The hemisphere comes to the heartland: ready or not, the next generation of movimientistas will redefine immigration politics.

AS SHE MARCHED across Milwaukee's historic 16th Street viaduct, Christine Neumann-Ortiz knew she was linking political traditions. "We chose the bridge because that's where African Americans marched for housing and other civil rights in the '60s," said Ortiz, leader of Voces de la Frontera, the immigrant worker center that staged the May 1 march in Milwaukee. "It was important to make these connections."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The march passed South Side churches built by 19th and early 20th century Polish and German immigrants. Their descendants forged one of the country's deepest, most well-rooted progressive histories--Milwaukee bricklayers and carpenters like those who built the churches were among the first to organize unions in the United States. Ortiz didn't know how far down the wells of political potential went. "We didn't think that 70,000 people would show up," she said of what was later confirmed as the largest march in Wisconsin history.

Beyond the size and sheer numbers, the marches, organizing and other components of the movimiento mark an even deeper milestone: the need to redefine or even transcend the progressive movement born in response to industrial-age ills in Midwestern cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. The daughter of a German father and a Mexican mother, Ortiz symbolizes the necessary marriage of political and cultural traditions in Milwaukee. She is a reminder of the need to bridge the political and cultural chasm between the largely English-speaking Black and white local progressives--most of whom didn't participate in or even see the great waves of Spanish-dominant marches coming--and the politically ascendant Latino community. Such a melding of movements is especially urgent at a time when cities like Milwaukee deal with racial and class tensions and other urban issues that still dog them in the digital age. "Wisconsin is going through a lot of changes," said 39-year-old Ortiz, "and we didn't initially didn't get a lot of sympathy from white activists."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While Ortiz and other marchantes view immigration within the context of such core progressive concerns as globalization, war and national security, most progressives don't. She and other activists perceive a great threat from the fusion of security concerns and immigration embodied by Milwaukee Congressman James Sensenbrenner's HR4437. But that has also moved them to envision a singular opportunity to birth a grand movement that bridges progressive and immigrant rights agendas in what will be a new march to freedom in the global age.

For historian John Gurda, the current movimiento follows a well-trodden political path of continuity and change led by communities of domestic and foreign-born migrants. Gurda, who hails from a long line of Polish immigrants who used to inhabit the white picket fence homes, ornate churches and crowded streets now occupied by Mexican immigrants of Milwaukee's South Side, points to the similar roles played by 19th-and early 20th-century Polish and present-day Mexican newspapers and associations. These and other institutions, says Gurda, were critical in "providing a vital and unified response to political issues affecting the community." He calls the similarities between the two communities "striking" in that "both groups are predominantly Catholic, both have a tradition of large and close-knit families and both spoke a language other than English when they arrived. Poles and Mexicans also began at the bottom of the economic ladder, often in foundries and tanneries, and they have struggled to overcome both poverty and prejudice." Another key site of political activity and cultural transition, says Gurda, are churches like the twin-spired St. Stanislaus Catholic Church on Mitchell Street, where 2,000 Polish workers gathered in 1886 to organize and protest as part of the initial movement that later led to the establishment of the eight-hour work day. As if marking the transition from industrial to post-industrial Milwaukee, priests at St. Stanislaus say they now "bury in Polish and baptize in Spanish."

While the continuity described by Gurda remains, developments in Milwaukee and other U.S. cities with large Latino and other immigrant populations also signal something altogether new in the history of U.S. immigrant populations. Latinos, especially Mexicans, the immigrant behemoth, come from countries and a hemisphere with a contiguous border shared with the U.S. And this hemispheric view of the border has as many implications for U.S. citizens as it does for Mexican, Hmong and other Milwaukee immigrant communities. Unlike previous generations of immigrants, Mexicans and other Latinos arrive in Milwaukee at a time of intense globalization, a time when the telecommunications, banking, travel and other industries are making obvious and facilitating the very linkages Milwaukee's Sensenbrenner wants to cut off with his proposals for a border wall and other policies designed to appeal to the white fear vote.

Similarly, whites living in Milwaukee and other cities are facing unprecedented challenges to their well-being and identity. They have been abandoned by big, globalizing capital like no previous generations of whites. Take for example, the hundreds of mostly white workers in nearby Neenah, Wisconsin, who were recently laid off at Kimberly Clark, the company founded by Sensenbrenner's great-grandfather and one that still makes him a millionaire. Sensenbrenner offered them no explanations, only pointing toward the region's burgeoning immigrant population to explain the declining economic, political and cultural cachet of whites and whiteness, all the while remaining silent about the fact that his family's company is sending over 6,000 jobs to Mexico by year's end. Such an approach and such a situation makes it all the more necessary for Latinos and other immigrants in Milwaukee to develop more global explanations of the political and cultural moment.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Pedro Martinez, who coordinates pastoral services for the Hispanic ministries of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, also sees how Latino parishioners occupy a place similar to, yet different--and more hemispherically-oriented--from that of previous generations of immigrants. "Germans, Poles, Italians, Irish--each of these established their own relationship to the church. Now Mexicanos are doing the same," says Martinez, a Guadalajara, Mexico-born layman who has lived in Milwaukee for over 30 years. Like Ortiz, he sees the dangerous connection made by some like Sensenbrenner between the issues of immigration and national security. As a former candidate to the priesthood, Ortiz sees how "issues of social justice--housing, peace, human rights, labor--are intimately connected to the issue of immigration." As an immigrant himself, he views immigration with a broad continental lens. And like Ortiz, he also marched across the 16th Street bridge in the hope that the broader community would recognize the need to join forces. "We carried Mary in the marches. We carried a replica of the Virgen de Guadalupe in both the March and May 1 marches" says Martinez, adding "She appeared and still appears as a relief from oppression--for everyone, not just Mexicanos." In Milwaukee and elsewhere, progressives would do well to remember that the Virgen is not just the Queen of Mexico, she is also considered by Catholics to be the Empress of the Americas--including the United States, which more and more resembles and is connected to left-leaning Latin America both culturally and politically.

Martinez and Ortiz see, in both the Sensenbrenner bill and in the increasing number of gated communities popping up in the richer parts of the Congressman's district, a city and a country trying to wall themselves off from a world created by migration and economic decline fueled by failed foreign and domestic policies. In the face of these and other global challenges in Milwaukee, Ortiz says that white progressives should not wall themselves off politically from people whose very existence reflects the many dimensions of globalization. "Our movement has brought back hope where there was none. English-language media has been ignoring us. Progressives shouldn't do the same." And Ortiz's message seems to be getting through to some, like the Milwaukee Labor Council, which took the historic step of sponsoring the big marchas.

Ortiz and others leaders in the movimiento are struggling to define the future in and of a progressive movement that has, of late, been largely defined by electoral politics and war. "Milwaukee is a battleground state (in elections). We have registered over 5,100 voters and will register more. But elections will not define us. Organizing will," she says.

Their vision extends far beyond the Latino horizon. They have built broad coalitions around local labor and peace issues and have sponsored forums for candidates to Congress (Sensenbrenner didn't show). More recently, Ortiz and Voces crossed the bridge to the African-American community on the North Side of Milwaukee. "We raised money and sent seven African-American high school students to Washington to make connections to the national Black leadership," she said. Some of those same students marched were among the next generation of movimientistas who crossed the 16th Street bridge.

Roberto Lovato is a New-York based writer with New America Media.