up here to work.

There has never been enough local workers.

(mellow music) - We have more opportunities in here in Wisconsin than in Texas.

And I like for the kids, the school.

Well, we came here this year in May, took us like around a week, 'cause my sister's truck broke down.

It's hard.

We work on seven days a week, 12-hour shift.

(mellow music) - They'll say that Latinos are taking jobs away from people that are here.

When migrant workers come to the state of Wisconsin, they take jobs that nobody else wants.

For someone to travel 2,500 miles in search of employment, without knowing that they're going to have housing, or whether they're gonna find employment, you know, that's a tribute to them.

And then when they get their job, they work really, really hard.

I was born into a family that were migrant workers.

We traveled around the country, primarily to the Midwest from Texas.

In those days, they didn't come in there and inspect the fields and say, you know, the children shouldn't be here, you know.

So, my job was to haul the potato sacks around.

(upbeat music) - Yeah, we went to Michigan.

That's where we used to go first.

We would pack the asparagus.

I called my niece, she's here, too, and she said, "Come on here in Wisconsin.

There's a lot of work."

Over here at the Seneca, the corn (mumbles) just give it a try.

(whirring) We got up at four, and we start doing breakfast, or whatever we're gonna take for lunch.

And at five, we take off.

Oh, yeah, we like to work.

We like to get pay and pay our bills.

(upbeat techno music) - Just a minute.

Good afternoon, Jumo.

Yes, what Toma would be for Aurora and Montano.

First time that I came to Wisconsin, it was in 1998.

That year, we didn't know anybody around this area.

And we were staying in a ranch in Minoscoro.

My title right now is the property manager, and I run a hundred units migrant housing.

They tell them, "You're going to find a job over there.

You're gonna work a lot of hours."

And the reality with farm workers, you never know.

We have families, they've doing it year after year after year.

And I understand what they're going through.

Really hard for someone who travel and look for a better future.

This is my house.

I have four kids.

I hope for my kids to continue their education, grow up here in Wisconsin.

And we have more opportunity here because everybody have a job.

(mellow piano music) - We came to Arcadia 1976. Who knew this kind of terrain was in Wisconsin?

So, we actually fell in love with the place.

The first people that came here were the English.

Then the Poles came, and then the Germans came, the Scandinavians came, and then everything kind of stayed the same for awhile.

And then in the '90s, the Latinos came.

- Nobody likes to see their community with empty storefronts.

And I'm so grateful that we've had the growth, and we've had the entrepreneurship that has been brought to Arcadia to fill those stores, and to bring business and wealth back into the community, to serve Arcadia and its people.

(upbeat techno music) - Some people thought we shouldn't have immigrants here.

Mayor John Kimmel was elected in 2006, and he didn't want, you know, Spanish-speaking people coming in.

You know, a lot of these things that were just somewhat you hear today with some of the political things that are going on, but (mumbles) and Ashley kept on expanding.

And that's the time when the Latinos were starting to come into our area.

(clacking) - The Latino population was certainly, you know, a major factor in our operations.

We have our corporate headquarters here in Arcadia, Wisconsin, as well as our manufacturing and distribution services.

We now have over 4,000 employees at Ashley Furniture Industries.

We're the largest employer in Trumbull County by far.

- There's a lot of work in here.

You can work in the farm.

You can work in the furniture.

You can book in a chicken Pilgrim.

So, they open to you, "Come over and work for us."

They say, "You are welcome."

(mellow strings music) - The Latinos came so quickly.

It wasn't a gradual thing.

It was kind of fast, and change is hard for my generation.

- (mumbles) speakers, not too many Caucasian places left in a way.

Grocery stores and main street restaurants, everything has gone Hispanic, you know.

It's a decent thing, you know.

We've changed, even our churches have changed.

They have a regular mass and Latino masses.

There again, most of the older generations, they'll say, well, that was their time to go.

Now it's a Latino mass, so they don't go.

(praying in foreign language) - On every weekend now, we have two Spanish masses.

Sunday mass, 12 o'clock, in Spanish, is very well attended.

On some Sundays, I would say it's the most attended mass on the weekends.

I am from Poland, and I spent most of my preschool life in Peru.

Six years ago, the Bishop called me back.

He assigned me to Arcadia because of the Hispanic population being so large.

