On War and Remembrance: Hispanics and World War II
Posted October 19th, 2007by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
At 81, World War II seems like a world and a half ago. I had just turned 17 when I enlisted in the Marines during the dark days of World War II and 20 when I was mustered out in 1946. My role in that “great war” was nominal. Its heroes lie buried on far-flung battlefields.Best estimates indicate that more than half a million American Hispanics served in the armed forces during World War II (1941-1946), most of them Mexican Americans. I was just a speck among that number.The San Antonio of 1941, where a branch of my mother’s family settled in 1731, was a place of “brown blood and white laughter” as I wrote in a poem years later, remembering the city’s segregated schools and its English-only rules. Though the war transformed the city economically, a different kind of war would vanquish the barriers that had made San Antonio a divided community and strangers of Tejanos in their own land.At war, American Hispanics showed their mettle. Boys became men. On the Day of Infamy, I went to the cathedral and prayed, wondering if I could pass for 17, hoping the war would wait for me.
What seems lost in national memory is that American Hispanics played significant military roles in that conflagration, recipients of more Medals of Honor during that fray than any other ethnic group. But they came home to a country that disdained their service, continuing to treat them as foreigners in their own land.
During World War II, Hispanics served in the Army, the Army Air Corps, the Navy, the Marines, the Coast Guard, the Merchant Marine. They were pilots, navigators, bombardiers, gunners. On the home front they were Air Raid Wardens, led War Bond Drives, served at USO’s, handed out donuts and coffee to American GI’s at train stations and military bases, scores of Hispanic mothers placed Gold Star on their windows, and dutifully covered their windows at night in compliance with “blackout” instructions.
Across the country American Hispanics played crucial roles in the victory of World War II by working in defense plants building planes, tanks, jeeps and other military equipment. In Pittsburgh, Mexican American women from the Ohio Valley communities of Mexican Americans built gliders in the Heinz plant which converted its ketchup machinery to the war effort.
After the War, I came home, hung up my uniform with its plastron of medals, and went looking for America. The first part of that odyssey carried me to the University of Pittsburgh where — with the help of the G.I. Bill — I matriculated with only one year of high school. I went on to achieve the Ph.D. in English (British Renaissance literature) at the University of New Mexico with only one year of high school and no GED.
More than half a century later, PBS added insult to injury by its ill-advised decision to air Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 14-hour mini-series on World War II despite the fact that the series did not include the significant participation of Hispanics in that War. Ironically, Burns’ documentary was originally scheduled to air on September 16 — a commemorative day for Mexican Americans during Hispanic Heritage Month, the day Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1810. That sparked considerable controversy since the documentary did not include any of the contributions of Hispanics to the war.
However, after an intense “Defend the Honor” campaign of public protest by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Hispanic vet organizations like the American GI Forum, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez–associate professor of journalism and director the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas–and Gus Chavez (founder of Defend the Honor” campaign), PBS president Paula Kerger agreed to emendations of the documentary. How extensive remained unclear even after word leaked out that Hector Galan, the Hispanic film-maker from Austin, Texas, who produced the 1996 series “Chicano! History of The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement” for PBS, had been contracted to provide supplementary Hispanic footage for the series. Burns stood firm, saying that he would not “re-cut” the film. When asked about the Defend the Honor campaign by Matt Lauer on the Today Show on Friday morning (September 21, 2007), Ken Burns disingenuously told Matt Lauer that “Latinos never came forward to be part of the documentary.” In Orange County, California, the PBS affiliate (KOCE) responded vituperously to the Defend the Honor steering committee, which sought to meet with the station management, with the accusation that “you all belong to a fringe group who refuse to be satisfied and who seem to enjoy the attention you are receiving by continuing to attack PBS.” The station added that “PBS and KOCE have been true friends to Hispanic Americans and deserve far better than the treatment they are receiving from an unreasonable few.”
I’ve long thought that congressional funding for PBS and NPR should be eliminated since both are disconnected from the realities of American Hispanics and seem to be impervious to the demographic presence of Hispanics in the U.S.
TV network media and a majority of mainstream American newspapers don’t have a clue about American Hispanics. They don’t know who they are. The fault lies with American history, as Carlos Guerra correctly points out: how it’s written and how it’s taught. An old African proverb contends that “the history of the lion hunt will always favor the hunter until lions have their own historians.”
