by Barbara Miner, photos by Peter DiAntoni
It might be a scene from a Dick and Jane reader of the 1950s. Manny Molina is the friendly neighborhood police officer, starting his beat at 7:30 a.m. sharp. He unlocks a police call box at 27th and National, grabs an extra jacket and begins his rounds amid the fluorescent cheer of Honeydip Donuts. Customers and workers alike seem happy to see him. “Hey Manny, on the bike today?” asks Benny, a manager at a nearby Ace Hardware who had stopped on his way to work. “No, I’m walking,” Molina responds affably, the banter almost as sweet as the glazed doughnuts on display.
But it’s not the 1950s, Molina is Latino, and he has far more serious concerns than getting cats down from trees. A gun, bullets, handcuffs, a walkie-talkie, a cell phone and a bulletproof vest are loaded onto Molina’s stocky-yet-compact frame, and his quiet confidence leaves no doubt that, if necessary, he won’t think twice about pulling the firearm.
And instead of the all-white faces from Dick and Jane stories, this scene is a melting pot of ethnicities. As Molina does his route down National Avenue to 16th Street and back, talking to scores of business owners, workers and residents, he passes Mexican restaurants and stores, a day care center run by African-Americans, a Buddhist temple, Phan’s Garden Restaurant (Molina calls their Vietnamese beef soup “out of this world”), a Native American social service agency, a Middle Eastern food mart, and a Korean-owned hip-hop clothing store.
Molina, the 45-year-old son of a Mexican mother and Tejano (Tex-Mex) father who worked at Pfister & Vogel Tannery, graduated from Bay View High School and still lives in the neighborhood. “I bought the house I grew up in and I’m looking out the same window as when I was 4 years old,” he admits with a laugh. On days off, he likes to fish or ride his Harley motorcycle. He has a girlfriend but no kids: “The roll of the dice,” he shrugs.
Mainly, though, Molina is a cop. And has been for 14 years. Molina has walked and bicycled this beat for four years, summer and winter alike. He knows it well. “It’s not just Polish and Hispanics,” he says. “There’s Asian, black, American Indian. A little bit of everything.”
Once predominantly Polish, and in recent decades the heart of the city’s growing Latino population, the near South Side is developing a new identity as the most culturally and racially diverse neighborhood, not just in Milwaukee, but in the entire state.
It faces challenges: poverty, gangs, crime and some tension between the various ethnic groups. But it is also a richly varied, vibrant area, with a determination to move beyond the stereotype that it’s got great Mexican restaurants but little else of value. It’s a complex, 21st-century neighborhood with countless stories to tell.
Dirty Work
Milwaukee Temps, on the corner of Sixth and Mitchell, sits in the shadows of the Witkowiak Funeral Home and the twin steeples of St. Stanislaus. On an early summer morning, when the neighborhood is just waking up, its storefront office already is filled with some 25 people hoping for work that day, sitting quietly at well-worn cafeteria tables. Most appear to be Latino; some are white or African-American. Many look as dispirited as the grim office. All wear the uniform of the manual worker: blue jeans, T-shirts, sturdy shoes.
Welcome to a bedrock of the new South Side: the world of unskilled temp jobs. More than 100 years ago, Polish immigrants were the city’s main source for cheap labor, with one historian noting that “Milwaukee considered Poles good workers, but workers best fitted for ‘dirty’ tasks.” Today, the South Side still serves that function, not just for Milwaukee, but the entire metro area. Census data shows that in 2000, almost 40 percent of 53204 ZIP code residents on the South Side worked in Milwaukee suburbs or Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties. Thousands of workers drive or are transported from the neighborhood to companies throughout the metro area.
Nestled among the bodegas, auto shops, churches and bakeries that dot the South Side are most of the city’s temporary job agencies for manual labor. Many are so unobtrusive as to be invisible, with thick glass-block windows, making it difficult to see inside, and discreet signs with euphemistic titles like “industrial staffing specialists.”