It is actually the largest Hispanic parish in our diocese.

Last year, I believe, we had like 90 some Hispanic baptisms and only about 10 American baptisms.

So, that gives you an idea where the population of Arcadia is heading.

(mellow strings music) - I'm originally from Jalisco, Mexico.

I moved to Arizona when I was 12 years old, and I moved from Arizona three years ago to Wisconsin, new state, new life (laughs).

My husband, he goes, "There's nobody that speaks Spanish here for people to go and do their taxes."

This is my fifth year now here in this location.

I noticed my business is growing, and I'm pretty sure business here, even, you know, food, places or stores, even around the farmers, I believe they are doing better because our people are coming here.

- This community grows by 3,000 people during the day, going down to Ashley and down to Pill Grove.

- I'm not sure if I like all the traffic.

Housing is such a shortage here, we can't keep up.

- There is a need for housing, definitely.

We're seeing multiple families, it seems, like in these single family dwellings.

It's gotta be kinda tough on them, is tough on the neighborhoods, because they have multiple cars.

- In fact, there's a block down here that's almost all Spanish people, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico here, El Salvador, next to me.

They bought the house 11 years ago.

- Our schools weren't ready for it.

We're outgrowing our schools.

- We're actually just under 68% Hispanic, district-wide, and our elementary is closer to 80%.

And our middle school is about three years old, and we are already seeing some space impact issues with our middle school, just because of the rising population.

That's a great problem to have.

Many districts, especially small rural districts, are continuing to see a decline in their student population.

We've actually seen an increase in our population.

Instead of being a school district over 1,300, we would have about just over 400 students in our school district if we had no Latino students right now.

They're kids.

They're not kids who have a demographic label to them.

They're kids.

They have an understanding of other cultures that many students in small rural communities in Wisconsin never have an opportunity to be a part of.

(chattering in foreign language) - I teach social studies.

I love it.

And I love teaching in a very bilingual setting.

So, right now we're reading the Diary of Anne Frank in Spanish.

And that's actually been very interesting because many students are finding connections with Ann's life.

- The students open up to and they tell you their stories.

And a lot of them are kind of sad.

I mean, you take it home with you.

Even once they're here, they're afraid that when they get home, their parents aren't going to be there.

- We actually did have ICE in the community back in October.

When I learned of it, I immediately alerted the entire staff in the district and told them that if ICE does come to the school doors, we will not let them in the building.

(upbeat accordion music) - We felt it was really time that Arcadia had an event to kind of celebrate the different cultures.

(upbeat accordion music) Kind of social change fueled by art and culture.

(mellow music) (cheering) (clapping) - It may be new thing in the experience for a small town like Arcadia, but you know, like we've seen in other places, people kind of get used to it, and they're happy about it.

(singing in foreign language) - I think it's going to be a younger generation and I'm seeing it already.

There they're gonna be the ones that we have to rely on to be a blended community.

- I think it's a positive thing.

It's diversity.

You're gonna see more of this all the time.

It's happening in Arcadia a lot quicker than a lot of other areas.

- People are making their lives here.

Those people are getting to blend in in a big way and become part of the fabric of our community.

- Now after 10 years, finally, I feel now this is home.

I will stay here.

I don't want to leave anywhere.

(mellow piano music) - If you look at it from an aerial view, you'll see that just like most cities, from up high, it's not a lot of color.

There's a big spot of color.

Mural of peace.

It's hopeful.

A lot of truckers would come from Chicago or come from down south.

And I heard that they would say that that was a landmark.

They knew they're in Milwaukee now just looking at it.

So, it's really nice to know that it's a landmark and it was funded by Esperanza Unida.

The executive director was Richard Oulahan.

He said he wanted to have a mural that showed the pride of the south side.

The Latinos murals is part of the culture.

It sprang out of necessity to show problems, concerns, and also pride of the Latino and African-American communities.

(mellow strings music) - [Man] There's been Latinos, even Mexicanos here since the '20s.

We call them Los Primeros because they were the first to develop the community.

(mellow music) (engines roaring) - I was interested in oral histories, and I said let's do a (mumbles), and we'll make it a research project, and we'll collect oral histories.

And then we'll have the students involved in that research.

