“The Priests Said the Church Should Not Be Used for Political Purposes”: Latino-Serving Organizations, Religion, and Fights for Self-Determination in Civil Rights-Era Milwaukee

This paper examines the complicated and oftentimes contentious relationship between Milwaukee religious organizations and grassroots Chicano and Puerto Rican activists throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. During the early 1960s, southeastern Wisconsin ecumenical coalitions representing the Roman Catholic Church, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, and the Episcopal Church collaborated to provide Latino migrant and industrial workers with the educational, health, and social services denied them by state and local agencies. With the rise of Brown Power movements by the end of the decade, the predominately white-led leadership of these organizations clashed with Latino coalitions such as the Latin American Union for Civil Rights and the Young Lords over control of social services as grassroots activist coalitions demanded control over the organizations serving their community. Protesting that religious organizations were neither open to the public nor responsive to the Latino community’s needs, Chicano and Puerto Rican activists further demanded monetary and institutional backing to support economic, social, and educational programming for Spanish speakers throughout southeastern Wisconsin. This paper contributes to a larger project calling for historians of Latino communities to understand the role of religion in Midwestern and national Latino civil rights movements not just as an additive component of grassroots mobilization, but as a constitutive aspect of broader organization within Spanish-speaking communities in the twentieth century.