Friday evening marked the launch of Milwaukee’s Festa Italiana at Henry Maier Festival Park, which is back for the first time since 2019. This year, First Lady of the United States, Jill Biden, joined the celebration and spoke during the opening ceremony at the Aurora Pavilion.
Biden was welcomed by Mayor Cavelier Johnson and Sandy Winard, president of the Italian Community Center of Milwaukee.
The Henry Maier Festival Park was full of Italian-American pride, with Italian and American flags flying high. Biden, who is of Sicilian heritage, used her time to briefly reminisce about childhood memories spent with her grandparents.
During her speech, Biden was interrupted five times by pro-Palestinian protesters yelling from the crowd. Other attendees jumped into action, physically blocking the protesters’ view of the stage, while the crowd booed them and began chanting “four more years” in opposition.
“Even though it’s [the protests] a little disturbing, thank God we live in a democracy,” Biden commented after the first protester was removed by law enforcement.
Biden waited for each interruption to quiet down before continuing her speech.
“We can talk, you don’t have to shout at me,” Biden said. “We only get things accomplished when we talk.”
In her 17-minute speech, Biden rarely mentioned her husband. Only toward the end did she draw a connection between Italian immigrants’ aspirations for a better life in the United States and her husband’s economic strategy, which she described as building the economy “from the middle out and from the bottom up,” giving families a chance to carve out a good life.
There was no mention of former-President Donald Trump, who was found guilty of all 34 felony counts in the hush-money case May 30.