- I guess I didn't connect the faces to a lot of the things that I benefit from now.

(mellow music) - I think the organization has been a catalyst to create change within the state of Wisconsin, including Milwaukee.

We started off with one grant and we have an excess of 40 different programs now.

- There's a natural progression in the story of the mural.

It starts off with migrant agriculture.

And so in the very beginning, you see the farm workers.

It continues through the organizing efforts, so, Salas and others when they marched from Wautoma to Madison.

We ran into these problems that the migrants were having, injuries, not paid their wages, violations of a housing code that we had.

We not so much wanted new legislation as such.

We want the enforcement of existing legislation.

And then when Chavez marched in '66, we said, "That's what we need."

We need to dramatize really the work and the living conditions at that time.

Almost 10,000 migrant workers were coming into Wisconsin.

(mellow strings music) We called it Obreros Unidos because the workers produce an obra, a work, just like a work of art, or any work.

Problem was that Libby's then moved their operations out of state rather than negotiate with the union.

(mellow music) Migrant farm workers usually traveled because there's no job on the home base.

Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, they saw the opportunity of staying in Wisconsin because they could get a full-time job.

They could see a better future, not only for them as worker, but also for the family.

What we found later on was that there was a lot of discrimination in the workplace.

- There's marches against Allen Bradley for filing of job discrimination.

But Allen Bradley was a federal contractor during the Vietnam War.

They were obliged to have an affirmative action program and out of several thousand employees and a handful of Latinos working there, the brewery industry was in the same situation.

So, the (mumbles) participated in the picket, and during that period of time, that the American Union for Civil Rights is formed.

- The issues were also tenants' rights and education.

And then we saw police problems.

And we saw during our organizing campaign that we were having a lot of young kids going to high school and graduating, but not going to college.

So, we thought that maybe what we could do then was to begin to address the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

- When I enroll here at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1968, so out of 25,000 students, all the Latinos could sit around one table.

- Why aren't there more of us, you know?

That's the one thing I kept saying.

Why are we so few of us, why?

So I go to my class, I'd run, and then go straight to the beginning line and eat my lunch while I was picketing.

But I never missed my class because I was afraid of retaliation.

I really was afraid that somebody would say, "We're gonna give her a bad grade," or something because of my activities.

- We adopt the tactic of direct action.

In other words, we're not gonna stand in front of the chancellor's office for weeks at a time, picketing with no alternative.

When the chancellor, Klotche, refuses to meet with us, we start escalating our activities.

And that's when five of us decide that we're going to get arrested, to bring attention to the fact that there's only a couple of dozen of us out of 25,000 students.

And what do we have now?

We have academic support services provided by the Roberto Hernandez Center.

You have this peer interaction among the Latino kids that will hopefully lead to a better college graduation rate.

- Going to the RHC, the Roberto Hernandez Center, even just like the simple act of doing homework around people that looked like me, you know, was nice for me.

(mellow music) This mural will tell the story of the people of the community.

I think it's gonna empower people to see huge brown heroes, you know, to see heroes that look like them.

You know, like Graciela De La Cruz, who played a huge role in shaping bilingual education in NPS schools.

- They were flunking our kids.

We needed teachers in the classroom that would have lived and walked in the shoes of our children, whether you were migrant or you were not migrant, whether you were Puerto Rican or Mexican, they needed the culture.

They had to survive and they had to survive in both.

And we want them to be A+ in Spanish, A+ in English, not just in English.

To me, I represented a bilingual education that it was coming.

And a lot of people were not too happy with me.

It will always be controversial because we have people who feel, if you're in the United States, you have to speak only English, especially now because of the politics.

(beeping) - And then we end up at Fiesta Mexicana.

But Fiesta Mexicana, curiously, isn't only a celebration.

(upbeat music) - [Man] You had a purpose because our community was growing, and we thought maybe it was important for us to begin to recognize our identity and who we were, a Mexican, Mexican-American, Latinos.

Now Fiesta continue to do what we've wanted to do in the educational system, promote kids to go to school.

- Well, it's called the Wisconsin Hispanic Scholarship Foundation.

1.7 million to scholarships for Hispanics to go to higher education, to universities.

(protesters yelling slogans) - Voces was created to continue to fight for immigrant, racial, and worker justice.

