[MUSIC PLAYING] JESUS SALAS: This isn't about Jesus Salas.

This is about a farmworkers movement, and what comes out of there is the issues of the community, its roots, and its legacies.

[SINGING IN SPANISH] Por eso le canto así.

Y así, y así trabajas tú las horas bajo el sol.

Y así si no es por ti no habría tortillas ni frijol.

Y así, y así confrontas tu la tierra con la acción.

Y así si no es por ti no habría surgido esta canción.

JESUS SALAS: We were part of 100,000 seasonal migrant workers coming from La Frontera, from the Texas-Mexico borderlands, coming up here.

And we converted the agricultural industry of this region to feed all of these growing urban areas that were growing at the time.

Wisconsin at that time became a leader.

SERGIO GONZÁLEZ: It became impossible to not come across Jesus's story.

It became really central to understanding the history of Latino settlement here in Wisconsin and, more importantly, the role of people like Jesus in developing social movements to better the lives of Latinos who have called Wisconsin home.

JESUS SALAS: We lived in a segregated community-- unpaved, there's no electricity in the streets, segregated schools.

In 1954, when I was in middle school, they'd create 61, 62, 63, 64.

61 was primarily for Anglos and all their lackeys.

And then 62-- a little bit mixed.

I usually ended up in 63, 64, 65 in all Mexican classes, and that's the way they avoided integrating the classrooms.

Even though we were in the same building, we weren't in the same in the same classroom.

Relocated in Wautoma, Wisconsin, and concentrated on finishing school there and, hopefully, have a different future, other than being the third generation migrants that we were.

LUPE MARTINEZ: When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his vice president became president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

And when Lyndon B. Johnson took over and became the president, he came from Texas and he saw that there was a lot of poverty in Texas as well as around the country.

So one of the things they decided to do was to start.

He initiated what was called the war on poverty.

He wanted to make sure that poverty was eliminated, and he created all kinds of new programs.

One of them was the Office of Economic Opportunity, a federal agency that came up with funding for agencies like UMOS to deal with farmworker issues and the community action agencies that are still in existence today.

So this war was launched to try to do something about the poverty in this country.

UMOS was one of those agencies that applied for that funding and was funded in 1965.

JESUS SALAS: I knew the working conditions as a migrant worker.

There was a study that I became aware of in the early '60s about the living conditions-- that is, the migrant labor camps.

And, at that time, only 375 camps were certified for human inhabitation.

50 of them were provisional.

They had to make some repairs in order for migrants to be allowed to live there.

And nearly 100 of them were uncertified.

They were just farmers who were operating without any inspection of the units.

And what was going on-- as you know, Wisconsin is a dairy state.

So where were migrants living?

Well, If you look at the farm-- in former barns that used to inhabit cows.

Sheds were being converted into migrant housing.

Granaries that are used to store corn were converted.

And, of course, all these separate units-- there were no potable water in them.

There were no bathrooms or toilets.

These were minimum standards.

And the big problem was they were inspected before the migrants got in there, but they were never inspected when the migrants were inhabiting these labor camps.

And most of the problem was that even those that were certified was overcrowded.

ERNESTO CHACON: I think it was around 1969 in Wautoma, Wisconsin.

I was working for UMOS as a counselor.

Our job in UMOS was to visit the migrant camps in Waushara County and provide information to the migrant farm workers of what UMOS was trying to work on.

At the same time, there was a movement for the migrant farm workers in Wautoma.

JESUS SALAS: So for the next three years, I go back to the migrant labor camps, but now with a different vision, not as a migrant worker, but trying to do something about the migrant families and, in particular, trying to get the kids out of the migrant fields and caring for them.

And these new child care centers that we're establishing.

And this gives me a completely different vision of the condition of the migrant workers and what we should do about them than when I was a migrant worker.

LUPE MARTINEZ: Conditions were terrible in those days and, in some cases, they're still the same.

I come from a migrant farmworker background, so I experienced the problems that farmworkers were having in terms of poor housing, low wages, very difficult work in the hot sun, very physically challenging kind of work.

