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Nation in uniform: Chicano/Latino war narratives and the construction of nation in the Korean War and Vietnam War

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NATION IN UNIFORM: CHICANO/ LATINO WAR NARRATIVES
AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATION IN THE KOREAN WAR
AND VIETNAM WAR

by

William Arce

_______________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 William Arce

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I graduated from high school in 1991, a few months
after the end of the U.S. Gulf War. Some of the senior
classmates enlisted for the war and returned a year
later as veterans. I remember the tremendous energy
amongst students discussing the legitimacy of the war.
In particular, I was most impacted by the spirited class
discussions regarding national service for first and
second generation Latinos. Unfamiliar with the
historical and literary discussions of Latinos in the
armed service I visited my local library but to my
dismay there was a dearth of information on the subject
at the time. My hope is that this dissertation
contributes to the growing scholarship uncovering the
history and literature written by Latinos who
participated in the two major U.S. wars during the Cold
War era: the Korean War and the Vietnam War. If it does,
then certainly one reason is that so many people have
supported me in this endeavor.
This dissertation was written while I was at the
University of Southern California in the Department of
English. I am deeply indebted to three professors who

iii
chaired my dissertation committee: Teresa McKenna, Leo
Braudy and Michael Messner from the Department of
Sociology at the University of Southern California. Each
one demonstrated a great deal of patience and wisdom in
their guidance of my academic development. They opened a
new world to me, and for that I remain eternally
grateful. Professor McKenna in particular nurtured my
intellectual curiosity from my first year in graduate
school, without her this project would not have been
possible -- un gran abrazo. In addition, I would like
to thank Professor David Roman for his wise words of
encouragement. The University of Southern California
also introduced me to a group of graduate students who
were essential in the completion of this project. The
members of my dissertation writing group "The F-abd 5":
Pricilla Ovalle, Marci McMahon, Joshua Smith and Karen
Bowdre. Thanks also to James Penner, my good friend with
whom I had many prolonged discussions about masculinity
during the Cold War years and to Amy Schroeder who read
every single chapter of this dissertation and generously
provided detailed feedback.

iv
I received institutional financial support from the
University of Southern California in the form of
fellowships and teaching assistantships. Bowdoin College
in Maine provided me with a one year dissertation
fellowship and excellent mentorship from their
Department of English.
I am very fortunate to have a circle of people who
never stopped believing in me as I made my way through
this project. My brother Arturo Arce and friend George
Diaz always supplied me with much needed moments of
decompression in the form of barbecues, dinners, and
weekend fun. I would also like to thank Ricardo Garcia
who stood with me like a soldier during the rough times
at Jefferson and Budlong. Finally, I wish to thank my
mother Francia Arce and father Guillermo Arce for their
love and care throughout my entire graduate school
years. They were my first teachers and continue to be my
strongest supporters.

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Chapter 1. Introduction: "From the Halls of 1
Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli"
Chapter 1 Endnotes 36

Chapter 2. Forgotten Patriots: The Mexican 39
American/Latino Veteran During the Korean War
Years
Chapter 2 Endnotes 92

Chapter 3. Shadows of the Southwest in Rolando 95
Hinojosa's Korean War Trilogy
Chapter 3 Endnotes 134

Chapter 4. When Little Brown Boys Grow Up to be 137
Military Heroes: Roy Benavidez, Everett Alvarez,
War and the Road to Masculinity
Chapter 4 Endnotes 208

Chapter 5. The Hill that Will Remember You: 212
Vietnam War Trauma in the Urban Landscape of
Alfredo Vea's gods go begging
Chapter 5 Endnotes 263

Chapter 6. Epilogue 266
Chapter 6 Endnotes 275

Bibliography 276

vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. American G.I. Forum flag-raising 55
ceremony at national headquarters in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, 1957

Figure 2. Roy Benavidez: Migrant farm worker to 164
military man

Figure 3. 1995 and 1999 covers of Medal of Honor 167

Figure 4. At the age of four and a half, wearing 195
sailor's suit [Original Caption]

