University Place

Milwaukee's First Mexican Community

[Katie Schumacher, Wisconsin Historical Museum]

Today, we are pleased to introduce Sergio Gonzalez as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum’s employees.

Sergio M Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests include labor, working class, and immigration history. His primary research focuses on the development of Latino communities in urban areas in the American Midwest with an emphasis on the religious communities Latino immigrants developed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throughout the 20th century. His article, Interethnic Catholicism in the Transnational Religious Connection: Milwaukee’s Mexican Mission Chapel of Our Lady Guadalupe, 1924-1929 will appear in the upcoming winter edition of the Journal of American Ethnic History, and he is currently completing a book manuscript entitled, Mexicans in Wisconsin for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. So, if you could all please join me in welcoming Sergio Gonzalez.

[applause]

[Serio Gonzalez, Doctoral Student, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Buenas tardes.

[Audience members]

Buenas tardes.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

Ah, buenas tardes, alright. That’s – thats the extent of the Spanish for the day for those of you who thought it’d be bilingual some. Well, a little bit more mixed in. Thank you all for being here today. It’s a beautiful day outside, and I know it took a little bit of effort probably to come out from the sunshine and spend an hour in here, so thank you for being here.

We’re gonna spend the majority of our time today in the 1920s, which is where the story of Los Primeros, Mexi – Milwaukee’s first Mexican community, takes place. But before we go back nearly a hundred years, I’d actually like to start with an event that happened this year.

Raise your hand if you’re familiar with the events of February 18th of 2016.

[wide shot of audience with several of them raising their hands]

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

Okay, so quite a few of you. So, for those of you who don’t know –

[slide titled – Un Da Sin Latinos – February 18,2016, featuring two photos – one of protestors around the State Capitol Square in Madison, and one of a large group of protestors inside the Wisconsin State Capitol building]

El Da Sin Latinos occurred on February 18, 2016, when over 20,000 people, including immigrants, their native-born sons and daughters, and their allies took to the streets, here around the Capitol, and then eventually inside of it, to protest what they believed to be anti-immigrant and truly anti-Latino legislation. And they were protesting specifically two bills. The first was AB450, Assembly Bill 450, which would have allowed police officers to question –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– anyone they suspected of committing a crime about their immigration status and then detaining them for deportation if they thought they were here undocumented. The second bill that the people were protesting on that day was Senate Bill 369, which eventually did pass, and that one blocks counties statewide from issuing local IDs to people who can’t access state versions.

What we saw on February 18th was part of a multi-year process of anti-immigrant legislation that really kind of first started in Arizona with SB1070, and we’ve seen pop up throughout the American Southwest, the American South, and parts of the American Midwest as well. However, the collective action of the people that day, the 20,000 people-plus that stormed the Capitol, successfully defeated the more kind of odious of the two proposed bills, AB450, and also brought to light the growing power of the state’s Latino community.

Now, for many Wisconsinites, this may have been the first time that they’ve caught a glimpse of so many Latinos in their state. And they may have even considered this kind of, an anomaly, and abnormality, and they might’ve thought, How did this happen? How could there be so many Latinos in this state? I – I’ve traveled throughout the country, and when I tell them where I’m from, and that I tell them that my parents are both Mexican immigrants, the first thing that I’m invariably asked is, I didn’t know there were Latinos in Wisconsin.

[laughter]

This – they may have mistakenly thought this community was a new one, and in some ways they would be correct. Latinos share in the state’s overall population has grown from about 2% in 1990, to 3.5% in 2000, to 6.3% in 2013. The Latino community, and specifically the Mexican community, which is the focus of our talk today, however, has a history in this state that reaches back over a hundred years. And interestingly enough, the anti-immigrant legislation and this kind of anti-immigrant atmosphere –

[return to the – Un Da Sin Latinos – slide, described above]

– that led to the development of these bills, also reaches back over a hundred years in this state’s – in the states history. The response from the Latino community, as you might imagine, also goes back to those time –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– of Los Primeros, the first Mexicans who came to this state.

So, what I’d like to do today is to give us a brief introduction to that history, drawing from some of the research that I’ve done for my dissertation and for my upcoming book. And we’re gonna – were gonna learn a little bit about Los Primeros, Spanish for The First, Primero is First. The original pioneers who came from Mexico to establish roots and make the first Mexican community in Milwaukee. In order to give the protest that occurred this year a little bit of context and, perhaps, open discussion afterwards for where our state’s Latino community might be going, moving forward.

