Walk south across the Sixteenth Street viaduct on any warm Saturday and the city changes language. The Mexicans in Milwaukee have made the near South Side their own, a district of tortillerias and taquerias, of murals and mariachi, anchored on a stretch of road that was plain South 16th Street until the city renamed it Cesar Chavez Drive in 1996. It is the largest concentration of Spanish speakers in Wisconsin, and it began, more than a century ago, with a tannery and a recruiter.
The Place
Walker’s Point is Milwaukee’s oldest residential quarter. The Virginian George Walker filed a land claim here in the 1830s on a wedge of ground between the Milwaukee and Menomonee Rivers, and his settlement joined Juneautown and Kilbourntown to form the core of the future city.
For a century it was a working district of Yankees, Germans, and Irish, then Poles, drawn by the foundries and machine shops that lined the rivers. Allis-Chalmers and Allen-Bradley built their plants nearby, and the leather tanneries crowded the riverbanks. The same blocks would later anchor the Polish community of Milwaukee’s South Side, whose cheap multi-family houses gave the first Mexican arrivals a foothold.
Today the near South Side, stretching from Walker’s Point west through Clarke Square and out along National Avenue, is the heart of Mexican Milwaukee. Roughly two-thirds of Walker’s Point residents now claim Mexican ancestry, and the neighbourhood holds more Spanish speakers than anywhere else in the state. Wisconsin’s immigrant map is dotted with such anchors, from the Hmong of Eau Claire to the Poles of Stevens Point, but none speaks Spanish like the South Side.
How It Became Mexican
The story starts with a single hire and a sales pitch. In 1920, the Pfister and Vogel tannery on South 6th Street sent recruiters south and brought back roughly a hundred Mexican men to work the leather pits at its Menomonee and Bay View plants. They were remembered afterwards as “Los Primeros,” the first ones, the founding chapter in what the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee records as a century-long story.
The tanneries and the first arrivals
The work was brutal and the pay meant for men who would not stay. Mexico was bleeding people north in those years: the Revolution of 1910 to 1920 displaced more than a million across the border, and Milwaukee’s tanners and foundries were happy to recruit them.
In 1923 a second group arrived to work the U.S. Glue Factory in Carrollville, the industrial corner of what is now Oak Creek. The men found cheap rooms in the multi-family houses of the South Side, then a heavily Polish district, where rents were low and the factories were a short walk away. The arc would repeat across the Midwest, from the steel towns of Texas to the auto belt, where Detroit’s Mexicantown grew the same way.
Then the families came. Wives and children followed in the second half of the 1920s, and a community of single labourers became a settled one. By 1930 more than four thousand Mexicans lived in Milwaukee.
The mutual aid societies
What held the early community together were the mutualistas, the mutual aid societies that pooled money for funerals, illness, and hard winters. La Sociedad Mutualista Hispano-Azteca formed in 1920, and El Club Mexicano, founded in 1924, was the first Mexican-led organisation in Wisconsin.
These societies did more than insure their members. They put on the dances, kept the religious calendar, and from 1930 published a community newsletter, El Mutualista, that ran for forty years. Mexicans opened grocery stores and taverns, and the South Side acquired its first Spanish-speaking institutions.
The Depression and the deportations
The collapse nearly erased it all. When the Depression threw men out of the tanneries, relief agencies in Milwaukee, as in cities across the country, paid the train fare to send Mexican families back across the border. The community that had topped four thousand fell below fifteen hundred by the late 1930s.
Recovery was slow. As late as 1970 only about thirty-six hundred Mexicans lived in the city. The great growth was still to come, and when it came it arrived not directly from Mexico but by way of Texas.
The Tejano migration and Crystal City
Through the mid-twentieth century, Mexican American families from South Texas worked the northern harvest as migrant labourers, following the crops up from the Rio Grande Valley each spring. They picked cucumbers and sugar beets in Wisconsin, asparagus in Illinois, and tomatoes along Lake Michigan.
One small Texas town sent so many that its name still echoes on the South Side: Crystal City, the spinach capital of Texas. Families from Crystal City, the Cristaleños, kept ties to Milwaukee through return visits and annual reunions, and many simply stayed when the season ended. The same Tejano world produced the older barrios of San Antonio and Houston, from which the harvest road ran north.
Among them was Jesus Salas, who came up from Crystal City and in 1966 helped found Obreros Unidos, an independent farm workers’ union inspired by Cesar Chavez. Salas led a march on Madison in August 1966 to demand better conditions in the fields, then helped take over United Migrant Opportunity Services to run it for the workers themselves.
The civil rights years
The late 1960s turned the South Side political. In 1968 organisers ran a grape boycott in solidarity with Chavez’s union in California. In 1969 a seven-month picket outside the Allen-Bradley plant demanded that the company hire Black and Latino workers.
New institutions grew out of the protests. The Latin American Union for Civil Rights formed in 1968, the Council for the Education of Latin Americans in 1970, and in 1971 students walked out of South Side schools twice in a week demanding bilingual classes and Latino teachers.
This was the generation that turned a labour colony into a neighbourhood with a voice. By 1980 the Mexican population of Milwaukee had climbed past fifteen thousand, and it kept climbing, to twenty-one thousand by 1990 and sixty thousand by the turn of the century.
The Landmarks
Cesar Chavez Drive, South 16th Street. In 1996 the city renamed a stretch of South 16th Street for the Mexican American labour leader, formalising what was already the commercial spine of the community. The street carries Latino-owned bakeries, restaurants, insurance offices, and grocers, and a business improvement district works to make it a cultural hub.