Figure 5. I spoke in my capacity as Deputy 197
Administrator of the Veterans Administration at
the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
November 11, 1982 (Veterans Day)

Figure 6. Jacket cover for his second book, Code 199
of Conduct (1991)

vii
ABSTRACT
My dissertation examines narrative constructions of
nation in war novels and autobiographies written by
Chicano/Latino authors between the years of 1951-1976. I
focus on the two major American wars of this period: the
Korean War and the Vietnam War. I argue that in the face
of discrimination and oppression, these authors engage
in a narrative reconstruction of the United States as a
heterogeneous, yet interconnected nation. The first half
of the dissertation focuses on the Korean War. In many
respects, these Korean War veterans set the stage for
Latino veterans of the Vietnam War by focusing on the
importance of public recognition of their service, not
only as Americans but as Americans of Spanish-speaking
background.
In the first section, I also have a chapter
focusing on Rolando Hinojosa's Korean War Trilogy. In
the second portion of the dissertation I focus on
cultural debates regarding Latino participation in the
Vietnam War. I explore masculinity in the
autobiographies of Roy Benavidez and Everette Alvarez.

viii
In the final chapter I focus on trauma in Alfredo Vea's
Gods Go Begging.

1
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: "FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA
TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI"

"[J]ose Antonio belonged to several families,"
Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles said to the large
group of mourners attending the funeral of Marine Lance
Cpl Jose Antonio Gutierrez.
1
Gutierrez, an immigrant
from Guatemala serving in the U.S. Marines, died of
bullet wounds March 21, 2005 in a battle near the Iraqi
city of Umm Qasr. He was the first "Green Card Marine"
2

to die in the current U.S. war against Iraq. Immigrants
are a growing population in the military: In 2004, there
were approximately 37,000 non-citizens serving in the
military; about one third were of Latino heritage.
3
Most
of these soldiers came from working class backgrounds
and joined the military to serve the country, to gain an
education,job training, or to receive citizenship.
Gutierrez told his friends he joined the Marines to earn
money for college.
"He was a great man with much courage who gave his
life for his adopted country," continued Cardinal
Mahoney. Gutierrez immigrated to the United States at

2
the age of fourteen, crossing Mexico atop trains and
settling in California. Although he was captured by INS
officials while unlawfully entering the country,
Gutierrez told officials he was born in 1980 in order to
stay in the United States under a program designed to
help undocumented minors. Posthumous investigation into
his Guatemalan origins revealed a birth certificate
dated Dec 1, 1974, making him twenty-four and subject to
fines, detention and deportation.
After Cardinal Mahoney finished his eulogy, all
stood for the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.
Gutierrez's sister, Engracia, was flown in from
Guatemala; she stood beside the flag-draped casket and a
line of Marines from her brother's regiment. The
service had the makings of a traditional military
funeral: an honor guard, a bugler and a 3-volley solute.
Yet after the Star Spangled Banner ended, all remained
standing, waited a couple of beats, and then
straightened up for the Guatemalan national anthem.
When it was all over, two lines of Marines dressed in
immaculate blue and white military uniforms carried the
body to waiting hearse. José Antonio Gutierrez's body

3
was flown to Guatemala later that evening, buried and
posthumously awarded U.S. citizenship.
4

Cardinal Mahoney's eulogy illustrates a central
issue in Chicano/Latino war narratives—-that of nation
and national identity. José A. Gutierrez did indeed
belong to more than one family, one nation: he was proud
of his Guatemalan cultural heritage and loyal to his
adopted country. In return, the government of both
nations recognized him as "part of" their collective
body. Yet, the death of Lance Corporal Gutierrez brings
to the fore a host of related questions concerning
identity politics, patriotism, citizenship, heroism,
manhood, and civic responsibility. How, for example,
does a soldier understand the patriotic impulse to
"serve" the country when economic incentives are the
reason for enlisting? Or, to what extent is Gutierrez'
military funeral and subsequent burial in Guatemala an
example of what is currently being called
"transnational--nationalism"? Nominally at least,
Gutierrez's death marks the tragic end to the story of a
young Guatemalan man in pursuit of a better future. His
death as an American soldier, however, taps into the