I’m gonna go back farther than Los Primeros, before 1920s though, to introduce you to an – to an important figure, a man who kinda has a singular place in – in Wisconsin’s history. And so, this man actually predates the establishment of – of Milwaukee’s first Mexican community. His name is –

[slide titled – Raphael Baez (1863-1931) – featuring a portrait photo of Mr. Baez on the left and a photo of the cover of a musical program in which Mr. Baez was featured on the right]

– Raphael Baez. Raphael Baez was born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1863, and he actually came to Wisconsin in 1886. His story is very different from the stories of Los Primeros who came in the 1920s for a number of different reasons. Number one, he was recruited to come to the United States as a classically trained musician. He was actually living in Mexico City at the time that the was found by the C.D. Hess Opera Company, a national American opera company, and he was a classically trained violinist. He was recruited to come to the United States to perform music. And so, in 1886 –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– he came to the United States, and he settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of all places. And he was a composer. He was an organist and music and choir director for churches and synagogues throughout the city of Milwaukee. He was also a tutor and a professor. He actually – we can actually count him as being the first Latino professor at Marquette College, now Marquette University, in 1892. And he was also respected and active member of the city’s civil – civic scene. He was a member of the Jefferson Club. And for you political fans, at the turn of the century, the Jefferson Club was the most important, Democratic party organization in the state. He was actually the – on the music committee for the Jefferson Club, maybe helping set the music or the political party, I don’t know.

His story, as I said, though, was atypical from that of the stories we’re going to hear for the rest of today’s talk. He was a highly skilled, highly educated in classical music. He was recruited here to come to serve in these number of different positions as a director of choirs, and as an organist. And he – and probably most important, as you’ll see today, he also gained a pretty fairly well-respected position in the – in the state’s community, and, specifically, in Milwaukee’s community.

The majority of the early Mexican immigrants, however, that came after Baez in the 1910s, didn’t come as classically trained musicians, and they didn’t come to work as composers. The majority of them came to work in the state’s agricultural industries, many arriving by way either of Mexico or by states in the southwest, in the American –

[slide titled – Images from Latinos in Waukesha by Walter Sava and Anselmo Villareal – featuring two photos of Hispanic workers – one in a sugar beet field and one of a family in front of a farm dwelling]

– southwest. Employers in Wisconsin in the sugar beet industry were actually the first to recruit large numbers of Mexicans in the 1910s, and they called these workers Betabeleros, which is someone who picks beets, in large numbers to fill positions that had formerly been held by Germans, Belgians, and Russians in the state’s beet fields.

And Mexicans who came to Wisconsin in the 1910 – in the 1910s came to work all over the state. We have reports of them –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– working in Green Bay, and Fond du Lac, and Oshkosh throughout the 1910s. And they actually had their largest concentration in – in those first two decades of the 20th century in Waukesha and the surrounding area, where they worked both in agriculture as well as for companies like International Harvester, the Werra Aluminum Foundry, the Waukesha Foundry, and General Casting Company.

This early Mexican migration and immigration, however, to the state was pretty minimal, as groups of 10s or 20s, and many times they didn’t stay for too long and they went back to Mexico. It wasn’t really until the 1920s that we saw the first big growth of Wisconsin’s Mexican community. And to kind of understand how it is that Mexicans came to arrive to Milwaukee in the 1920s, we have to get a little bit of immigration and political history. So, I hope you can keep up with me, and if not, raise your hand, and we’ll – well try to fill in the spots.

So, the settlement of Los Primeros in Milwaukee was in many ways facilitated by changes in national immigration law. At the national level throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, federal legislators were wrestling with fundamental questions of how immigration helped shape the character of the nation. And when I say character, I mean a few different things. Federal legislators, and social commentators, considered questions of how –

[slide featuring two images – one a political cartoon of many people on the large end of a funnel that is labelled Europe and at the small end of the funnel is Uncle Sam standing on land labelled U.S.A. who is about to put a sheet of metal labelled 3% in the part of the funnel that turns into a small tube; the second image is an illustration of a map of Europe and Eastern Russia that is graphically coded by the number of immigrants proposed to enter the United States – with England and Germany proposed to have the highest numbers allowed in the legislation]

– immigrants shaped the cultural, the linguistic, the religious, and the racial character of citizens of the United States.

So, this is a story that some of you might be familiar with. Rapidly increasing numbers of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe arriving in the United States at the turn of the century were the reason that a lot of these questions were coming up. And with more and more –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– immigrants from these countries settling in urban centers like Milwaukee, questions of who was an American, and what qualified someone for becoming an American, occupied the minds of many.

So, drawing upon nativists, xenophobic concerns of increasing number of hyphenated Americans, Irish-American, German-American, Italian-American, in other words, people who define themselves by dual ethnicities or – or dual understandings of their identity in the years following World War I, federal legislators came to define who was desirable for entry into the United States upon racial and ethnic distinctions in order to better maintain a national American character and a national American identity.