(speaks in foreign language) - Where I consider the contemporary immigrant rights movement to start is really in 2006, when Congressman Sensenbrenner introduced a bill that would have created a mass criminalization program of anyone who was out of status, including children, and anyone who knew about someone's status and didn't turn them over to immigration, would also face criminal charges.

So, Voces De La Frontera would be not allowed to exist.

- I wanted to get a bill passed in 2005 and 2006, and the people who did not like increased border security had all of these demonstrations, and literally, they divided the country.

- Milwaukee was the third city in the country to turn out in mass scale.

And you know, that really moved that off the table.

It brought immigration reform back on the table.

2006 was also important because it exposed the face of the immigrant community.

And what was it?

It was working families.

It was parents with their kids, standing up for themselves, and really demonstrated that immigrants have a positive contribution to our state.

And they're tired of these kind of attacks.

- [Announcer] Good evening, (mumbles).

Our street painting workshop is in full swing.

Come on down.

- Okay, I'll hold this.

- Yeah.

- You got it?

- Okay, got it.

(cheering) - I think, as an educator and as a community artist, Milwaukee is a place that you can start new things.

If you look at like memorials on the street, I think, sometimes art, I think it's helping us heal some sort of, some part of us that doesn't know how to deal with death.

And that's when I decided to start the Day of the Dead Parade.

(rhythmic drums thumping) I really think it was the skull images though, that really attract people because they're not like these bloody, gory skulls.

They're happy, smiling, colorful, fully dressed skeletons with bright flowers in their hair.

We're also embracing part of our ancient culture, part of our ancient history, whether it's indigenous people, black people in our Latino community.

And so I feel like the more we embrace other parts of being Mexican-American, or Mexican or Latin X or Latino, that we're including now all of those other voices.

- And we all strive, no matter who we are as people, we want peace and harmony, live in happiness, and get along with one another.

So that was the theme.

Even though that's the goal, there never is completely peace in the world.

There's always tension, so I put in a lightning bolt showing tension in the world, but then there's little things at the bottom of the mural.

You see like little, they look like doll cutouts of people of different races, so there's white, black.

I even put like other, put an orange person, 'cause back then, on your driver's license, they had the, you're either white, black, or they wouldn't even recognize you as being brown.

It was those three things or other, so I include everybody the world over, including the others.

(pensive strings music) (mellow piano music) (kids chattering, squealing) - A recent report on facilities show that the growth of the population in this area is the largest in the city, okay?

Latinos are growing in many different ways.

Right now, we're like 28% of the public schools.

And we could be larger in years to come.

So, they recommended that in order to accommodate the growth in the population in the public realm here, you needed to build at least four more schools.

It's impossibility, politically, you just can't do that.

There are issues of money that have to be addressed and all of that stuff, but the people who are in the private sector, they don't care about that.

All they care about is that, whoa, there's a population growth.

And they build a wonderful, beautiful facility that takes kids.

(mid-tempo music) - Everybody ready?

One, two, three.

(cheering) (clapping) The first stage, I think, costs total about 53 million, of which 10 million was raised outside the family.

The reality is there are more students than all of our schools can handle at this point in time.

The Hispanic community is the only growing community in Milwaukee.

This was the right location, right place for a large new school.

If you see where all the school growth is, where all the new schools are coming, they're mostly on the south side.

- When we looked at some data from the Milwaukee Foundation, which told us that the 53215 zip code, or the zip code west of UCC, west of 16th Street, that there are over 5,000 children of Spanish-speaking descent in that zip code, that led us to sort of say, "Can we explore how we can go to the zip code to work with our youngest population?"

The importance of early childhood education, particularly the importance of early childhood education in a Latino community, where you can really begin to provide vocabulary words, stimulus very early on, is extremely important.

We're building a new facility that will accommodate 200.

It will be close to a $10 million investment.

Imagine what a $10 million investment means to the 53215 zip code.

25 years ago, when we merged what Bruce Guadalupe School, that changed the whole focus of our organization.

We are a public school, anybody can come, anybody can participate.

The only difference between us and a public school is that we're managed by a private entity.

1,700 children, over 1,700 are attending our school, K3 through eighth grade.

- UCC and Bruce Guadalupe just gave me a lot of opportunities outside of the community to grow and to find success.