Supermercado El Rey, 916 S. Cesar E. Chavez Dr. The brothers Heriberto and Ernesto Villarreal, who emigrated in 1960 and 1964, opened their first small grocery on South 16th Street in 1980. The chain grew to several locations and its own tortilla factory, employing hundreds, and the flagship store on Chavez Drive opened in 2007 across from the original site.
Conejito’s Place, 539 W. Virginia St. Jose Garza, who came to the United States in 1957 and was nicknamed Conejito, the little rabbit, opened a tavern on South 6th Street in 1968 and moved it to Virginia Street as a restaurant in 1972, when Milwaukee had almost no Mexican kitchens. He served home-style tacos on paper plates until his death in 2010, and the place still trades on that no-frills reputation.
United Community Center, 1028 S. 9th St. The UCC grew out of a youth programme called The Spot, started in 1965 next to Walker Square Park. Today it is a sprawling social service agency with a senior centre, clinics, and its own charter school, Bruce-Guadalupe, serving the near South Side in Spanish and English.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Grove Street. Founded in 1926 as a Mexican mission on the South Side, Our Lady of Guadalupe gave the early community its own Catholic parish. By the 2000s nearly a dozen Milwaukee parishes were holding Spanish masses, but Guadalupe carries the name that the first families brought with them.
Mexican Fiesta, Henry W. Maier Festival Park. Held on the lakefront festival grounds each August since 1973, Mexican Fiesta has become the largest Hispanic paid-entrance festival in the Midwest. The Wisconsin Hispanic Scholarship Foundation runs it and has raised well over a million dollars for student scholarships from the proceeds.
National Avenue. Running west from Walker’s Point, National Avenue is the everyday commercial street of the South Side, lined with taquerias, panaderias, and shops whose signs are in Spanish. It is the artery that ties the historic core to the newer Mexican neighbourhoods of Clarke Square and beyond.
Where They Came From
The earliest arrivals came straight from Mexico, many from the central states and from regions emptied by the Revolution. The very first known resident, Rafael Baez, had arrived from Puebla as far back as 1884 to play the organ at Gesu Church, but the tannery recruits of 1920 were the true founders.
The later, larger wave was Tejano. These were Mexican American families from South Texas, above all from Crystal City and the Rio Grande Valley, who had followed the migrant harvest north and decided to stay. They brought conjunto music, a Texan accent on the Spanish, and a tradition of labour organising that reshaped the city.
That double origin still marks the community. The older mutualistas and the parish of Guadalupe carry the memory of the first arrivals from Mexico, while the festivals and union halls carry the memory of the Cristaleños who came up the harvest road. It is a pattern echoed in Mexican enclaves from Dallas to Santa Ana, California, each shaped by where its families first set out.
Milwaukee Today
Mexican Milwaukee is no longer a small colony. By the 2020 census, Hispanics made up roughly a fifth of the city’s population, and Mexicans were by far the largest group, around two in three of all Latinos in Milwaukee. The community has spread well beyond Walker’s Point into Clarke Square, Silver City, and the wider South Side.
It has political weight to match. JoCasta Zamarripa became the first Latina elected to the Wisconsin legislature in 2010, representing the South Side, and Mexican Americans have served on the Common Council and the County Board. A Mexican consulate opened in the city in 2016, a sign of how large the community had grown.
The neighbourhood is not without strain. Gentrification has crept into Walker’s Point as breweries and apartments move in, and in 2026 the renaming of Chavez Drive itself was reconsidered after allegations surfaced about the labour leader’s record. Yet the South Side remains, stubbornly and proudly, the place where Wisconsin speaks Spanish, where the tortilleria opens before dawn and the August fiesta still draws the whole city to the lake.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Mexicans first settle in Milwaukee?
The Mexicans in Milwaukee trace their community to 1920, when the Pfister and Vogel tannery recruited about a hundred men, remembered as Los Primeros, to work its leather plants. A second group arrived in 1923 for the glue factory in Carrollville. The earliest known individual resident, Rafael Baez, arrived from Puebla in 1884 as a church organist.
Why is it called Cesar Chavez Drive?
In 1996 the City of Milwaukee renamed a portion of South 16th Street as South Cesar E. Chavez Drive, honouring the Mexican American farm workers’ leader. The street runs through the heart of the South Side Mexican community and is lined with Latino-owned businesses, anchored by the Supermercado El Rey.
What neighbourhood is the centre of Mexican Milwaukee?
Walker’s Point, the city’s oldest residential district, is the historic core, with roughly two-thirds of residents claiming Mexican ancestry. The Mexicans in Milwaukee have since spread west through Clarke Square, Silver City, and along National Avenue, but Walker’s Point and Chavez Drive remain the symbolic heart.
Where did Milwaukee’s Mexican families originally come from?
The first arrivals came directly from Mexico, many from central states emptied by the Revolution of 1910 to 1920. The much larger later wave was Tejano, Mexican American families from South Texas, especially the spinach town of Crystal City, who followed the migrant harvest north and settled permanently.
What is Mexican Fiesta in Milwaukee?
Mexican Fiesta is a three-day celebration held each August at Henry W. Maier Festival Park on the lakefront, running since 1973. It is the largest Hispanic paid-entrance festival in the Midwest, organised by the Wisconsin Hispanic Scholarship Foundation, which uses the proceeds to fund student scholarships.
How large is the Mexican community in Milwaukee today?
As of the 2020 census, Hispanics made up about a fifth of Milwaukee’s population, and Mexicans were the largest group, roughly two in three of all Latinos in the city. The near South Side holds the largest concentration of Spanish speakers anywhere in Wisconsin.
If your family’s story passed through Milwaukee, or any of the places Mexicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the spinach fields of Crystal City and the tanneries of Pfister and Vogel, to a bakery on Cesar Chavez Drive, to wherever you are now.