And so, Congress passed two pieces of legislation that radically altered the face of immigration for the ensuing four decades, and that’s the map you see on the right over here.

[return to the previous slide, described above]

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and then followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, drastically limited the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and curbed all immigration from Asia. Suddenly stopping this immigration flow, however, caused a major headache, and problem for business owners. Ending immigration from those parts of Europe was basically cutting of the spigot – shutting off the spigot, turning off all sources of labor for their businesses. And so, in the buildup to the –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– to the passage of these two laws, growers and industrialists throughout the United States, and specifically agriculturalists, demanded access from Congress to importable labor that would be inexpensive and that would be easily accessed. And so, thanks to lobbying from these business interests, Congress decided to solve the problem by exempting all immigrants from the western hemisphere. So that’d be Canada. But you can imagine that’s not really what they had in mind, specifically Latin America. And so, those two areas, the western – the entire western hemisphere, Canada and all of Latin America was exempted from these quotas. And due to Mexico’s proximity to the United States, legislators argued that Mexican immigrants would be less likely to attempt to permanently remain in the country. They said, Well, look, Mexico’s right down the way, they’ll come and do their work, and then they’ll head back when they’re done. And, thus, they would pose a minimal threat to national cultural and racial homogeneity, to this idea of an American identity or an American character.

The popular term for immigrants coming from Mexico at the time was this idea of birds of passage, right? You know how a bird migrates according to the seasons. And so, legislators argued that Mexicans would come to work as temporary migrants during peak levels of employment, considered when the planting season and the harvesting season, and then they would return home to Mexico when they were no longer needed. So, during the 1920s, because of this – changes in immigration law, about 50 to 100,000 Mexican immigrants made their way to the United States annually. This is a dramatic jump.

Milwaukee companies were not immune to the changes in immigration law. Faced with declining immigration from Europe, and increased industrial needs following World War I, many Milwaukee companies looked south for new workers, both for African American workers in the U.S. south, but also, more importantly for our discussion today, recruiting laborers of Mexican descent from Mexico –

[slide featuring two black and white photos – one of the exterior of the Pfister and Vogel Tannery Building in Milwaukee and one of a group of Mexican migrant workers in front of and on top of the engine of a locomotive train]

– and the American southwest.

So, here’s what companies would do. Companies would send down what were known as enganchistas. Enganchista means someone who hooks. Enganchar means to hook or to grab. And these were labor recruiters. So, they would send them down either to the border region or directly into Mexico. And these Enganchistas, they promised Mexican men, many of them who were single and young, they promised them the opportunity to travel to the United States to find stable employment.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

And so, these labor recruiters went down to a number of states, specifically to the central parts of Mexico. So, they went to states in Mexico, including Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Michoacan, Zacatecas, Nuevo Leon, and Jalisco, which is actually where both of my parents are from. These men would sign contracts, and they would usually – they were usually limited term contracts. So, they’d say, You can come to work to Wisconsin for six months to a year, and then your contract expires, and you’ll head back. But here was the rub, here was the problem. These contracts were often in English. They weren’t translated into Spanish. And what the workers were not told in Mexico when they were signing these contracts is that they were actually being recruited as scabs to come up to Wisconsin to help replace the unionized workforce.

Now, for those of you who know Milwaukee’s history, Milwaukee has a rich and long union history. Milwaukee was a stronghold of – of labor power throughout the turn of the century, and up really until pretty recently. And so, I’ll give you one example. On the left over there is one of the Pfister & Vogel –

[return to the previous slide, described above]

– tannery sites. Anyone familiar with Pfister & Vogel tannery? Alright, so Pfister & Vogel, in the spring of 1920, they sent down their enganchistas, their labor recruiters, to Mexico in the midst of a strike that we initiated by the Polish and Slavic workers. And they recruited trains full of – of Mexican men to come to Wisconsin, to come to Milwaukee. These men were of course hoping to find stable work, and instead they were greeted at the train depot by striking workers who were ready to kill them.

[audience groans]

So, you can imagine the type of tone that set for these two communities from the onset.

Pfister & Vogel management obviously was worried about protecting their investment. Theyd paid a lot of money to send labor recruiters down to Mexico to grab these workers, and they were afraid of retaliation on behalf of Polish and Slavic workers. So, what they actually did is that they didn’t let the Mexican workers leave the factory. They actually put up cots inside the factory walls, and they made the Mexican men sleep inside the factory for fear that if they left the building, they would meet trouble with the city’s European origin communities.