Like One Source Staffing, on National Avenue, where workers walk down a narrow passageway and enter through a side entrance hidden by the shadows of a Cream City brick building now black with soot. Or SITE Staffing Inc., which is a few blocks west on the same street. Or P.A. Staffing Service Inc. on Muskego Avenue just off Mitchell and conveniently around the corner from a 24-hour George Webb. The list goes on.
If you lack marketable skills beyond your muscles, or your English is limited, or your immigration papers are questionable, you often find work through such temp agencies. Take, for example, Maricruz, a 33-year-old Mexican woman who lives near 16th and Greenfield. (An undocumented immigrant, she uses a pseudonym for fear of being deported.)
Maricruz is not one who catches the eye: soft-spoken, with no flashy jewelry or wild hairdo, wearing muted, black and brown-toned workaday clothes. People who do not legally exist rarely call attention to themselves.
When she came to Milwaukee five years ago, she worked for her father at his travel agency. When her father became sick and returned to Mexico, she joined the day-labor workforce. She never left. She has worked all over southeast Wisconsin, but can’t name the specific places or cities, other than saying they are usually far away neighborhoods, and are richer, cleaner and filled with
white people.
“One day you can be working in a factory, packing and shipping, and the next day you can be working with produce or cleaning up a recycling plant,” Maricruz says. “I do whatever they tell me to do.”
Maricruz relates her story in Spanish at an interview at Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights group near Fifth and National. She has harrowing tales to tell: the difficult decision to leave her young son with her mother in Mexico so she could come to the United States. Or her early-morning border crossing, running and falling and running again, and then being shoved into an overheated van that left her with third-degree burns. Or how she watched the “coyotes” who charge for this illegal transport throw a dead child out of the van and into the desert and felt helpless to do anything.
And her story of life as a day laborer. It’s a far cry from the jobs for office workers offered by Manpower-type agencies. Applications often contain warnings about working conditions. One Source, for instance, notes: “Our work assignments generally include the following: lifting and carrying up to 50 pounds; standing for long periods … bending and stooping. Working in very hot or cold environments.”
The world of these temp agencies is below the radar screen of public awareness, but is critical to the local economy. A receptionist at P.A. Staffing Service on Muskego Avenue notes that most of its jobs are in Menomonee Falls or Franklin. Other places decline to offer any details.
The agency applications generally ask if the person is a U.S. citizen or lawful resident or an “alien authorized to work.” Maricruz says she shows some doctored papers. “They accept the papers I show them. It’s to their advantage. But I think they know the truth.”
First-shift workers must be at the temp agency before the sun comes up. Maricruz usually leaves home before 4 a.m. to arrive by 4:45 a.m., when the line starts forming for jobs to be handed out. If you don’t get there early, you may not get a job. Even if you go to the same workplace as the day before, you must get in line again early that day or you won’t be selected.
“You never know how many days a week you will be working,” she says. “Sometimes I work two or three days a week. When the economy was better, I sometimes worked an entire month.”
Like many temp workers, Maricruz has no car, which limits the assignments she can take. Usually an agency van takes her and others to the work site. A transportation fee is deducted from her minimum-wage pay. She generally works a 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. shift, and hopes the van will be on time to return the workers to the temp agency. She gets home about 7:30 or 8 p.m. It’s a 15-hour day.
Maricruz has been taking English classes, and her favorite place in town is the Downtown Central Library. Paulo Coelho is a favorite author. She also writes poetry. She talks to her son every couple of days and sends as much money as she can spare every month. She worries that at any time, she could be apprehended and deported. Still, she clings to her dreams.
“It has always been my dream to have my own house for me and my son,” she says.
Many Cultures
Going back some eight decades, the usual trajectory for those who grew up on the near South Side was to move further south or southwest, first within the city and then to the suburbs. Jill Lackey, who lived as a child near Kosciuszko Park but later moved away, reversed that trend. Five years ago, her children grown, she moved back to her childhood neighborhood and helped found the Old South Side Settlement Museum at Seventh and Lincoln.
