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March 23, 2006 was a historic day for
Milwaukee. It was a day with Latinos in a city that still
thinks of itself stereotypically as either a German/Polish Old
World European enclave or a post-industrial, predominantly African-American
ghetto, plagued with violence and urban blight. It was a day
that thousands of Latino workers and their families took their
children across the 6th Street Bridge from the once mostly Polish
Southside to downtown's Ziedler Park (named after German-American
Socialist Mayor Frank Ziedler), where Milwaukee's predominantly
white political and economic elite work, to demand that they
not be treated as criminals in a land settled and built by immigrants.
They demanded that the state and federal governments not pass
laws, like H.R. 4477, sponsored by Wisconsin's own James Sensenbrenner,
which would criminalize them for wanting to make a better life
for themselves and their families. Symbolically, this march
was historic because just by their presence Milwaukee's Latino
community showed, in a dignified way, that they are part of this
community and are not willing to be taken for granted anymore.
During the 1960's and 1970's
Milwaukee's civil rights movement, led by Italian-American Father
James Groppi, marched across the 16th Street Bridge to demand
equal housing and dignity for all of Milwaukee's citizens. An
old racist joke named Milwaukee's 16th Street Viaduct the longest
bridge in the world because it linked Poland to Africa. But
after March 23, 2006 the newly-renovated, David Kahler-designed
6th Street Bridge should become a symbol for a new Milwaukee
that is being revitalized by the Southside's increasingly confident
Latino community, one that is emerging as a center for cultural
and entrepreneurial activity.
Although many Milwaukeeans
in the last 20 years have had more and more interaction with
Latinos at work, in churches, at entertainment venues and in
schools, the community's 12% Latinos have been virtually invisible
in the dominant media, that spends more and more of its time
pandering to the suburbs. Except for a constant xenophobic drumbeat
about the hordes of foreigners coming across the border on by
late-night AM radio shows and regular racial slurs by our local
wannabee Rush Limbaughs- Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes- Milwaukee's
coverage of what is actually an American story of immigrant struggle
and success an urban-American story has been appalling.
As Milwaukee's Latino population
has almost doubled in the last ten years Latino radio, newspapers,
entertainment and businesses of all types have mushroomed with
barely a peep from a press that has historically been a cheerleader
for the Anglo-Saxon business class. The success of Milwaukee's
Latino workers and entrepreneurs in light of an almost total
collapse of the industrial base in the 1970's and 1980's, which
traditionally was an entry into a living wage for Milwaukee's
immigrants, has been astonishing. This is not to say that we
have reached a utopian Atzlan on the banks of the Menomonee River
given the educational achievement gap, lower incomes, unemployment
and poverty that exist in Milwaukee's minority communities.
However, we should recognize that the Southside has certainly
had a resurgence, based on the energy of our now second-largest
minority population.
What the march suggests for
Milwaukee and the United States is that we have a choice between
two worlds. In one the world that Representative Sensenbrenner's
bill would create children and workers are denied emergency health
care, kept from having driver licenses, indefinitely detained
by border agents and lumped together with criminal terrorists
and generally treated as outcasts. Or we have a choice to travel
the bridge from the south to the north like Milwaukee's Latino's
to create the promise of an America as a place that welcomes
people who want to live in a country that has as its foundational
principles a society of tolerance, a sense of justice and equal
opportunity.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
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