And so, it got so bad that the Pfister & Vogel tannery company actually hired instructors from the Y.M.C.A. to come in and do classes and do recreation, so that the Mexican men wouldn’t get bored in their off-hours. So, this was the opening introduction of Mexican workers to Milwaukee. They’re scabs. They’re here to take our jobs. You’ve probably heard some of that before.

Soon, other Milwaukee companies followed the lead of the Pfister & Vogel tannery company. So, the Bucyrus Company, Harnischfeger Company, the Ladish Company, Allis-Chalmers, England Steel, Northwestern Coke, and then railroads like the Milwaukee Road and the Northwestern Railroads sent labor recruiters down to get Mexican workers to come to the United States.

Well, as worker recruitment for Mexico grew across the country, Americans soon realized that this promise from federal legislators and industrial owners of Mexican simply being birds of passage was an empty promise. You can imagine, if you come to the United States and you find stable work, regardless of the discrimination you might find, you find stable work and good paying jobs, you might decide to stay here to help better provide for yourself and for your family. And so, as more Mexican immigrants decided to settle in the United States and not go back to Mexico, not kind of fulfill this idea of the birds of passage, questions of assimilation and racial acceptability, once again, rose to the forefront of conversations regarding immigration, except this time it wasn’t Europe, it was focused on Mexico.

And so, Americans debated whether the country’s new –

[slide featuring two editorial/political cartoons – one titled How Long Will it Continue that has a caricature of a Mexican worker holding up a lighted torch in his right hand and a bottle of liquor in his left hand and wearing a hat that is labelled Mexican Anarchy. The second is titled – Civilization Follows the American Flag – featuring a line up of caricatured Mexicans in desperado outfits with sashes naming the eight Western states and captioned – in 1880 follow the Mexican flag – and then the same caricatured Mexicans now in suits and ties still with their state sashes dressed as businessmen with the caption – in 1920, follow the American flag]

– immigrants could be integrated into American society, or if they should be excluded once again to protect national identity. And these questions were definitely on the mind of Milwaukeeans throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

Besides settling in one of the most ethnically heterogeneous, one of the most ethnically diverse places –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– in the country, Milwaukee, the city of Milwaukee, Mexican workers experienced a much different settlement experience from that of European origin immigrants. Marked less by growing access to social and political power and marked more by ethno-racial discrimination, economic exclusion, and social iso-isolation. So, institutions across the city, and we’re talking about the media, social services, and public schools, viewed Mexicans more as a problem to be solved than a community to be welcomed into the city.

Numerous editorials from the Milwaukee Journals throughout the 19 – 1920s. Everyone knows the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, right? So, in the 1920s, the Milwaukee Journal published editorials, advocating strongly for the expansion of these quotas that have been imposed on Europe to Latin American, specifically to Mexico. And I’m going to hold off on discussing or reading from them because, quite honestly, they’re pretty disgusting editorials, but I’ll just mention that they used terms like mongrel and half-breed when they refer to Mexicans and the reasons why quotas should be extended to the south.

I would like to turn, however, to a more comprehensive justification. Probably one of the longest reports that was prepared in Milwaukee advocating for the extension of quotas or for at least to keep an eye on these Mexicans arriving in Milwaukee. And that comes from a 1930 report prepared by the International Institute, which was a settlement agency organized by the Y.W.C.A. And this report was prepared by a social worker. Her name was Agnes Fenton, and Agnes Fenton surveyed members of the community on Milwaukee’s south side where a lot of Mexicans were settling. And she interviewed police officers, teachers, and medical professionals. And here’s what her final report asked Milwaukeeans. She asked Milwaukeeans, “Do you know how intimate an American problem the Mexican has become?” Her report depicted an immigrant group that threatened to disrupt the cultural and social character of the city. She portrayed Mexicans as lazy, uneducated, unscrupulous, and ultimately as being undesirable for integration as citizens. And she commented that this racial group, which she referred to constantly as peons, was darker skinned and of lower intelligence than Europeans who had proceeded them. Her findings marked Mexicans as racially and culturally non-white, as dangerous, and, thus, as being unworthy of integration.

And through her conversation with city officials, she additionally stoked fears of potential public safety concerns. So, reporting from conversations with the city’s police officers, her survey stressed this inherent criminality among Mexican immigrants. And this is what she said, she said, quote, The Mexican is law-abiding as long as he knows he is being watched. She supported her report with so-called academic and pseudo-scientific articles by eugenicists, who emphasized the quote-unquote “Indian character” of Mexicans as being a justification for exclusion in order to demonstrate their racial incompatibility.