Hispanics are not newcomers to the territory that is now the United States. Long before 1848 they were here with the Dutch in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York); they had established settlements on the Gulf Coast long before the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts; and in the Southwest they had established thriving cities like San Antonio, Santa Fe, El Paso, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterrey, and San Francisco long before the U.S. declared war on Mexico in 1846 and dismembered it, taking more than half its territory as a booty of war.
Today there are Hispanics in every state of the nation, in every major city of the country. In many places they are the majority population. The current Census count indicates that there are 45 million Hispanics in the American population, not counting the 4.5 million Hispanics on the island of Puerto Rico. Two-thirds or 30 million of those Hispanics are Mexican Americans.
In Texas, according to Steven Murdoch, the state demographer, Hispanics will be 65 percent of the state’s population by the year 2040. The U.S. Hispanic population is the second largest in the world after Mexico. By the year 2050, twenty-five percent of the American population will be Hispanic–one in four Americans will be Hispanic.
Amid the current brouhaha over immigration, Americans seem to have forgotten that in America’s defense, Hispanics have played significant roles in every war starting with the American Revolution. Some scholars contend that without Spain’s help in the war for independence (Bernardo de Galvez and Francisco de Miranda), the revolting American colonists would not have won the struggle.
American history does not identify as an Hispanic Jorge Farragut who went to the aid of besieged Americans in New Orleans during the War of 1812, nor that during the Civil War, Hispanics fought on both the Union side and the Confederate side of that internecine dispute.
Hispanics from Texas and New Mexico were with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” at San Juan Hill in Cuba. They were in China with the Boxer Rebellion; and in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. They served in significant numbers in World War I–the Great War to end all wars.
South of us, Mexico entered World War II in 1942 as America’s ally and by 1945 had three fighter squadron in the Philippines. More than 500,000 Mexican braceros (workers) were recruited by the United States to help fill the depleted manpower on American farms and industries.
The point is that from the founding of the nation, American Hispanics have served in the American Armed forces in overwhelmingly numbers. Currently, American Hispanics are on active military duty everywhere, most of them having already served in Iraq or Afghanistan.
American Hispanics have not only fought to defend the nation but they have fought for every inch of progress they have made. Mimi Lozano had it right: Ken Burns and PBS are lousy historians and blind to the history of American Hispanics.
A dding supplementary Hispanic footage to the first episode of “The War” consisted of 28 minutes at the end of the Guadalcanal sequence of the episode. Two Hispanic Marine veterans who were at Guadalcanal with Carlson’s Raiders were interviewed with intersticing clips of Carlson’s Raiders. This struck me as an emendable gesture but far short of delivering on the Hispanic contributions to World War II.
At the start of episode one, when the narrative focused on Sacramento, Burns could have spliced into the narrative that the first draftee of World War II was Pete Aguilar Despart, a Mexican American from Los Angeles; and that at the height of the war, just one month after Private Jose P. Martinez (U.S. Army) had bee killed at the battle of Attu in the Aleutians, an action for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, Mexican Americans were fleeing for their lives in Los Angeles in what came to be known as the Zoot-Suit Riots.
In Episode 5, Ken Burns could have added that on April 24, 1945, Congressman Jerry Voorhis from California read into the Congressional Record:
“As I read the casualty lists from my own state, I find anywhere from one-fourth to one-third of those names are names such as Gonzales or Sanchez, names indicating that the very lifeblood of our citizens of Latin-American descent in the uniform of the armed forces of the United States is being poured out to win victory in the war. We ought to resolve that in the future every single one of these citizens shall have the fullest and freest opportunity which this country is capable of giving him, to advance to such positions of influence and eminence as their own personal capacities make possible.”
Sad to say, American Hispanics continue to be the invisible minority, but that condition can change. Indeed, we ought to hold Burns’ and PBS’ feet to the fire but we can resolve to make our own documentaries about our contributions to the United States. Our absence in documentaries is like our absence in American textbooks.
As recently as 2003 I received an anthology of The American Tradition in Literature (shorter 10th edition in one volume) from McGraw Hill (2281 pages) in which only one Hispanic writer was featured on page 2199 — Isabel Allende, the Chilean writer. I’m a great admirer of Isabel Allende’s work, but including her as the representative for American Hispanic writers in The American Tradition in Literature would be like including Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer, as the representative for African American writers in The American Tradition in Literature.
Copyright 2007 by the author. All rights reserved.
