HispanicVista Columnists
The revolution is seeded at Pearl Harbor
-
By
Raoul Lowery Contreras/HispanicVista.com - January 8, 2007
The revolution is
seeded at Pearl Harbor
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the world was startled by a vicious attack on
American bases at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by Japanese naval forces even as
Japanese diplomats were delivering diplomatic notes to the United States
government.
The Spanish-speaking of East Los Angeles and San Diego were beginning their
Sunday morning routines of getting ready for mass in their parishes or
preparing for another work-day. In the backcountries of Los Angeles, San
Diego and in California’s Central and Imperial Valleys, farm and dairy
workers were awakening after a Saturday night and mentally preparing for
another hard day in the fields or among the cows.
It was just after dawn California time when the Japanese started the "Day of
Infamy." Two thousand three hundred and ninety people (2390) were killed
that day, some of them were named Garcia, Martinez and Mendoza. Americans
were enraged, all Americans.
On Monday, December 8, 1941, Mexican and Mexican American boys like many
other Americans inundated recruiting offices. Some walked across the
U.S./Mexican border to sign up. Tijuana, Mexico, for example, sent over a
hundred boys to join the American military out of a population of 15,000
people.
The "invisible" revolution of the "invisible minority" had begun even as the
killed and wounded were being gathered and treated in a place most Mexicans
had never heard of or visited.
Being "machos" these young "barones" (barons, a word used by Mexicans to
describe sons) flocked to the Marines and Army paratroopers. As most were
ill educated, many served as most American soldiers did, as plain old grunts
in the infantry. Some, however, served as officers and non-coms in all
theaters of war.
One, a Navy flyer named Commander Gene Valencia, shot down 25 Japanese
fighters in the Pacific. Another (P.F.C. Silvestre Herrera), earned the
Medal of Honor after his feet were blown off in France and killed a number
of Germans before he passed out from lack of blood. In fact, ten Mexicans
and Mexican American men were awarded the country’s highest military honor,
the Medal of Honor, during World War II.
From Alaska to Palestine, from San Diego to Iwo Jima, from Texas to the
Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest, Mexicans and Mexican Americans
served with great distinction even as American Blacks weren’t allowed to
serve in combat.
In Texas in 1946, a group of American sailors destroyed a restaurant that
refused to serve an Army Sergeant who had been awarded a Medal of Honor for
gallantry in France. What mattered to the sailors was not that he was
Mexican, even, as it turned out -- Mexican-born, but that he was a genuine
American hero (Staff Sergeant Macario Garcia, born in Villa de Castano,
Mexico).
A Texas funeral home refused to handle the body of a Mexican American
soldier killed in France. The local Mexican American population exploded
with rage. President Harry Truman ordered that the soldier be buried at
Arlington National Cemetery.
The world would never be the same after WWII for Mexicans, Mexican Americans
and for their neighbors, the Americans who had rarely acknowledged the
"invisible" minority until the war ended and the boys came home.
Soldier Cleto Rodriguez of San Antonio, Texas, was the second most-decorated
American in the entire World War.
The G.I. Bill of Rights – The G.I. Bill -- opened up college and university
doors to thousands of young Mexicans who never considered college before the
war; homes became affordable with no down payment and low interest mortgages
offered to veterans. The building boom financed by these G.I. loans employed
thousands of young Mexican men who ignored Labor’s stranglehold on
construction and joined fellow WWII veteran contractors in building new
homes for the next generation to grow up in. Coincidentally, that generation
was to be labeled the Baby Boomer generation.
High school teaching staffs throughout the Southwest began adding the mostly
married young Mexican American veterans armed with degrees from state
colleges, state universities and from Roman Catholic colleges like Notre
Dame.
About the time Baby Boomers hit high school, many of the Mexican American
teachers were armed with master’s degrees and doctorates and were gaining
tenure in colleges as professors and coaches. Some left teaching to attend
law school and were now appearing in courtrooms as prosecutors and defense
attorneys, not just defendants.
Coupling with the educational advance of the Mexican American, the civil
rights revolution led by black college students at lunch counters and
parades throughout the South carried over into the Barrio and the American
we know today left behind the America of yesterday.
The mestizo was not called a mestizo any longer, for every one could see
that Mexican Americans were a unique American personage with Indian and
Spanish backgrounds, with distinctive cultural roots that manifested
themselves in many ways in many places. They were and are much more than the
"issue of Spaniards and Indians."
Only an ignorant social hermit is unaware of the splendor and taste of
Mexican food; only a historically challenged fool is not aware that Mexicans
arrived long before Americans in California and the Southwest (1540s in New
Mexico, for example) and created the American cowboy in the process. Only an
uneducated bigot tried or tries to mistreat Mexicans after they fought with
honor and bravery in World War Two and Korea.
In 1954 the United States Supreme Court decided that Mexicans had been
routinely discriminated against by the State of Texas and its local
governments and declared Mexican Americans to be a "discrete class." A
"discrete class" is a clearly defined group that has been officially
discriminated against by law and government policy. (U.S. Supreme Court
--HERNANDEZ v. TEXAS, 347 U.S. 475 (1954)
Some who tried to manifest bigotry post-WWII met resistance for the first
time. Some continue anti-Mexican bigotry to this day. Men such as Colorado
Congressman Tom Tancredo lead a ragtag bunch of backward fools in attacking
Mexicans even as they have fought and continue to fight for the country,
something Tancredo and his flock forgot to do. Tancredo claimed mental
illness to avoid serving in Vietnam.
Thus, while it is of great importance that Mexicans Know Themselves, it is
as important that they know who hates them and how to ferret those enemies
out. They must expose them to ridicule and attack them without mercy with
the greatest weapons on hand, truth, dignity and education. A good enchilada
helps, as well.
Contreras' books, THE ILLEGAL ALIEN: A DAGGER INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA and A HISPANIC VIEW OF AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION are available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com