The report is long. It’s multiple pages, and you can actually download a copy of it through the Wisconsin Historical Society. It’s online. I recommend, if you’re interested, to read more of kind of the attitudes at the time, you log-on and you grab that. But I would like to end with – with one quote from Ms. Fenton from that – from that report. She said, quote, While the social workers are afraid that the peons will not mix with our native population, the eugenists –

[Slide featuring a scan of the quote which Mr. Gonzalez is currently reading]

– are afraid that they will. It is certain that interbreeding cannot be prevented. That might be considered a happy ending if the quality of our racial stock was not lowered in the process. If the stock of the Mexican is as good as ours, there can be no scientific objection, but there are, however, competent, and impartial observers who consider the peon inferior to the whites, both physically and mentally.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

You’re getting a taste for the scene in Milwaukee in the 1920s for Mexicans.

Even beyond dealing with social services agencies like the International Institute, Mexicans face harsh prospects in finding their own spaces throughout Milwaukee that might not be marked by exclusion and by segregation. Juana Danas, who arrived in Milwaukee in 1927, recalled in a 1974 interview that Mexicans weren’t allowed inside the south sides Gem Theatre. On the rare occasion that Mexicans attempted to buy a ticket and enter the establishment, white patrons would run them out, they would yell racial slurs at them, and then they would physically assault them.

[slide featuring three black and white photos each of a group of Mexican friends in Milwaukee in the early twentieth century]

Mexicans also learned to be weary of the police, of the city’s police department, who would arrest Mexicans after dances on trumped up charges of drunkenness. And their interactions between Mexican men and European-American women also served as a point of contention. Remember that fear of miscegenation, of intermixing between races.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

Their interactions with Italian and Polish men usually led to confrontations in social settings. So, Porfirio Gonzalez remembers socials at the Wisconsin Roof, which was a bar, a popular bar on – on the near south side, where members of different European origin groups and Mexicans, quote-unquote (speaking Spanish), which means they got into fights over dances with European-American women.

Despite discrimination, however, Mexicans continue to come to Milwaukee, and specifically in – in search of better economic opportunities. And the recruitment of one Mexican worker to the city typically led to the creation of a chain migration, as those who successfully secured employment, sent word back home that there were better opportunities in Wisconsin. And eventually the recruitment of single men as workers led to the arrival –

[slide featuring three photos of Mexican families from Milwaukee in the early twentieth century]

– of entire families from Mexico. So, through 1910, there were fewer than 50 foreign-born – foreign-born Mexicans living in Milwaukee. By 1927, that number had risen to over 3,000 Mexicans, and by the end of that decade, that number was anywhere from 5 to 7,000. So, the community –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– really grew over those 10 years.

Newly arrived Mexicans settled in neighborhoods nested around their workplaces on the near south side. So, a lot of them settled around the Walkers Point area, the River West area, and Merrill Park. And their neighbors many times included the more established ethnic communities of earlier German and Polish immigrants, but they were usually more recently arrived immigrants, like Norwegians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Slovenians.

Mexican children, this will – this will be surprising to you after what we’ve heard, but Mexican children, of course, didn’t have a great time arriving at the public schools in Milwaukee either. They – they caught themselves in what I called linguistic Catch-22. Spanish-speaking students encountered resistance from public schoolteachers and administrators complaining that the city’s – citys newest immigrants weren’t doing enough to integrate themselves into American society. How they would have done so, I’m not sure.

The story of a young child who attended Vieau Elementary School demonstrates those difficulties. Like many Mexican children who came to Milwaukee in the 1920s, this student didn’t speak any English, and he struggled to keep up with his American peers and his classes. In his – In response to this childs difficulties, the childs teacher demanded that he return home until he learned English, at which point he would be allowed back in class.

The educational experience of Mexican children – children differed greatly from those of German and Polish students in the late 19th and early 20th century. And there’s a little bit – theres quite a bit of irony in the situation here. European immigrants who had settled previously had fought for Milwaukee’s public and parish schools to use native language along with instruction in English, elevating their own cultural linguistic heritage to the same as American and English standards. Milwaukee’s schools, before the arrival of – of Mexicans to the city, at this point had a national reputation for the progressive language immersion programs. But, of course, they didn’t seem to extend that same sort of progressive idea to the newly arrived Mexican immigrants.

These experiences, however, didn’t deter early Milwaukee Mexicans from looking to create their own social, economic, and religious spaces. Arturo Morales, one of the Pfister & Vogel company’s earliest recruits, who had arrived in the early 1920s, managed to save and borrow the $2,000 he needed to open Milwaukee’s first Mexican grocery store in 1925. And that is Arturo Morales’ store on the near south side.

