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Meet Wisconsin's first Hispanic mayor
Former Sheboygan Mayor Juan Perez is believed to be Wisconsin's first Hispanic mayor. Now retired from politics, Perez focuses on painting.
SHEBOYGAN, Wis. - He is believed to be Wisconsin's first Hispanic mayor, but if Juan Perez had listened to the critics, it would have never happened.
Meet Juan Perez
What they're saying:
"Letters. For example, they would call me a dirty [anti-Hispanic slur], and ‘You know we're going to kick you out.’ And first of all, they wrote me letters saying, 'Do you think a stupid Mexican like you will even be elected mayor?'" Perez said.
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Perez said that opposition made him more determined.
"I think the reason I was able to overlook that and to kind of live with it is that I knew for a fact that not everybody is like that, and I pretty much understood that was coming from a small group of people that were determined to rattle my being mayor," Perez said.
Juan Perez
Sheboygan elects Perez
The backstory:
Indeed, in 2005, the people of Sheboygan elected Perez as their mayor.
"I was proud. I was proud to have been able to step up, and I was proud that people had the faith in me to elect me," Perez said.
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But, the criticism of Perez didn’t stop. He survived a recall attempt. Opponents accused him of things like costly delays in building the city’s police station. They did not gather enough signatures to force the election. Then, in 2009, he lost the mayoral primary.
A legacy of Perez's one term as mayor is that a proposed police station did not take over Sheridan Park, but was built in a different location, meaning the park was saved.
Pen for paint brush
What they're saying:
When he put down the mayor's pen, he picked up the painter's brush. Now retired from public office, he speaks through his brushes, color and canvas as a painter.
"Calms me down," Perez said of his daily painting. "As cliché as it may sound, I already have the final product in my head. Now I just have to put it there."
There's a lot of lessons in these brushes.
Juan Perez
"People say: "You should have done this better. Well, here’s a brush, you do it,’" Perez said.
Wisconsin’s first Hispanic mayor paints a picture of the past and sheds light on the future. FOX6 News asked Perez what Hispanic heritage means to him.
"It means a lot in the sense that we have people who have taken the time to even recognize the Hispanic population, the culture," said Perez. "For a long time, and even now our presence is being questioned here in the United States, in our own country, and it means a lot that people are even willing to come forward and say we're going to celebrate, we're going to have Hispanic Heritage Month."
Portions of this article were formatted using A.I. FOX6’s Jason Calvi and an editor reviewed it for accuracy and tone prior to publishing.
The Source: Information in this story was gathered from Juan Perez, as well as the Sheboygan police station, plus McFarland, Wisconsin’s "A Brief History of Hispanic Life and Labor in Wisconsin," and an archived web page dedicated to the recall effort.