SERGIO GONZÁLEZ: The question of social movements are intrinsically questions of solidarity.

How do we come across divisions of difference and try to better understand a world in which we can all thrive together?

So my work is deeply invested in those questions as historical questions.

But I think, more importantly, as well, is tools for us to build those different worlds for the future.

LUPE MARTINEZ: Farm work is very similar to construction work-- high incidence of accidents and such.

JESUS SALAS: Farming was the most dangerous job that there was.

The farmers themselves, when they used the plow or the or the cultivator or the disc or whatever they knew or the thresher with a very complicated multimotor machines-- maybe they knew the safety hazard.

But if you put a migrant worker who has never oriented himself as to the safety of this, you could have issues.

LUPE MARTINEZ: Having being familiar with that, it made it much easier for me to be able to deal with those problems at the UMOS level.

And the conditions that existed then, in many cases, in part of the country have not changed very much, over the past 50 years.

There are some states-- like Wisconsin is only one of a few states that has very strong laws to protect the migrants season farm workers.

In addition to that, in Wisconsin, the legislature and the governor chose, several years ago, to establish laws that would protect farm workers and have what is called a statutory council, an advisory council that oversees the conditions of migrant season farmworkers.

Not very many states have that.

In fact, most of the states in the country don't have what we have here in Wisconsin.

I mean, people like Jesus Salas and Salvador Sanchez advocated for changes in establishing laws to protect farmworkers.

JESUS SALAS: In 1968, we finally got who is going to be responsible for the farmworkers because violation of child labor laws, violations of the housing code-- we had wonderful laws, workmen's compensation, unemployment compensation.

Wisconsin was one of the most progressive states in terms of its legislature, but the problem was enforcement.

ERNESTO CHACON: Jesus Salas began to organize a group called Obreros Unidos and Obreros Unidos was more or less reaching out to organize the migrant farm workers in that county.

At the same time that he was doing that, Cesar Chavez was organizing the farm workers in Delano for the grape boycott.

JESUS SALAS: I'm in Madison in 1965.

We're going over the reports of the summer activities in the migrant labor camps.

And somebody shows me-- he says, hey, this is a newspaper in LA.

You see what the farmworkers are doing in California?

They're marching from Delano to Sacramento, the state capital, protesting the fact that the grape growers won't recognize the farmworkers union.

And I said, that's what we need to do.

SERGIO GONZÁLEZ: The one thing you're going to come away with is understanding that Jesus is a very humble man who understands that he is where he is because of his family, the community he calls home, the social movements that he built.

It was not just a story about his life, but a story of the life of Latinos in Wisconsin, of Texas Mexicans who have migrated here since the 1930 and 1940s, working in our state's agricultural fields, harvesting and reaping all of the things that we put on our tables, the things that really make Wisconsin what it is.

Jesus wanted Wisconsinites to understand that you can't tell the story of Wisconsin without telling the story of Texas Mexicans, of migrant farmworkers.

And I think he wanted people to understand that his story, as a young man growing up in Wautoma and helping develop this really special organization, this union, Obreros Unidos, is the story not of Jesus Salas, but it's the story of hundreds of thousands of migrant farmworkers who came together in solidarity to envision a better life for themselves and their families.

KRISTIN GILPATRICK: So many of the stories that you think are just stories are really histories.

I mean, the word "story" is part of "history" for a reason, and it's the most important part, and that's the part that we love to share.

So, for example, Jesus came to us with his idea, and as soon as we saw it, we knew what an important part of history, the whole migrant farmer story-- not just was, but is.

I mean, history is continuing.

JESUS SALAS: None of the ethnic festivals had that focus in terms of what are your existence?

What are you-- Because we were all children at the time, but I think that what we find is that migrant labor at the time was about women and children, as is poverty right now.

Poverty is about women and children.

And I think most of the burden fell on our on our women.

DAVID GIFFEY: A day's work that they're looking forward to with great happiness.

And that is not surprising to anyone who understands the nature of migrant work or of farm work in this kind of condition.