[slide featuring Arturo Morales in his Mexican grocery store on Milwaukees south side surrounded by several Mexican-American patrons]

The Avila family also opened La Compania Industrial Mexicana, which served as a grocery and a general store, a restaurant, and an importing location for peppers and herbs as well as kitchen goods, like la tamalina, which is used to make tortillas. You can imagine you weren’t going to find la tamalina in random Milwaukee stores. The Avila’s restaurant also served traditional Mexican dishes, like enchiladas, frijoles and chiles.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

Now, I’ve painted a pretty negative picture, you might say, of this – of this settlement experience for – for Milwaukee Mexicans, but I don’t want you to think that every single relationship that Milwaukee – Milwaukee Mexicans had with the general community was an antagonistic one. And so, what I’d like to do is actually point towards one of the brightest spots for Milwaukee’s Mexican community. It’s what my primary research looks at. And that is the development of a religious home.

Milwaukee Mexicans found common ground with the city’s European-American community through a shared Catholic faith and the creation of Spanish language, quote, “pioneer missions” in the mid 1920s.

[slide featuring two photos – one of the exterior and one of the interior of the Catholic Holy Trinity church]

This first Mexican Catholic parish right here, this is Holy Trinity, and I’ll talk about Holy Trinity in a second. But the first Mexican Catholic Parish that Mexicans eventually created helped meet the cultural –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– spiritual, social, and linguistic needs of the Mexican community throughout the period. And it was only possible through interethnic collaboration.

In 1924, Mexicans began attending Holy Trinity Catholic Church on the near south side. The church’s fraternal order of the Knights of Columbus –

[return to the previous slide, described above]

– noticed this growing Mexican community, and they reached out to the new congregants. And after consulting with – with Mexican community leaders, the Knights of Columbus decided to sponsor a Spanish language mission in 1924 during Holy Week. So, this was a Mass, this was a series of Masses that were conducted completely in Spanish by a, I believe he was German-American Jesuit priest –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– who spoke un poquito espanol, right?

[laughter]

So, he did his best to trudge through a Spanish language mission, but this was really the first time that Milwaukee Mexicans felt any sort of invitation to the city’s community.

Frank Gross, a parishioner from Holy Trinity and an active member of the Knights of Columbus, took the lead. He was very interested in Mexican culture. He took the lead, he spoke Spanish fluently, in working with Mexican community leaders to provide regular Spanish language Masses. Gross, Frank Gross, he contacted the office of the Archbishop, Sebastian G. Messmer, who provided a little bit of financial support from the archdiocese, and then he also reached out to Catholic social organizations, like the Society of St. Vincent De Paul, to help provide for the physical welfare of the community.

Together, Frank Gross and Mexican community leaders created the Mexican branch of the Knights of Columbus, which was called El Club Mexicano, in 1924. And this was, without a doubt –

[slide titled – El Club Mexicano – featuring a portrait photo of the first members of this club]

– the first Mexican-led organization in Wisconsin’s history. El Club offered the city’s Mexicans the first space to celebrate their national heritage through ethnic Catholic traditions and through community dances. In 1924, the committee brought the community together to commemorate the Battle of Puebla in early May through prayer, dancing, and singing in an event –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– sponsored by the Knights. Organized as a celebration of national identity, advertisements included images that emphasized pride and Aztec heritage and past military victories. So, imagine this: after years of the type of discrimination and prejudice they faced on the south side, they actually have an opportunity to express and to celebrate national and ethnic heritage.

Mexican leaders and Frank Gross continue to collaborate throughout 1925 and developed a welcoming spiritual home for Mexicans through Spanish language Catholic Masses. This is actually from 1924. This is a dance that the Club Mexicano held in September –

[slide featuring a photo of a large gathering of El Club members and their community at a dance in 1924]

– of 1924.

They recruited Spanish-speaking priests from around the Midwest to help lead services, usually from Chicago, where the Mexican community was much larger, and their work led to the December 1925 mission –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– which was the most successful event organized up to date in the Mexican community. The celebration was devoted in honor to Mexico’s patron saint, la Virgen de Guadalupe. And a celebration of Las Posadas, just a few days later, represented a public renewal of their shared Mexican religiosity and history. After living through five years of racial antagonism on Milwaukee’s south side, the city’s Mexican community saw in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the celebration of her feast day, a powerful symbol of ethnic collective solidarity. So, with momentum and enthusiasm growing within the Mexican Catholic community in Milwaukee, Milwaukee’s Mexican leaders and white Catholic laity and clergy came together to plan a development of an independent chapel that would be capable of supporting Mexican – the Mexican community in the spring of 1926.

And here’s where it gets really interesting, or at least I think it does.

