War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980

Defining the Space of Participation in a Northern City: Tejanos and the War on Poverty in Milwaukee

MARC S. RODRIGUEZ Defining the Space of Participation in a Northern City Tejanos and the War on Poverty in Milwaukee Many of the important social movements of the 1960s played out dramatically in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a midwestern industrial city known for the brewing of beer. One of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, Milwaukee is divided along a north-south axis by the Menomonee River. The river also divides the city’s two largest minority communities, African Americans and Tejano migrants. In the 1960s, Milwaukee gave birth to a racially and ethnically diverse urban civil rights movement that is most often associated with a charismatic Italian American priest, James Groppi, who led some of the city’s most dramatic protests and trained many young African American activists . Still, the emphasis on one person’s heroic activism tells only part of Milwaukee ’s activist history. Led by farm labor organizer Jesus Salas and other Tejanos, a civil rights movement developed on the city’s Latino South Side. These leaders maintained close relationships with local African American activists, with Father Groppi, and with the national Chicano civil rights movement emanating from Texas, California, and other western states. The story of the Milwaukee movement complicates both the history of civil rights activism in the city and narratives of the War on Poverty that explore the impact of African American migration on poverty politics but overlook that of Mexican Americans. In urban areas of the North, the War on Poverty created tensions between the primarily white governing class and low-income minority communities that were politically galvanized by the Community Action Program (cap) operated by the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo). In Milwaukee, the Social Defining the Space of Participation [111] Development Commission (sdc), established in 1963 at the behest of the city’s mayor, sought to respond to the problems faced by the region’s poor. After passage of the Economic Opportunity Act (eoa), the sdc became the community action agency (caa) for all of Milwaukee County. In 1964, a group of religious leaders who had long worked to assist migrant farmworkers began planning a caaof their own. Their work led to the creation in 1965 of United Migrant Opportunity Services (umos). Headquartered in the suburb of Waukesha and set up as a statewide caa, umos sought and won federal funding under the new federal poverty program’s provisions for migrant workers. Tejanos and other Latino migrants fought to define themselves as central to the “community” that umos had been created to help. They also increasingly sought political and administrative control of an agency that was supposed to incorporate maximum feasible participation of the community members it served. Late in the 1960s, umos experienced an organizational revolution as a direct consequence of the era’s varied activist influences, including the establishment of a farm labor union in Wisconsin, support for the California grape boycott led by the United Farm Workers Union, and the growth of pan-Latino and interracial civil rights activism. The umos case provides insights into the ways poor people defined themselves into the space of an interstate and translocal community as well as a vantage point from which to consider the development of Mexican American activism and pan-Latino politics outside the American Southwest. It also reminds us that part of the original intent of the eoa and a focus of much organizing that grew out of it was to ameliorate the poverty of the nation’s farmworkers. Although usually considered an urban program, the War on Poverty also sought to remedy the problems of the several hundred thousand migratory farmworkers who harvested the nation’s crops. Nearly ignored by historians of the War on Poverty, Title IIIB of the eoa created separate program funding streams to address the special needs of America’s migrant farmworkers. Following a wellestablished narrative, research into the War on Poverty has tended to focus on urban programs serving African American neighborhoods, with some more recent examination of rural programs assisting Appalachian whites, a population that had lived in the same place for generations. Unlike programs that sought to remedy the problems faced by fixed populations in poverty, the migrant program operated at statewide and interstate levels. As a result, this sort of caa was free (at least in the Wisconsin case) from the control of city and county political machines. [112] Rodriguez The founders of umos in many ways provided...