JESUS SALAS: It was very hard work.

And as I said, it was especially difficult for the women and the young girls because, of course, they were expected to be assuming responsibilities very early.

JIM PECK: And they still worked in the fields.

JESUS SALAS: In addition-- well, everybody did that at the same thing, like when we started going to school in Henry and Wautoma, we got up at the break of dawn.

We got a couple of hours in before we went to school, went to school, and when we came back, changed into our workloads, and finished up until nightfall.

DAVID GIFFEY: It's an inner strength of some sort that led them and assisted all of us as the years passed.

DOLORES HUERTA: Our organization, which Cesar and I had formed, called the National Farm Workers Association, we said, OK, we've got to do something here.

So we kind of waited a few days to see if it was just going to be a work stoppage or a real strike.

But what happened is that the growers retaliated with such brutality against the Filipino workers, beating them up.

They lived in these labor camps-- they shut off the lights and the gas and the water of the workers.

In fact, one employer actually locked the workers inside of the labor camp so that they wouldn't get out.

JIM PECK: Yeah, it sounds like something out of the 19th century.

DOLORES HUERTA: Exactly.

And so all of this brutality and violence against the Filipino workers-- so we call the general meeting of all of the Mexican farmworkers and said, look, we've got to support this strike.

So the workers took a vote and voted to support the strike on September the 16th of 1965.

ERNESTO CHACON: We knew about Chavez.

We knew about the great boycott.

Somehow, Jesus and Chavez connected somehow because Chavez needed some support to promote the boycott here in Wisconsin.

JESUS SALAS: Person-to-person call in 1966 to Cesar Chavez, and I told him that I had been a farmworker, that I had been involved in these nature programs, and that I wanted to organize a protest.

And he says, yeah.

And he says, would you help us with the grape boycott?

And I didn't know what a boycott was.

But he explained to me.

He said, not only does Wisconsin consume a large quantity of grapes, but it's one of the biggest consumers of brandy per capita in the whole nation.

DOLORES HUERTA: And not in 1965 but later on, we ended up doing that boycott right here against that same company, right here in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, because it turned out that the brand-- Wisconsin has the highest consumption of brandy of any country-- JIM PECK: That's right.

DOLORES HUERTA: --of any state in the United States of America.

And so we had farmworkers that had to come out here in the dead of the winter to ask people not to buy this-- JIM PECK: They had time to ask people not to drink brandy.

ERNESTO CHACON: I was having breakfast, and I saw the line there.

I said, what's going on?

So I said, I'm going to go help them.

So I got up the table, went to the line, got in the picket line, and that's how I met Jesus.

Ever since then, we became friends, and we've been working together for our community for many, many years.

And we follow Chavez grape boycott, and we follow Martin Luther King civil rights movement.

We were a small committee that came together and we talk about what Chavez was doing and what Martin Luther King was doing and other people around the country was doing.

JESUS SALAS: We didn't organize like the traditional labor movement, the heads of the family.

We organized the whole family.

And you don't have a youth movement unless you organize the whole family.

You don't organize women unless you organize the whole family.

You don't have a women's liberation movement unless you organize the whole family as such.

ERNESTO CHACON: There was a movement, a national movement of Mexican-Americans in the United States.

José Ángel Gutiérrez was in Texas, organizing La Raza Unida.

Reies López Tijerina was in New Mexico, organizing the land grant movement-- Corky Gonzalez in Denver.

We've become part of a transnational movement, and the group was mostly Mexican-Americans.

So we decided to have a group, an organization that do more than be a committee.

Our group decided to use the committee and name it a name that more or less reflects to the community.

And most of the Tejano was saying, we should call it the Civil Rights for Raza, Civil Rights for Mexican-American.

JESUS SALAS: No eramos mexicanos, no eramos norteamericanos, eramos chicanos, verdad?

ERNESTO CHACON: We had a big debate over that.

JESUS SALAS: Y ahora los puertorriqueños y los cubanos, entonces Chacon dice, Mira... ERNESTO CHACON: I know this community.