A spunky, fast-talking, urban aficionado, Lackey exudes energy and excitement. She is the quintessential community activist, an unapologetic champion of the near South Side in general and Lincoln Village in particular. A cultural anthropologist retired from Marquette University, Lackey says she gets angry when university colleagues ask why she moved to the central city. “I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, but even if I were rich, I would never move to Fox Point, or the country or the suburbs.’ ”
Lackey heads up Urban Anthropology Inc., self-described as the nation’s only nonprofit exclusively focused on urban anthropology. Her understanding of cultural diversity is deep in her bones. Her mother was German/Russian Jewish and her father was Scotch-Irish/Native American. He was the model for the first Milwaukee Braves logo back in 1953, Lackey reveals.
Ask Lackey about anything in Lincoln Village – 50 years ago, 10 years ago or last month – and she will launch into a story. She talks of the Figueroas, the first Latino family to move to the area back in 1956, who were told “to pretend they were Italian so they could get along.” Or the late Del Porter, a member of the Ojibwe Nation who was a Golden Gloves boxing champion and started the Ace Boxing Club at Kosciuszko Park in 1960. Or the 1976 theft of the “Squirrel Lady,” a bronze statue in Kozy Park honoring Bella Austin Jacobs, a prominent Polish community activist here at the turn of the 20th century.
“Before the 1970s, this was probably the strongest Polish neighborhood you would ever find. More than 90 percent of the households were Polish,” Lackey says. Today, based on surveys by her organization, Lackey estimates the area is about 20 percent Polish, with another 10 percent of German and Serbian descent. Latinos are the majority of residents, about 55 percent. About 10 percent are African-American and 5 percent are “other,” including Native American.
Tension between ethnic groups has long been part of the neighborhood. “It was very hard when the Poles moved here, because the Germans were prejudiced against them,” she says. “When they built the Polish Flats, the Germans called them Polack Caves.”
Latinos and Poles, she says, have gotten along pretty well, better than she would have predicted 40 years ago. One reason is their cultural similarities. Both tend to be Catholic with a strong devotion to the Virgin Mary. Both have a strong emphasis on family. And mariachi and polka bands share a similar musical history. (Mariachi music is descended, in part, from European musical instruments, including guitars, horns and fiddles, which came to Mexico via Spanish and French colonization. Tex-Mex bands, meanwhile, make strong use of the accordion.)
It is African-Americans, Lackey says, who face the most prejudice, based partly on race, but also because they tend to be poorer, more transient and more likely to rent rather than own a home. Nowadays, racial comments are rarely expressed openly, she says. “I still walk down the street and run into some old Polish neighbor, and he’ll say, ‘It’s getting darker around here.’ ”
Ultimately, however, prejudice is not the main reason people leave the neighborhood, Lackey believes. “Being an anthropologist, I blame that on the romanticization of the car and the suburbs,” she says. “It was sold as everybody’s American dream, that the minute you have enough money, you move somewhere else.”
And as some groups move away, others move in.
The Longest Bridge
To anyone with an inkling of Milwaukee’s past, the most unexpected development on the near South Side is the growing African-American population.
In the summer of 1967, during the height of the civil rights movement, white mobs on the South Side hurled rocks, bottles and racist epithets against civil rights marchers demanding the city pass an “open housing” anti-discrimination ordinance. The worst white backlash occurred when Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council led marchers across the 16th Street Viaduct.
For years, even as memories of the marches dimmed, an oft-repeated joke summarized the racial and geographic division in Milwaukee. Question: “What’s the longest bridge in the world?” Answer: “The 16th Street Viaduct, because it separates Africa from Poland.”
People such as Stacey Donelson, an African-American born after the volatile 1960s, see the South Side with different eyes. Donelson moved here from Capitol Drive a couple years ago and couldn’t be happier. She twirls her arms in broadening circles to help the listener visualize what she calls “little world” – the area south of National Avenue to Forest Home, between 16th and 27th streets.
“Everything in the world is in there,” she says almost breathlessly. “You got Hmong, Laotian, Puerto Rican, Mexican. Inside that box is everything in the world.”
