Mexicans in Wisconsin by Sergio González

Mexicans in Wisconsin by Sergio González

Author:Sergio González
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00


THE UNITED COMMUNITY CENTER

In Milwaukee, displaced farmworkers joined the Mexican and Mexican American industrial workers and business owners already inhabiting the city’s south side, while others scattered throughout the Greater Milwaukee area as they searched for employment, equitable educational opportunities, and suitable housing. Tejanos joined the more than fifteen thousand Spanish speakers, including many Puerto Rican and Cuban transplants, living throughout southeastern Wisconsin’s urban centers. As the Latino community in Milwaukee swelled, several organizations developed in the 1960s to serve them. Under the direction of Reverend Gil Marrero, the south side’s Spanish Baptist Church collaborated with the Milwaukee Christian Center in 1963 to help address community concerns about Latino youth opportunities and a growing number of delinquent street gangs committing petty crimes. Marrero, a former pitcher for the Puerto Rican national baseball team who himself had been a member of a New York City street gang in his youth, had turned to a religious life by serving as a missionary in Central America before arriving in Milwaukee in 1962. The young pastor hoped to help Latino families “cut through the fog of prejudice” that fostered employment discrimination, antagonistic relations with the city’s police, and unequal access to social aid benefits. With the help of Milwaukee Christian Center director Reverend Ken Smith, Marrero developed a program to reach the Spanish-speaking youth living in the core area of the south side, along with the ten thousand Spanish speakers in the Greater Milwaukee area.

Marrero first contacted a Spanish-speaking youth gang called the National Avenue Rebels operating within a few blocks of the church. The pastor hoped to redirect the Rebels’ energy away from petty crime and street rumbles with rival gangs toward more productive endeavors. Marrero worked with the group’s leaders, offering advice on how to elect officers democratically, create meeting rules, and collect weekly dues. With the help of the Baptist church and Mr. and Mrs. Marrero, the young members of the street gang transformed themselves into a community club newly dubbed the Thunderbirds.

The Christian Center’s Latino outreach efforts grew into an independent program dubbed the Spot, which found a home in a small vacated tavern on Sixth Street. Teenage members of the Thunderbirds became involved in worship services and activities at the church while others attended the program’s new vocational school. Working under the philosophy that programs needed to be tailored to meet the desires of participants, Marrero proposed a coffeehouse, a car repair club where youths could repair automobiles under the supervision of experienced mechanics, a beauty shop where students could learn fundamentals from trained beauticians, and other innovative programs. The Thunderbirds also took the initiative in expanding the center’s physical fitness program, working together to repair and build much of the exercise equipment themselves. The center’s boxing gym, run by former professional boxer Teddy Porter, covered about three thousand square feet of the site of a former hat factory on the east corner of South Sixth and West National Avenue. The gym trained amateurs, professionals, and Golden Glove aspirants including pro Vidal Flores and vaunted amateur middleweight Reynaldo Martinez.



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