We have Puerto Ricans.

We have Latin Americans.

We have people from Mexico.

We cannot just call it Tejano, you know?

JESUS SALAS: Si vamos a establecer una organizacion nos vamos a llamar Latin American Union for Civil Rights.

Osea eso atrae, nunca tenemos esos problemas que en otras ciudades hay esos conflictos entre la diversidad, esa que estamos hablando.

SERGIO GONZÁLEZ: Wisconsin is the number one cheese producer in the United States, the number two dairy producer in the United States.

And that's an industry that is heavily dependent on immigrants.

The majority of our dairy producers in the state rely on these workers who come from places like Mexico, from Central America.

These are people who are no longer migratory workers.

They don't just come here to work for a specific season.

Of course, dairy work is work that's required every single day.

So we're talking about people who are living 24/7, working every single day in these farms who are helping produce an industry that really is iconic in the state of Wisconsin.

These are people who are here every single day.

They live in the state of Wisconsin.

They call this state their home.

I think the question that a lot of people in rural parts of Wisconsin are having to ask themselves is how will we welcome these immigrants into our communities?

KRISTIN GILPATRICK: Our mission has been to collect, preserve and share Wisconsin history, really since the beginning.

And it is because at the state level, they recognize we need the stories of all of Wisconsin.

If we don't collect and preserve them, they're lost.

And then how do we know what Wisconsin is or who we are or who we want to be?

ROBERTO HERNANDEZ: At the University of Wisconsin, I have reached an agreement on the immediate establishment of a Spanish-speaking outreach institute.

As stated in the formal agreement between the university and the community, the primary purposes of the Spanish-speaking outreach institute will be as follows-- to provide a focal point for the court-- JESUS SALAS: I think when we started organizing what later became community development rather than social unionism here, we brought what?

We opened up the University of Wisconsin because we wanted the social agencies that were being taken over by Latinos to be led by Latinos.

And the university was a crucial piece of getting an education.

You couldn't teach unless you had a certificate as a teacher.

You couldn't run the social services organizations that we were undertaking unless they had a college.

And, at that time, when I enrolled at UW Milwaukee, what?

there were-- out of 25,000 students, all the Latinos could sit around one table.

ERNESTO CHACON: There were only about 15 students Latinos at the university at that time.

After 50 years, we have about 3,000.

JESUS SALAS: The University of Wisconsin became crucial in order for the success of the organizations of UMOS, of Centro Hispano, of United Community Center of Concentrated Employment Program, Latin American Union for Civil Rights, the 16th Street Clinic, all of these organizations, in order for Latinos to be integrated in to lead these organizations-- the University of Wisconsin.

So that became a multiyear fight as the University of Wisconsin in Madison became a decades-long effort to be able to accommodate the offering of academic courses at that research institution.

ERNESTO CHACON: There were three major things set that were main concern of the neighborhood was education, employment, and welfare.

So the major, major thing at that time was welfare.

And Father Groppi and the Commandos were organizing welfare rights for mothers and single mothers and the community itself.

We had a march from Milwaukee to Madison requesting benefits for welfare mothers.

LUPE MARTINEZ: I remember we marched to Madison, and we took over the capitol, just like the education people did when the laws were changed about unions.

And we actually went into the conference room.

The governor allowed us to come into his conference room.

We met with the governor.

We met with the commission chairman for DILHR, which is now DWD, and made our case.

So they went to the legislature and the Migrant Labor Council was created, and it still exists today.

And I have the good fortune of being a chairman of the council today.

ERNESTO CHACON: We try to talk to the legislature and talk to the governor and nothing happens, like, oh, nobody paid attention to us.

So we came back to Milwaukee and began to organize in Milwaukee.

So we had people from all over the country for this march.

We had about maybe 10,000 people.

I was in charge of marching, taking the people from 6th Street on Wisconsin Avenue all the way down to the lake.

Camila Caceres, Clementina Castro was trying to go inside the store, and we had about 10,000 people behind us.

And I tried to open the door for them, and the police grabbed me.

