LatinoLand by Marie Arana

Author:Marie Arana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

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AMERICANS ALL! Let’s fight for victory!

AMERICANOS TODOS! Luchamos por la gloria!

—Leon Helguera, poster artist, Mexican American, 1942

Come World War II, by which time the Hispanic population had ballooned considerably, more than a half million Latinos served in the United States military effort overseas. Sources reported that 60 percent of all American-born Hispanic males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two were serving on the war’s battlefields. And yet many who were willing to fight were never called to colors: take, for instance, the 350,000 Puerto Ricans, all of them American citizens, who reported to wartime conscription offices, although only 65,000 of them were admitted to the ranks. On the mainland, millions more Latinos, including my engineer father, worked in factories producing war materiél: turbines, bombs, parachutes, navigational instruments, cluster adapters. Indeed, the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter as a white woman is grossly misleading; most women who worked the punishing, round-the-clock, eight-hour shifts in America’s war factories were women of color.

The exact numbers are difficult to quantify and maddeningly inaccurate, because undercounting was rampant and because the US Census and the military itself were more preoccupied with counting blacks (for segregational purposes) than reckoning a wildly diverse and confounding ethnicity. The choices offered on military rosters said it all: “White,” “Negro,” and “Other.” Often, Latinos checked off “White,” believing themselves to be so. Otherwise, clerks simply typed in whatever they saw, depending on their own prejudices, now and then crossing out “Other” and registering an arbitrarily designated “Mexican.” The challenges are amply illustrated in the experiences of the Botello family: five Texan brothers, all army or navy servicemen, whose phenotypes were officially recorded in 1945 and 1946 as they were discharged. The first brother was certified by the clerk as “Mexican”; the next three as “White”; the fifth was penciled in as “Spanish.” To this day, these capricious categorizations continue to bedevil demographers, public policy makers, historians, even Hispanics themselves. As one veteran put it, “I was born American in Fort Stockton, Texas, but they called me Mexican. And when the war started, I became a white man.”

For all the confusion, military records show that soldiers with Spanish surnames were amply represented in the Pacific Theater as well as in Europe. Thousands died on the killing fields of Italy or in defense of South Pacific territories. Valued for their language abilities, many ended up serving in the Philippines, where Spanish was understood. Indeed, the legendary Bushmasters (158th Infantry), a combat team that fought the Japanese in the Philippines, were mostly Mexicans and indigenous people from Arizona, trained in the Panama rainforests to battle in the jungles of Southeast Asia. They ended up being so audacious a force that General Douglas MacArthur was inspired to say of them, “No greater fighting combat team has ever deployed for battle.” But there were instances, too, when diplomacy served as much as valor: for US Marine Guy Gabaldon, deployed to the Mariana Islands, the fluent Japanese he had learned in his

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