Donelson, 32, was working at Audrey’s Lil’ Angels day care at 22nd and National when I first interviewed her. Molina says it’s the only black-owned business he is aware of on his beat. Operating out of a former storefront, Lil’ Angels has the hand-painted, down-home feel of many city day cares run independently of churches or schools – complete with childlike paintings of rainbows and numbers on the building where it faces National Avenue.
It’s early afternoon, during the children’s naptime, and an angelic row of children lie sleeping soundly, including African-American, Latino, white and, in this post-racial Obama era, some who are not easily categorized.
“All these kids, they’re from the South Side,” Donelson says. “I don’t think their mothers work on the South Side. But rather than finding a day care close to the job, they find one close to home.” (In mid-summer, Donelson was laid off from the day care, a victim, she says, of the shrinking economy.)
Born some 10 years after the 1967 marches, she knows nothing of the area’s racially charged history. Given a brief summary, she tilts her head and comes to a realization. “You know, maybe that’s why my grandma won’t come visit.”
As a young child, the Milwaukee-born Donelson moved with her mother to Louisiana and Indiana. She returned to Milwaukee, initially staying with her grandmother near 27th and Capitol. After getting to know the South Side through work and friends, she moved there. “The only time I leave the South Side is when I go see my grandmother,” she says.
Donelson says there’s tension over this with her fiancé and his family members. “My fiancé’s family is on the North Side, and he wants to be close to his uncles,” Donelson explains. “I say, ‘Tell them to see you on the South Side.’ And he says, ‘Don’t nobody want to go across that bridge.’ ” She had always assumed it was
because of a fear that police may target any black traveling in a predominantly white neighborhood, not because of the South Side’s still-lingering reputation from the 1960s.
But Donelson says she won’t budge. Ask her why and she’ll talk almost nonstop about South Side life: better housing, cheaper rents, nicer landlords, better parades, more diversity. Then she’ll list all the stores she can easily get to by bus or on foot: Pick ’n Save, Popeyes, El Rey, Leon’s, Club Asian Moon, Family Dollar, Blockbuster, Walmart, Walgreen’s. “I even have the sales mapped out,” she notes. “When El Rey has a sale on meat Pick ’n Save doesn’t.”
Donelson loves the area’s multiculturalism. She particularly likes to watch members of the Lao Buddhist Temple at 19th and National, across from where she lives. “Sometimes, early in the morning, you can see them walking with their hands behind their back. It’s really neat. I like to think they’re blessing the block.”
Peace Training
Principal Chris Her-Xiong’s office is cluttered with books, bulging manila folders and oversized three-ring binders. What stands out are the exquisite, handmade Hmong tapestries. Others are hung throughout her school. Most depict the Mekong River and scenes of war planes and people fleeing – beautiful, almost soothing artwork that belies the deadly seriousness of the events re-enacted. The artwork, like the school, exists in two worlds.
The Hmong American Peace Academy, a K-8 school near South Layton and Greenfield, is the state’s first Hmong charter school. About 40,000 Hmong live in Wisconsin, the third-highest number after California and Minnesota. Milwaukee, especially the near South Side, has been their cultural center.
Why the Peace Academy? “The Hmong people have been fighting wars as long as we can remember,” Her-Xiong says. “We want to teach our children to learn you don’t have to fight wars to get what you want.”
Her-Xiong considers herself an ambassador from the Hmong community to the Milwaukee community, and has the self-possessed calm common to both successful diplomats and school principals. She patiently answers a plethora of questions, despite the pull of phone calls, meetings and school crises waiting for her to handle. “In five years, the most vacation I’ve taken is five days for the death of an uncle,” she says with a sigh. She knew things were getting out of hand when her son said, “Mom, we’ll get you a couch for your office that folds out to a bed because then you can sleep at school.”