So Jesus and those people went to Madison to request pardon or clemency for me and Puentes.

So it took about maybe three weeks or so.

The governor announced that they gave me, they gave us clemency and pardon for me and Puentes.

And that was a major victory for the community because the community responded to us.

And it was something that we will never forget because the community not only said that they're not criminals, they were fighting for us, now we fight for them.

So the L.A.U.C.R.

and the committee became stronger and stronger.

After that, all the issues that we were working with-- education, employment, discrimination, the police-- became easier for us to organize because when we call a meeting for education, there were 100 people there.

KRISTIN GILPATRICK: I like to think of thousands of people hanging on to Jesus's story and sharing it-- literally, physically, handing it around, sharing it through libraries.

That's so important because if we don't do that, people don't know the stories.

No, if you don't know where you're coming from, how do you know where you go?

So we enjoyed the victories, but also we enjoyed the losses.

We lost a lot of victories, but we didn't give up.

It was a job to continue.

And that's how we became part of the national movement for civil rights and human rights services for our community.

SERGIO GONZÁLEZ: Latinos today, as many people know, are the largest minority in the state of Wisconsin.

The 2020 Census marks us growing not just in places like Milwaukee and Madison and Kenosha and Racine, but growing all across the state of Wisconsin.

There is a way in which we can understand this new development as being the arrival of new people.

This is something foreign.

This is something alien.

This is something different than you.

But I think the importance of his story is, to put this into a larger context, to remind us that the history of Latino settlement in Wisconsin stretches back over 100 years.

In fact, the first Latino to call Wisconsin home arrived here in the 1880s.

JESUS SALAS: A movement signifies that something was established.

It has its roots, but it appears to have its own.

Once you start generating this action, it seems to have a life of its own.

The people that you bring in, you want to make sure that they realize that their contribution is going to be something that is ongoing, something that will impact not only the present but the future.

ERNESTO CHACON: One of the things that I learned from my community is that the people taught me so many things about life, about respect and value and how we organize.

We use those feelings, the images of people to bring people together.

So now, with all that information, that knowledge that we have, I want to put it in a piece of paper, put a manual out for people to know what we did from the '60s to the '80s.

And I want to see if we can compare what we did with what we do now.

As you know, when we started, we only had the Spanish center in the early '60s.

That's all we had.

Look what we have today.

We have Roberto Hernandez Center, We have UMOS, UCC, Voces.

Look what we have today-- the clinic-- which we didn't have before.

But it was part of the community that said this is what we need.

You don't tell me anything.

I'm telling you what we need.

And your job is to work with us and do something.

And that's what I want to do.

SERGIO GONZÁLEZ: Jesus's story puts this all into a broader space for us to understand that the past of Wisconsin is not just a past of immigrants coming from Europe, from Germany, from Poland, from Ireland.

It's also the history of Latinos who have come here from all parts of the United States, from the Caribbean, from Central and South America, looking for the very same things that have brought people here for decades, which is a better life for themselves and their families.

Jesus's story is this perfect opportunity to tell that history within one man, one movement, one community, but then to blow it up and to think about what it means for the larger story of Wisconsin, not just in the past, but I think, more importantly, for the future of the state as well.

JESUS SALAS: The word movement-- being part of a transnational movement, being part of something that didn't end with a particular manifestation, but that continues, and all the people that created it are part of it and future generations can enjoy it is a key word I would use, yeah.

I would like to think that to be remembered about our contribution and not the individual contribution, the legacy of the migrant workers over 50 years.

[SINGING IN SPANISH] Antes que el sol se asome en las montañas.

Antes que el cielo se aclare en su ventana.

Se levanta siempre igual con el cantar de alegres gallos.

Lleva en su costal el maíz.

Un día mas que hay que cumplir.

Por eso le canto así.

Y así, y así trabajas tú las horas bajo el sol.

Y así si no es por ti no habría tortillas ni frijol.

Y así, y así confrontas tu la tierra con la acción.

Y así si no es por ti no habría surgido esta canción.