The goal of being white may have had roots in the struggle for civil rights, but by the 1950s it had become an obsession to be accepted as American albeit of Mexican descent, and to be distinguished—as George Sánchez reminded us—from “illegal aliens” and wetbacks. The historian David Gutiérrez quotes as follows a LULAC delegate to their 1946 convention:
The American citizen of Mexican ancestry is weak because he is a minority citizen. Discrimination will pursue him until he blends with the majority group of this country enough to lose his present identity. This is a discouragingly slow process … [but] if we fail to do it we shall continue to be discriminated against, insulted and abused; and complaining of injustice in the name of democracy will not help us. We shall simply be begging for things that must be paid for.24
Being white was not about assimilation and acculturation. That was taking place, and would have taken place even without the punitive campaign by LULAC and the GI Forum. No, from the point of view of these organizations, “being white” meant losing our identity. Melting away. The blatant discrimination and prejudice of the time did not discourage them. The pachucos were perhaps the most extreme manifestation of resistance to the enforced dogma. Pachucos were a Mexican youth subculture that burst upon the scene in Los Angeles. Though few in number, their impact was powerful. They dressed in a distinctive, flamboyant fashion, especially the men: exaggerated “zoot suits” with a coat reaching almost to the knee and baggy pleated pants that rode high above the waist, spectacularly colorful satin shirts with ties to match and, topping it off, a jauntily slanted wide-brimmed hat, with a feather that curved beautifully over it. They spoke in a special patois they called caló, primarily Spanglish with a decidedly urban black influence. The patois included the term “chicano” when referring to themselves. In 1942 twenty-two pachucos were charged with murder in a case, the Sleepy Lagoon trial, that became a national scandal. In 1943, confrontations between US marines and sailors and pachucos in Los Angeles sparked a week of riots in L.A. and other cities in the country. Soldiers and sailors were ordered to stand down only after Mexico had lodged a formal diplomatic complaint, and President Roosevelt intervened.25 The Los Angeles Police Department released “A Report on the Mexicans” in 1943 that described Mexicans as naturally given to violence, with “biological urges to kill, or at least let blood.” That tendency arose from the “Asiatic nomads” from which we were descended and from the “Indian blood” running through us. The Mexican’s “utter disregard for the value of life” was, the report asserted, “well known to everyone.”26 Once the asiatic connection was established and the violent stereotype reaffirmed, it was inevitable that the pachucos would be identified as part of an elaborate communist plot. The citizens’ committee formed to defend the accused in the Sleepy Lagoon case included prominent Mexican-American Angelenos like Josefina Fierro de Bright, and major celebrities Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn; it was promptly declared a “Communist front organization” by the Los Angeles police chief, C. B. Horrall.27 All of this attention served to spread the fashion and the patois to every barrio in America and, in the eyes of many young Latinos, to transform pachucos into outlaw heroes.
Pachuco influence was still strongly felt in the 1950s. Dressing like a pachuco in that decade meant wearing high-riding khaki pants, thick-soled work shoes with steel-tipped heels, white T-shirts, and a little tandita on top. A tandita was a cockily placed, fancy fedora. The style and the slang had the pleasant effect of driving Americanizers insane, but frankly, the pachuco threat had dissipated by the 1950s and was by then but an irritating side show. The Americanizers were single-mindedly dedicated to extinguishing the Mexican identity in America, and they seemed poised to succeed.
I finished high school in 1963 and, like my two older brothers before me, promptly enlisted in the Army. By the time I came back, the Americanizers were on the run, and the rumble of change and the talk of revolution were everywhere.
At seventeen I thought it natural to hitchhike the six miles to Globe, Arizona, walk into the recruiter’s storefront, and enlist in the military. There were no thoughtful conversations at the kitchen table with my mother and father asking me to carefully think it through, nor was anyone in my family dismayed. It was, I guess in retrospect, what was expected of me. My father had been exiled for most of World War II; his brother José enlisted almost immediately upon his return from Mexico; the oldest of my two brothers, Gilberto, enlisted when he turned seventeen, became a Ranger, and took part in both combat paratrooper jumps in the Korean conflict; my brother Arnoldo enlisted when he graduated from high school and spent the next twenty years on active military duty—so I guess that ride to Globe was destined. There was perhaps one more reason that my enlistment would elicit so little discussion in the family. By 1963 there was only one whorehouse left in the town, the Keystone, but business was so bad or the moral opprobrium so great that it was only open on Friday and Saturday nights. The rest of the week it just sat there at the bottom of Davis Canyon, empty, intriguing, and inviting. The stories of the painted ladies, their exotic toys, and the luxuries that surrounded them was the stuff that drove adolescents into a frenzy. One night the temptation overcame us ruffians. We broke in through a bathroom window, three of us, spent an hour or so upending the place and were disappointed by a drab cheap hotel with rooms the size of cells, steel frame beds and mattresses that stank of urine and disinfectant. There was a box of whiskey, gin, and rum in the kitchen. We stole it and lugged it up the canyon to Cabezón’s house. The police came to my house and picked me up the following morning. It turns out that Cabezón had been unhappy with our paltry loot, and after the Bear and I left, he decided to go back to the Keystone, this time with a diablito, a hand truck, and his little brother. They somehow loaded up the oversize refrigerator on the hand truck and proceeded to push it down an alley and up the canyon. Cabezón was a short little fellow with an inordinately large head, hence the nickname. He must have been quite a sight pushing a refrigerator twice his height up the road. It was not long before the police took them away, and it was apparently not long after that before Cabezón gave me and the Bear up. Cabezón got probation. The Bear and I went before the superior court judge in Globe, and, given our past colorful history with Judge McGhee, he gave us an ultimatum: either the military or six months at the notorious juvenile detention center known as Fort Grant. For me it was a godsend. I intended to sign up for the Marines as soon as I was out of high school. The Bear adamantly rejected the deal, Man you’re gonna be gone a long time, they could shoot you or cut your legs off and stick you in a wheelchair, ¿estás loco o qué? Me, I’m gonna be back in six months and I’m gonna kill pinche Cabezón.” Thus began the Bear’s long life of crime and incarceration. Fortunately he never got around to killing Cabezón.
The family has plenty of heroes, but my time in the Army was free of courageous charges, spectacular parachute jumps, extraordinary sacrifice, or even a glimpse of combat. When I got to Globe, the Marine recruiter was at lunch, so I ended up in the Army Infantry. A childhood of hunting rabbits and wild javelina pigs made shooting a big, round, slow-moving target at a hundred yards a cinch, so they declared me a sharpshooter. I was apparently smart enough to easily pass their battery of tests, so they made me a Mental Hygienist. Mental Hygiene was the Army’s euphemistic way of describing a small independent unit whose responsibility was to remove primarily combat command officers from the front who had, in the eyes of their superiors, gone stark raving mad and were threatening the wellbeing of the troops. I guess I wasn’t that smart because it took me some time and some straight talk to understand what a unit like that needed with a sharpshooter. Thankfully, I never shot a lunatic officer, though I did