My name is Daniel-Eli Cevilla.

I'm a Human Development and Family Studies major here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I'm also doing and completing some certificates in global health, as well as Chicano and Latino studies.

(mellow music) - My name is Gissell Vera.

I am a 2019 graduate from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School.

I was the first valedictorian.

And I was also the student body president for two years.

- Cristo Rey schools educate over 12,000 kids across the country, with 37 schools in metro areas coast-to-coast.

So, we opened in 2015 and we had about 125 freshmen.

About 90% of our students are Hispanic.

Currently we're at 398 students.

Both the demand for what we do and the desire to grow has led us to build a new school building at 18th and National.

It's a $33 million project.

It is a little over 100,0000 square feet.

We're a Catholic college prep school.

We serve students of limited financial means.

And so we participate in the Milwaukee parental choice program, and it helps fund the cost of education for our students at Cristo Rey.

We offer students four days of school a week, and then one day of work.

We charge a wage from the company that the company then pays the school to help offset the student's education.

- For me, it was really important to graduate college and also the work part of it all.

- Students can go out into the community, and get their foot in the door in a potential career that they might not have had otherwise the opportunity to do.

- When we decided to build the school, we had four pillars: the family, faith, education, and athletics and arts.

And we wanted excellence in all areas.

And the reason is, we felt educating the whole child was essential to achieve long-term success.

We created a great soccer field, an aquatic center that doesn't exist in any other school in the state and in the world.

We are spending $10,000, or we will spend $10,000 when we get to capacity per student.

Now spending more, but as we build the school, we'll eventually get down to that level.

Choice students get about 8,000.

That creates a $2,000 gap between what we get from the state and what we spend on the students.

So, every year we expect to donate anywhere from one to $2 million, depending on our effectiveness fundraising.

The current school has a capacity for 1,500, 1,600 kids.

And we're looking at an addition in four or five years that might expand that to another 1,500.

We want everybody to be as effective as we are.

And if they're good competitors and we have a hard time getting students, hey, that's my definition of success.

- So, the idea that you have a few schools that are doing well because what we call new liberals, you know, people that think that it's a good idea the schools are all bad, so let's put it in the private sector, but their money, the philanthropists, everybody puts their money in there, and they cut the funding from the public schools.

When we look at the amount of money that they get, combined with all kinds of other resources that they get, voucher schools get grants, I mean, charter schools get grants, they get incredible amounts of money put into them.

The aggregate of the financial resources that they get is better than the public schools in those big schools, okay?

On top of that, they are English-only schools.

That's a problem for me as an educator.

Right now, we have, my gosh, over 30 schools that are involved in bilingual activity.

(speaking in foreign language) (all reciting in foreign language) - I think there's a misconception of what bilingual education is, because bilingual education is not just teaching in Spanish.

Bilingual education is teaching in the students' native tongue.

So, academically, they're learning while learning English.

(mellow music) - Please open your books.

Even if we read to the middle of the page, I always go back and read what I did yesterday, just a little bit.

She is pretty like my own girl, 'cause that's at the top of page five.

- I felt very comfortable at that school because everyone was like me.

I didn't know how to speak English at all.

- So in '95, we opened our doors as a dual language school with the focus of science and technology.

And now, he's bilingual, is K3 through eighth grade.

Currently, we have about 665.

So, we've doubled in size in the last six years, along with doubling in staff.

- And those kids, 80, 90% will go to colleges, both four and two-year colleges, and Milwaukee will be a different community.

- I'm currently a JAMS major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, journalism, advertising, public relations and media studies.

Cumulative grade point average at the end of high school was it 3.8, and as of right now in college, is 3.9.

- After I graduate, I plan to keep studying.

I want to go into a counseling psych graduate program, and become like a family counselor.

- I was admitted to Marquette Georgetown and Holy Cross on a full ride.

I don't really see myself moving somewhere else after graduation, especially 'cause I feel like there's so much work to do.

There's so much I want to accomplish here.

Therefore, (mumbles) would be the best place for me.

I love law, so I want to become an attorney.

- We will be the people that will stay in Milwaukee in Wisconsin and we'll do things, so that will be a whole another movement.

(mellow piano music) - This city will go as far as the Hispanic community will take it.

