War and the role of Latinos in America’s wars was to become one of the major themes of the Chicano Movement. Vietnam would divide America. It would rip through the Latino community as well, but there it would also call into question what was increasingly seen as the embarrassing pandering of the Americanizers and its deadly consequences.
Wherever Latino veterans gather there will inevitably be a conversation about our proud presence in every conflict since the Revolutionary War. David Hayes-Bautista’s El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition details the Californios who proudly volunteered and valiantly fought with the Union Army.1 Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juárez were the two most admired figures to the Californio community. Latinos volunteered proudly for World War II and the Korean War from every city and town in the southwest. After I was discharged, it was easy to find the “Mexican” VFW or American Legion post in almost every community, large or small, that I would find myself in. The battlefront may have been integrated, but the veteran organizations, their rituals, and the drinking that went along with them never were. Vietnam was different, and so were the Chicano veterans. Rather than be the occasion for proud nostalgic storytelling, and, in many cases, liquored-up fantastical tales of heroism and suffering (my post had an informal rule that after ten p.m. or five beers, drunken exaggerations were forgiven), Vietnam provoked heated debate. I believe a large percentage of Chicano Vietnam vets soon withdrew from the posts, because any expression of doubt about the war’s justice would provoke outbursts from older vets. Questioning whether Latinos were being killed at an inordinately high rate could ignite angry charges of cowardice and questionable patriotism. It had been the unchallenged dogma of that generation that Latinos volunteered for war, volunteered for the most dangerous units, and fought hard. If you were killed in combat, so be it. That was the price of courage.
And the price was high. In October of 1969 the Congressional Record published a study, Mexican-American Casualties in Vietnam, by Ralph Guzman. The analysis found that:
Mexican-American military personnel have a higher death rate in Vietnam than all other servicemen. Analysis of casualty reports for two periods of time: one between January 1961 and February 1967 and the other between December 1967 and March 1969 reveals that a disproportionate number of young men with distinctive Spanish names do not return from the Southeast Asia theater of war. Investigation also reveals that a substantial number of them are involved in high-risk branches of the service … It is significant that the percentages of Spanish surnamed casualties for each period remains nearly constant at 19.0 percent.2
According to the 1960 US Census, only 11.8 percent of the total southwestern population had distinctive Spanish surnames. Guzman speculates that over-representation in death may be due to the fact that few Mexican Americans were in college, and thus they were unable to receive deferments available to others, or it may be due to factors “that motivate Mexican Americans to join the Armed Forces, [of which] some may be rooted in the inherited culture of these people.” He goes on to say that “still others wish to prove their Americanism. Organizations like the American GI Forum, composed of ex-GIs of Mexican-American identity, have long proclaimed the sizable military contributions of the Mexican-American soldier. According to the American GI Forum and other Mexican-American groups, members of this minority have an impressive record of heroism in time of war. There is a concomitant number of casualties attending this Mexican American patriotic investment.”3
Among Chicano activists, the study would be quoted as if it were Biblical verse in a gathering of evangelical zealots. “One in five” of those killed in Vietnam were Chicanos, was the rallying cry of the Chicano Moratorium against the war. “One in five” was the proud assertion offered at American Legion Post 41, and presumably at every other Mexican post and at every meeting of LULAC and the GI Forum, to prove that we were indeed courageous, patriotic Americans willing to sacrifice our young in defense of this country. Defending, even praising the disproportionate killing of Mexican-American soldiers was probably an untenable position to take from the beginning. Ultimately, the Vietnam experience and the activism of the Chicano Movement would end the rhetoric of being white and of delivering oneself to Americanism at the expense of one’s Latino identity. It would also besmirch the argument that you demonstrated your patriotism by sending your children to war, knowing there existed a statistically higher chance that they would be killed.
A passionate redefinition of being Mexican-American, and a wave of radical activism that seemed like a necessary rite of passage, took hold in college campuses across the southwest in the mid-1960s. The Chicano Movement, as the decentralized, often angry, amorphous movement came to be known, was the product of a long, slow boil. The kids were pissed, and they were primarily pissed at the established Mexican-American leadership.
The principal organizations that constituted the Mexican-American leadership in the post–World War II era were LULAC and the GI Forum. The activists of the Chicano Movement were raised in a social and political environment that those two organizations helped create. The Chicano generation was the beneficiary of their accomplishments and the inheritor of their legacy, such as it was. LULAC was founded in 1929 in the very heart of discrimination, Corpus Christi, Texas. Membership was limited to American citizens. It has a remarkable record of accomplishment. LULAC was organizing boycotts and sit-ins in the 1930s to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations; it was responsible for the first major legal challenge against segregated “Mexican” schools, Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District in 1931; in 1945 it successfully challenged the segregated schools of Orange County, California; it filed fifteen challenges in Texas that finally ended school segregation there; and in 1946 it filed Mendez v. Westminster, which ended 100 years of segregated schools in California. It was the Mendez case that would serve as the key precedent to the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal segregation in the rest of the country. LULAC marched, protested, filed lawsuits, and advocated for the rights of Latinos throughout its history. So how does such a defender of human rights become a major tormentor of the undocumented and the chief proselytizer of being white in America?
The Mexican-American obsession with being white probably begins with the bungled negotiation that produced the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Mexicans in the conquered territories were guaranteed the enjoyment of all rights of citizens. The problem of course was that in the United States only white persons could enjoy all of the rights of citizens. The first major test of the whiteness of Mexicans occurred in California twenty years after it became part of the United States. The citizenship of a wealthy Californio and one of the state’s major land barons, Pablo de la Guerra, was challenged in 1870 when he was called to sit on a jury. De la Guerra, whose family arrived in Santa Barbara before the British colonies declared their independence, had served in California’s first Constitutional Convention. Stripped of his citizenship, he became ineligible to own land, vote, hold office, or even sue his accusers. De la Guerra was clearly not white, and possibly even “three-fourths Indian.”4 He was said to be the victim of “caste creep,” wherein Indians and mulattos tarnish the purity of white blood.5 Fortunately, de la Guerra had the resources to hire attorneys and fight back. Ultimately, the court decided that he was “white enough” and restored his citizenship, but it also set a dangerous precedent: the court appropriated for itself the right to determine racial composition and exclude from citizenship any Mexican who was not “white enough.”6
In 1897 a federal district court in San Antonio took an entirely different tack. Ricardo Rodriguez, who was applying for citizenship, was carefully targeted by nativists who were seeking to create a legal precedent stating that all non-white Mexicans were ineligible. Rodriguez was a “copper-colored or red-skinned man with dark eyes, straight black hair and high cheekbones.” He would also testify that he was neither of the “original Aztec race nor the Spanish race,” but was a “pure-blooded Mexican.” Rodriguez was not trifling with the question of race, and neither was the judge. Judge T. S. Maxey found that Rodriguez had a right to citizenship based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and subsequent international agreements. Period. Judge Maxey did not consider the question of Rodriguez’s red skin, the placement of his cheekbones, or his racial composition