Her-Xiong, 44, was born in Laos, lived for a year in a refugee camp after the Pathet Lao movement took power, came to the U.S. in 1976, and in 1990 was hired by the Milwaukee Public Schools as the district’s first Hmong teacher. She lives near the Peace Academy with her husband and two teenage sons on the same block where former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist lived. Her husband, an electrical technician, was recently laid off.
Just as Puerto Ricans don’t like to be confused with Mexicans, the different groups from Southeast Asia are equally sensitive. “The Hmong are an ethnic minority within Laos,” Her-Xiong stresses. “We don’t like to be called Laotian. We speak a different language and have a different culture.”
Her-Xiong became principal of the Peace Academy when it opened in 2004. It has about 400 students, and about 90 percent are Hmong. Another 5 percent have at least one Hmong parent, and the others are Latino, Laotian or African-American. There are no whites. “At the time we started, our students were living in two worlds, the Hmong world and the American world,” Her-Xiong explains. “At school, they would want to wear baggy pants and dye their hair, but at home, the parents wanted them to follow the traditional ways.”
Her-Xiong says the Hmong were attracted to the South Side because of its low-cost housing, easy access to Milwaukee Area Technical College (where many received training), and the presence of Laotian groups such as Lao Family Community, a nonprofit at 24th and Vieau. While others have moved away, especially to the city’s Northwest Side, she and her family have stayed. “There’s something about the South Side that keeps me here,” she says. “Partly it’s because we’re close – to the freeways, to Downtown. We enjoy the Domes, we enjoy Jackson Park. And you are surrounded by beautiful churches. They give a peaceful feeling to the neighborhood.”
But she worries about problems, such as litter or cars blasting music on residential streets. “Layton Avenue used to be the grand avenue of the entire South Side,” Her-Xiong says. “I think we could still be that, but the pride in our community needs to come back. We need to keep the neighborhood clean, beautiful and safe.”
Eggs and Litter
It’s 8 a.m. on a weekday and George Webb at 21st and Mitchell is serving eggs, hash browns and sausage as fast as the short-order cook can make them. Some customers read the newspaper – the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelfor those who prefer English, El Conquistadorfor those who prefer Spanish. Regulars, from Alderman Bob Donovan to construction worker Juan Gonzalez, give a wave and a big hello to the waitresses.
The scene is a great example of what Stacey Donelson calls a “little world.” African-Americans, Latinos, Poles, Bohemians, Native Americans, old, young, in between – all gather at Webb’s.
Jim Halamka is a 70-year-old retiree whose large frame may bespeak both his family’s Bohemian roots and his decades working at Pipkorn Steel. He comes here regularly. He was born on the South Side and still lives here, across the street from where he grew up on 15th and Madison. When asked what he likes about the area, he pauses, then says, “I can’t say I like too much of anything anymore.” It takes a while to tease out what he doesn’t like: Too many people speak Spanish and he doesn’t understand a word. People moving in and out all the time. Years ago, you could leave your doors open and never have a problem. “There’s a lot of different people, that’s for sure now,” he says as he finishes his eggs, toast and sausage.
At a nearby booth, Gonzalez is as loquacious as Halamka is taciturn. But he also complains about the changes, albeit with a grin, even as he criticizes black people. A 43-year-old Puerto Rican who graduated from South Division in 1985, Gonzalez uses a Puerto Rican slang word for dark-skinned people and says, “The neighborhood is changing because of the prietas. Don’t you remember in the 1960s, with that viaduct shit? That’s how they should have left it.” The woman sitting next to him warns him to be careful, but he shrugs that off. “Take me to court,” he says. Besides, he adds, “I love the neighborhood.”
He now lives in Cedar Grove in Sheboygan County. “I used to work at the power plant in Port Washington. I saw a house, I liked it and bought it,” Gonzalez says. Yet he comes back to the South Side a couple of times a week. “My family is here. And I feel like I’m in Puerto Rico, sometimes Mexico.”