The growth over the last year of staying closer to 600,000 has been almost totally attributed to the growth in Hispanic community.

(upbeat techno music) - For years, we've been hearing, right, the Latinos are the fastest growing population in the country.

And that, what, by 2052, I think, we're going to make up more than 50% of this country.

And the joke, right, is if you're not related to a Latino, you're (mumbles).

- Wisconsin as a whole, I think our population grows by less than 1% over the next 50 years.

And so, looking towards populations that are going to replace what has been largely a white community is important to our future and important to understand.

- We're an incredible consumer base.

24% of the moviegoers in the United States happen to be Latinos.

One in practically every four consumer is Latino.

That's a pretty important consumer base.

- I think numbers don't mean anything unless they paint a picture.

And for us, it's how do we make sure that people understand the significance of our growth and accept the contributions that we are making to the country and to our communities.

And then how do we make sure we are being noticed for the right reasons, and that we're being noticed and given opportunities like anyone else.

- Here, we are a booming demographic responsible for 100% of the population growth in the area, 100% of the job growth in the area, but yet, we only have one Hispanic (inaudible).

- My district in particular, it's close to 70% Latino.

I represent about 40,000 people.

30% of the district is under 18 years of age.

- When I walked down Cesar Chavez, when I walk down Mitchell street, I see an entrepreneurial spirit.

People are working and talking to one another.

And that resilience, to me, is what's made the neighborhood successful.

- When I ran for office, the common wisdom was that a Latino could never get elected to anything in the city.

Most of the Latino candidates had been soundly defeated, but the community obviously grew and grew to the point where neighborhoods that were previously not Latino at all became completely Latino.

- I have always felt that within our Latino community, we are very diverse, of many different political persuasions.

Now, we have four Latino state legislators serving in the Wisconsin State Assembly: myself; Representative Jesse Rodriguez joined after me, a Republican; we also have Representative Jimmy Anderson, who, many don't realize, his mother is a Mexican immigrant; and our newest legislator, Representative Marisabel Cabrera from the ninth assembly district, the south side of Milwaukee.

We know that the super majority is on the near south side of Milwaukee.

When we get the near south side voting, that means the Latino community is voting, too.

And that's a good thing all around.

(mellow techno music) - In 2016, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation came out with the 2016 Latino study.

There was a lot of negative trend pieces that, you know, we really wanted to get our arms around.

You know, the key things that came out of it were strong recognition that we had to do something different.

That's where the Hispanic Collaborative was born.

- The Hispanic Collaborative and the partnership with MMAC came about almost naturally.

As we look ahead at entrepreneurs, at workforce, at leaders in this community, the Latino and Hispanic community are gonna be an integral part of our business future.

- And we took it to the next level and said, "Let's compare ourselves against 50 different cities."

And what we found out that when we did that comparison, Milwaukee ranked 39th out of 50 cities in the wellbeing of Hispanics, and that encompassed everything from educational attainment, to workforce development, to income levels.

- Just in terms of employment, Hispanic Milwaukee would be number eight, a lot of our people working.

If we look at that index in terms of income and poverty, we slide from 39 to 45th.

- I believe that if we can work with that population to figure out how being underemployed, we can create opportunities for them to actually get what they're worth in the workplace with additional training certifications.

So they don't have to work two jobs, and they can work one, and get paid what they should be getting paid.

- Well, after high school, I started working at Smithfield.

All my family pretty much worked there, like my dad worked there, my brothers worked there.

So I thought that was the way to go.

I've been working there for 12 years now, 14, $15 an hour.

- I started there in production area.

Then I moved on to crew leader, packing pepperonis and sausage.

- So, the Smithfield apprentices come to class here at MATC, one day per week.

And Smithfield is using the apprenticeship to upscale a large group of individuals to attack the skills gap within their own company.

These individuals have come from production worker, and they're moving into machine repair, repairing the actual machines that they were actually working on before as production workers.

- I think one of the key things that MATC did was open the Walker Square MATC location in the heart of the Hispanic community, is bilingual.

- One of the processes of apprenticeship is that you gradually move up in your pay scale.

So, a person that's earning $15 an hour, that eventually moves up to 28 or $30 an hour, can be life-changing.

- This has given me an opportunity for my future and my kids.