The decision to create a new chapel for Milwaukee’s Mexican Catholics in 1926 coincided with the beginning of a war in Mexico initiated by the government against the Catholic church, called the Cristero War, La Cristiada. Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles saw in the Catholic church a direct challenge in his attempts to solidify control, and so in February of 1926, he ordered the enforcement –

[slide featuring a scan of a solicitation letter from the Knights of Columbus to donate to their Mexican fund, a newspaper article wherein Archbishop Messmer calls for Prayers for the Catholic Church in Mexico, a political cartoon with two images – at the top is an illustration of a Christian in the Colosseum facing a lion and the caption Modern Rome is the Center of Christianity and at the bottom is an illustration of a Mexican on his knees is supplication with the caption – Modern Mexico – Country of Martyrs and the phrase Viva, Cristo Rey!, and finally a banner with the colors of the Mexican flag with the same phrase – Viva, Christo Rey on it]

– of a series of anti-clerical provisions. In response, Catholic protesters rose up in arms throughout northern and western Mexico through the summer of 1926, with cries of Viva Cristo Rey, Long live Christ the King. The ensuing war, and the persecution of Mexican Catholics, captivated Milwaukee’s Catholic community. And so, this is from the Milwaukee Catholic Herald, which was one of the – the Catholic publications. And we see over there, an advertisement from the Compass, which was the Milwaukee Knights of Columbus periodical. And so, what the Knights of Columbus actually did is connected their fundraising efforts for Milwaukee’s Mexican –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– community with fundraising efforts for Mexican Catholics abroad, right? So, they said, In order to protect Catholicism across the world, we actually need to support Mexican Catholics here in Milwaukee.

In the midst of the Cristero War, things began to falling into place for Milwaukee’s Mexican community when they are able to secure two necessary things for building a religious space: their own committed physical location, and a spiritual leader.

So, exiled clergy, especially foreign-born priests, such as the Chilean Reverend Ernesto Osorio Aguirre, were fleeing Mexico throughout the period, and Aguirre –

[slide featuring a photo of Reverend Ernesto Osorio Aguirre standing outside in front of his congregation on the left and a religious pamphlet in Spanish titled Novena Solemne on the right]

– is right here. And Aguirre was living in Texas at the time in 1926, and he answered the call to become Milwaukee’s Spanish-speaking priest. And then Archbishop Messmer proceeded to cover the $9,000 cost needed to purchase an old storefront on 5th Street, which was then Grove Street.

[new slide titled – The Mexican Mission Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe – featuring a black and white photo of Reverend Aguirre standing in front of the new Mexican Mission Chapel with his congregation]

And so, on December 12, 1926, Archbishop Messmer, along with Reverend Aguirre, led the dedication of the Mexican mission chapel of Our Lady Guadalupe, held in accordance with the feast of the patron saint of Mexico, la Virgen de Guadalupe.

For the next two years, Our Lady Guadalupes Masses took on a distinctly political tone –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– in response to the continued persecution of Catholics in Mexico. It became a cross-ethnic political space for Mexicans and Milwaukees European origin community to track geopolitical events that affected the entire citys Catholic community. So, from the opening of this chapel until the end of the La Cristiada, the Cristero War in 1929, congregants gathered every single night to pray for Mexican Catholics abroad.

By 1929, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that the chapel had become, quote, the general headquarters for all of the activities of Mexican life in Wis – in Milwaukee.

Besides the church, like many European immigrants who had made their home in Milwaukee, Mexican community members also created a number of mutual aid societies known as mutualistas. These organizations served partially as civic groups, as well as –

[slide titled – La Sociedad Mutualista Hispano-Azteca – featuring a black and white portrait photo of the mostly female members of this Society standing in front of an American flag and the Societys banner]

– places to celebrate cultural and ethnic identity. However, they were usually just spaces to spend time with compatriots. So, there were two mutual aid societies I’d like to mention. The first was La Sociedad Mutualista Hispano-Azteca. The first one to pop up, and I want you to notice the American flag along with Mexican banners in the background, right? So, there’s this idea of – of dual citizenship or of understanding of dual allegiances. And the second was El Circulo Social de Amigos Emilio Carranza, which was founded a little –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– bit later in 1929.

These organizations were responsible for establishing the city’s first Spanish language newspapers, which included El Sancho Panza, El Boletin Informativo –

[slide featuring two images – the first a scan of the Spanish language newspaper El Mutualista and the second a scan of an article from the Milwaukee Journal dated July 25, 1929, with the headline – Mexicans here Publish Paper – Sancho Panza Urges Uplift, Gives News in Spanish Language]

– and El Mutualista. And El Mutualista was the most popular of those newspapers. And that’s over there on the left. And Mutualista covered a wide range of things. News stories, poetry, editorials, religious essays, and patriotic appeals to the community.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

Mutual aid societies also took on the role of social functionaries, funding and hosting dances and celebrations for the city’s Mexican community. So, two special dates stood out for celebration, Cinco de Mayo and then the Mexican Independence Day. And this is what we see right here.

