A Walk through Walker’s Point

On presentation night I spoke briefly about the United Cultural Center in Walker’s Point, and my evening eating at their restaurant, Café el Sol. I skimmed over The UCC and the neighborhood quickly in order to talk more about the restaurant and my “Taco Literacy”-based pedagogy project, so for this post I’d like to give more detail about the former two.

Walker’s Point is Milwaukee’s oldest neighborhood, founded in 1834 by George Walker. Walker, of course, was not the first person to live here, just the first non-native to “own” land here; this is what we call “founding” today. It quickly became a business hub, mainly for the fur trade, and by 1860 it was the most ethnically diverse section of Milwaukee. This meant little by today’s standard, as it meant that Walker’s Point had Yankee, German, Irish, and Czech inhabitants; as I said in class, a cornucopia of whiteness. At the time, such ethnic differences mattered quite a bit, as the European ethnicities had not yet melded together into “whiteness.” The Irish, in particular, were not at the time even considered white unless compared to natives, slaves, or sometimes Italians. Norwegians arrived soon after, followed by immigrants from Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Serbia.

Industries Old and New

Manufacturing began and grew in the area until Walker’s Point became the most densely developed industrial area in the city by 1900. Twenty years later, the Latinx migration began as the tannery began to hire Mexican workers who settled there, many fleeing the economic and political turmoil initiated by the Mexican Revolution. The earliest Latinx immigrants are known as “los Primeros.” Puerto Rican migration to the neighborhood started in the 1940s, making Walker’s Point the largest Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Wisconsin to this day. In the 1950s, natives returned as the US government attempted to assimilate them into European American society; that is, to “de-Indianize” them.

Today, as I walk around the neighborhood over a range of just a few blocks in every direction, I can see the influence of many cultures. Greek and Asian restaurants stand among the 20 Latinx restaurants in Walker’s Point; this place smells good. The architecture is culturally varied beyond my knowledge of the subject. The neighborhood is currently known as a favored LGBT meeting place, though possibly not at the “gentlemen’s club” that I passed during my short walk. There’s also a jazz club I plan to visit soon

Signs of industrial activity are still everywhere, punctuated by various murals pained on buildings, including the largest mural in Milwaukee. Here is also the largest four-sided non-chiming clock in the Western Hemisphere (or just the world’s largest four-sided clock, depending on what source you consult), the Allen-Bradley Clock Tower, once known as the Polish Moon (and still memorialized by that name by MKE Brewery a few blocks from it) but now widely known as the Mexican Moon.

The United Community Center, or UCC, serves the Latinx community in Walker’s Point with support services, education, culture, arts, recreation, community development, and health and human services. It began in the 1960s as an outreach program run by a local Christian center known as “The Spot,” but became an independent program in 1970 and moved to their current 9th St. location, formerly the Parish Hall of the Slovenian John the Baptist Catholic Church,  in 1972. The UCC has seen steady growth since then.

Their programs include the Acosta Middle School, a blended-learning charter school that focuses largely on Technical and Engineering education. They also run the Bruce-Guadalupe School which provides elementary and middle-school education. The 97% of the student body is Hispanic, and 80% are low-income. Of their parents, 58% have completed high school, and 42% have a middle education or less. Yet the Bruce-Guadalupe school has Attendance, retention, and graduation rates all over 95%, providing a clear record of breaking this cycle.

Elder programs include geriatric health services, nutritious meals served daily, recreational facilities and affordable housing.
Aside from the geriatric services, health and athletic services include health care for students and clients, sports leagues, two gymnasiums, a boxing ring, a practice field, and a fitness center.

Other human services include a day care and the Walker Square Initiative, which provides education and assistance to 1st-time home buyers. All of these services are aimed at breaking poverty cycles, providing quality education to the next generation, and stabilizing neighborhood.

Culturally, they offer galleries of Latinx arts and history – one can learn about Los Primeros there – as well as Café el Sol, which fuses Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Wisconsin cultures into a delicious array of foods accompanied by Latinx music every Friday night. I highly recommend it.

JPS


Sources
http://www.neighborhoodsinmilwaukee.org/Walker%27s%20Point.pdf
Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods by John Gurda
https://www.unitedcc.org/index.htm