Right now, thanks to the program, I'm actually going to buy a house pretty soon.

Better life, better life for them.

- It changed my perspective about everything, like, I actually signed up for a two-year degree here at MATC as well.

When I graduate here, I will go to a four-year university and get my bachelor's degree.

- It's important for Latinos to have good jobs for the economic impact of the area, but you know, why don't we have more Hispanics in high-ranking positions in the city?

- And in fact, our study showed that, nationally, we represent less than 2% of representatives in board of directors positions.

We're less than that here.

- One of the key things that we try to do at HPGM is mentorship, because mentorship has been crucial and so important in my career.

And you realize that without the guidance and support of someone that has been there and done that, or can offer support or network and connections when you're trying to make something happen, you could easily be discouraged and you can easily probably want to quit.

- I'm the chairman, president, and CEO of Marcus Theaters.

There is no other, you know, chairman, president, and CEO, unless you look at some private companies.

- We have a really robust work pipeline initiative that we started three years ago.

And that was really the goal, is to get more Latinos on boards.

And we want people to stay in Milwaukee.

We want to grow our community, but we want people to grow into the right positions in leadership.

And so to date, we have given almost $600,000 in scholarships to 139 students.

- On the (mumbles), a force to be reckoned with.

A Latino is more inclined to start a business, like 50% more than the general population.

- When we opened, I thought that we we're gonna have the little store and that was it.

We didn't expect that we were gonna grow this big.

(whirring) - Rough estimate would be over $70 million.

A family business.

I got four children.

They all work on the stores and the spouses, too.

When we opened here in '60, there was almost no business at all.

Today is different, now we got restaurants.

We got almost everything in Cesar Chavez.

- Our philosophy has always been is to buy every business available on this street.

We're probably one of the largest commercial and residential landlords in the area.

And we continue to branch out into buying shopping centers and strip malls.

- My dad's always looking at new buildings.

He's like, "Oh, you know, we should buy this building.

We should make another store," you know.

He may be 70 years old, but there's no retirement in the foreseeable future for him.

He loves what he does.

(mellow music) - We are a general contractor, and we sell per form carpentry, electrical, and low-voltage.

We've been in business for 10 years now.

We have 40 employees on staff.

We are between 10 and 12 million a year revenue.

We're looking at gearing up to maybe 14 million this year.

I have physical offices in Colorado and Kansas.

You know, it is a very stressful industry.

I can't deny that, but it's rewarding.

I feel like it's a new beginning for Hispanics because there are so many new Hispanics that are now empowered, right?

And we now have the chance to empower ourselves.

- The chamber of commerce decided it wasn't doing about three year ago, we keep seeing gap in the market, in which small business owners were left behind.

I think that it will take us to empower entrepreneurs, to creating networking opportunities, to connecting them with the banking sector, or creating alternative sources of financing.

It also will take us educating entrepreneurs to feel comfortable to hire people, and to implement the systems that will allow a business to grow and scale up.

- We provide wireless networking services, handheld computers, barcode scanning, and most of these solutions are used in supply chain for tracking inventory, whether it's in distribution, or in the store setting or manufacturing plant.

We now serve customers, now on 50 states and in 14 countries.

So, very proud of what we've been able to accomplish together.

We've been very fortunate that the Lord has blessed us with some degree of success.

And there came a point where we started asking ourselves, "What can we start doing?

What can we start giving back to our community?"

And that's what eventually got me doing the work that I do on a regular basis today.

The more I got involved doing these types of things, the more and more I became convinced that these weren't exceptions to the rule.

They were just what was happening regularly, and the rules were wrong and needed to be changed.

I also have the great pleasure and honor of being national president of Foreign Latino.

And we help individuals of Latino descent all over the country with the challenges that they face in trying to achieve the American dream.

- So, the world's going to change.

I mean, that's sort of a demographic fact, and that demographic facts are just that Latinos are going to be a much bigger group.

The issue is what do we do?

Do we reflect differences in a better way?

Do we get along with the black community in a way in which we can all thrive?

Do we get along with the broader community and change the debate in which we've been strapped to by the history of this nation?

So, there's all these shortcomings, but the flip side of the shortcomings is Wisconsin is a place where Latinos naturally should thrive.

(mellow music)