[slide featuring a black and white photo from September 16, 1930 of the first Mexican Independence Day Parade in Milwaukee with a pickup truck waving the American and Mexican flags followed by a long row of cars decorated with streamers]

This is September 16, 1930, and this is the first Mexican parade in Milwaukee. This is a celebration of Mexican Independence Day through the Bay View neighborhood, 1930.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

So, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, it really seemed like Milwaukees Mexican community had found a foothold in the city. Remember we said about 5 to 7,000 Mexicans. They’ve got a church base, they’ve got businesses, and they’ve got a social scene.

Not a happy ending. This all comes to a halt with the Great Depression. The ramifications of the Great Depression dig – dug deeper and deeper into the city’s economic opportunities throughout the early 1930s. So, for example, in 1933, only a quarter of the wage earners in Milwaukee across the city still had a job, while only one out of every five families was actually already on some form of welfare or state aid.

Because most Milwaukee business viewed Mexicans as simply surplus labor, they were usually the first ones fired from the citys factories and tanneries.

[slide featuring two scans of old newspaper articles – The first from October 7, 1933, with the headline – Mexican Colony Here Dwindling; Jobs Scarce, Relief Food Strange, and the second from January 28, 1939, with the headline – Four Are Sent Back to Their Mexican Home]

Faced with high unemployment with the onset of the Great Depression, Milwaukees Mexican colony began to shrink very quickly. Felix Gonzalez remembered in 1975 interviewed that a large majority of the single men who had come to Milwaukee in search of work, ended up leaving on their own, but a lot of the families that had come weren’t able to pay their way back because it was so expensive to go back to Mexico. And so, they were forced to hunker down in Milwaukee.

Depleted county welfare resources –

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

– and rising anti-immigrant settlement also fueled crackdowns on both documented and undocumented immigration throughout the period. Local elected officials worked with federal immigration officers to search for Mexicans on the county welfare rolls and line them up for deportation. And regardless of their citizenship status or their documentation status, many of those suspected, quote-unquote “public charges” were apprehended and then taken for deportation proceedings in Chicago, oftentimes without any form of due process.

By 1933, Milwaukee’s Mexican community had been reduced to fewer than 1,500 people, as many Mexicans either returned on their own or were forced back through these deportations. Nationally, the repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression led to the deportation of anywhere from 500,000 to two million people back to Mexico. And I’ll just note that a lot of those people were actually American citizens, some of them born in this country or people who had achieved citizenship status. In fact, a few decades ago, California actually issued a – a formal apology because of the repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression.

In Milwaukee, it wouldn’t be until the years following World War II that Milwaukees Mexican community would recuperate and grow, but we’ll have to leave that story for another talk.

So, we’re almost done here, but before we go, I’d like to return to El Da Sin Latinos protest from earlier this year. In a number of ways, Los Primeros, the first Mexicans to make their home in Milwaukee, encountered a sense of anti-immigrant fervor both from their settlement experience in the 1920s and then in the possible –

[slide featuring a photo taken inside the State Capitol in Madison on El Da Sin Latinos with Hispanic protesters holding up American flags and a sign that says We Are A Nation of Immigrants]

– repatriation they faced in the 1930s. These challenges were driven by a number of factors. Fear of the other, fear of change, fear of a loss of economic opportunities, and then, of course, at times just unabashed discrimination and racism.

[Sergio Gonzalez, on-camera]

Those fears that drove cause to push Latino immigrants out of Wisconsin communities nearly a hundred years ago, I believe, are still in some ways apparent today. Not only in these pieces of anti-immigrant legislation, but also, of course, in calls for mass deportations and walls along our borders from certain presidential candidates.

But here’s the thing, throughout the history of Wisconsin Latino community there has always been a spirit of perseverance. At times, people turned inward, as they did in developing mutual aid societies or their own businesses. At other points, however, they found allies in their surrounding communities who were willing to stand with them, as they did in the development of Our Lady Guadalupe mission chapel and as they did on the steps of the Capitol just a few months ago. There’s a saying in the immigrant rights movement: Aqui estamos, y no vamos, which means We’re here and we’re not going anywhere. So, regardless of these efforts to drive away immigrants, census and demographic reports are painting a very different reality. They show us that no population will grow faster or larger than the states Latino population, which today stands at about 336,000 residents but will grow to nearly one million people by 2060. And Wisconsin Latinos, those who are here today and future generations, have Los Primeros to thank for laying down the roots to endure and [speaking Spanish]. Thank you.

[applause]