It’s a densely crowded neighborhood. There are 4,515 people of working age (16 and over) per square mile in the 53204 ZIP code: That’s three times more crowded than in the North Shore ZIP code of 53217 and eight times more than in the suburb of Franklin, according to data from the UW-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute. Homes, duplexes and apartment buildings are packed together. All those people help support all the shops in the neighborhood. But there’s also plenty of noise, litter and traffic. Residents are more likely to complain about this than crime or gangs.
“There’s resentment because the neighborhood isn’t as tidy as it used to be,” says Lackey. “The Poles were notorious for their cleanliness. I mean, they would go out and wash their sidewalks.”
Even Maricruz complains. “You can see and feel the difference between the Hispanic and white neighborhoods. The grime in the streets.”
The South Side has a disproportionate number of teens and youth, and that means more loud music and booming bass speakers. Sometimes the litter consists of fast-food containers, empty soda bottles or candy wrappers thrown onto the sidewalk, just feet away from a trash container.
Officer Molina has tried to understand who litters and why. Part of it, he feels, is people whose life crises are so acute they may not have the mental energy left to deal with litter. And because many residents have struggled and know what it’s like to be poor, he adds, “there is a lot more that is tolerated.”
Sometimes, Molina says, he wishes he could be a better link between the Latino and white worlds and make clear to immigrants, “You’re not back home. It’s different here.”
Carlos is a 58-year-old Mexican getting his breakfast at Webb’s this morning. He works as a butcher, has lived in the neighborhood for almost three decades, and has no complaints. “It’s fine,” he says. “You don’t bother nobody and they don’t bother you.”
Several booths away is Mary, a 26-year-old woman dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She says her father was Indian and French Canadian, and she graduated from Grandview High School on 32nd Street just off Greenfield. She comes here almost every morning with her 2-year-old son, Isaiah, who sits quietly and concentrates on his breakfast. Mary was raised around the corner from the George Webb and still lives there. She likes that the restaurants and stores are within easy walking distance. But she worries about the gangs. “I have a son now, and I don’t want him around this area no more.” Her dream is to move Up North, somewhere far away from the city.
Less Intolerance
Father Tom Wittliff is a 71-year-old priest who lives at Fourth and Lincoln, where he grew up and now lives in retirement. Entering his modest home is like stepping into the past. Family portraits and heirlooms, such as his mother’s china, are everywhere, competing for space with religious statues and snapshots of former students and parishioners.
Only one of his childhood friends is left in the neighborhood. The others have died or moved away. “Back then we were a Polish ghetto, and a German ghetto – all sorts of ghettoes,” Wittliff reminisces. “We never had a huddle when we played football with kids from other neighborhoods. We’d speak in Polish, they’d speak in Italian or Spanish.”
“I have all these memories of the past.” He remembers buying live chickens from the butcher shops and hanging out with friends from long-closed schools. “But I also have all this anticipation of what will be,” he says. “Change does not frighten me.”
Wittliff served on the South Side, Downtown, the lower East Side, the West Side and in Sheboygan. He retired three years ago after 18 years at St. Augustine of Hippo in Bay View. He never sold the family home, even after his parents died, and moved back when he retired.
Like any good parish priest, he knows his flock, sins and all. “I have buried kids who have died violently,” he says. “Gangs have been a problem. They are under control, I believe, but still a problem.”
Perhaps the main challenge is poverty and economic instability. “In the old days, people were pretty well solidified in their jobs,” he says. “But the economy has changed so much and folks moving in now suffer a great deal financially.”
One positive change strikes Wittliff as significant: less intolerance. “There is more openness, more receptivity to rubbing shoulders with people who are different from you,” he says. And then he asks me to take a look at his backyard. Like many on the South Side, it is small, well-kept, and has a lots of religious statues (especially the Virgin Mary), American flags and flowers.
“Look at my backyard,” he says. “Soon it will have an abundance of colors. That’s the South Side, room for all sorts of beautiful people. As far as I am concerned, change is the essence of faith.”
Then he puts it in Milwaukee terms: “I don’t like to drink from a stagnant pool. I prefer a jumping bubbler.”
Barbara Miner is a freelance writer for Milwaukee Magazine. Write to her at
letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
