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 meet a number of candidates.
And upon the end of my term I respectfully declined reenlistment. The war gave me a heightened understanding that the work of killing and death was not my work. In time I would conclude it should be nobody’s work.
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