4
complex history of Latinos serving in the U.S. armed
service, a tradition predating Gutierrez by many
generations and that current demographic shifts ensure
will continue into the future.
To explore this history, this dissertation examines
narrative constructions of nation in war novels and
autobiographies written by Chicano/Latino authors
between the years of 1951-1976. I focus on the two major
American wars of this period: the Korean War and the
Vietnam War. I argue that, in the face of discrimination
and oppression, these authors engage in a narrative
reconstruction of the United States as a heterogeneous,
yet interconnected nation. This literature operates
within a nationalist ideological discourse where nation
is understood as part of a culturally constructed and
malleable "imagined community"
5
affected by the
developments of its time period. What is significant
about this methodological critical approach to
Chicano/Latino war narratives is its acknowledgement of
the relationship between narrative and politics, and the
agency it yields to the ideological constructions of
nation molded by these authors.

5
These narrative depictions of nation contribute to
the emergence of a unique cultural consciousness that is
both marked by a heightened sensitivity to national
obligation, while simultaneously informed by a history
of resistance based on the experience of colonization.
These complex tensions, although subtle, are also
present in literature predating my project. In Jose
Antonio Villarreal's Pocho(1959),
6
for example, Richard
joins the Navy during WWII in the final scene of the
text to forge a new Mexican American identity for
himself. At the same historical moment Puerto Rican
writer Piri Thomas writes in Down These Mean Streets of
his frustration with the racial barriers his family
experiences when attempting to improve their living
conditions in New York during the late 1940s. As Thomas
puts it "[A] lousy rumble had to get called so we could
start to live better."
7
Thomas later joins the Merchant
Marines and travels to the American South in an effort
to better understand his racial identity as a black
Latino from Puerto Rico living in New York. Military
service for both of these writers was an
institutionalized "rite of passage," one which allowed

6
them to begin defining their place in American society.
Most importantly for this generation, as journalist
Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez writes, "it would be the first
time that they were participating fully in mainstream
society, even working alongside Anglos as equals."
8

Yet just a few years after participation in WWII,
Latino authors writing about the Korean War no longer
expressed belief in military service as a valid path to
equal citizenship. Even though the military claimed
"full" integration by 1954, the civilian population was
not as progressive.
9
For many Chicano/Latino soldiers the
jarring effect of moving from a segregated civilian
community to a desegregated military and then back to
segregated civilian life galvanized a push similar to
what the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh
Courier called the "Double-V": victory overseas and
victory at home. From that generation came many heroes,
including Hector P. Garcia, the founder and legendary
leader of the American G.I. Forum; the founders of the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
(MALDEF), civil rights leaders such as Pete Tijerina, Ed
Idar, Albert Armendariz; and even the legendary

7
organizer Julio Cesar Chavez who briefly served in the
Navy.
But for those who were serving in Korea, the
struggles of WWII veterans was proof that military
service did not grant them social equality. For
example, in Rolando Hinojosa's short novel in verse
Korean Love Songs, the author provides a poetic
meditation on the protagonist's disillusionment with the
unfulfilled promises of the U.S. Conscious of his
social position back in the States, Rafe, the
protagonist, looks forward to and simultaneously
laments, his return to the U.S. after his tour in Korea:
"To Klail/ And home. Home to Texas, our Texas/ That
slice of hell, heaven,/ Purgatory and land of our
Fathers."
10

A critique of the U.S. treatment of Mexican
American and Latino soldiers is more explicit in Chicano
poet Jose Montoya's well known poem "El Louie."
Originally published in 1969, the poem questions both
the treatment of Latino civilians by the federal
government during the 50s and the reasons for Latino
youth's decisions to enlist.

8
Ese, Louie...
Chale, man, call me "Diamonds!"
Y en Korea fue soldado de
Levita con huevos and all the
Paradoxes de soldado raso—
Heroism and the stockade!
11

The character is based on one of Montoya's childhood
friends, Louie fought in Korea only to find himself
marginalized and forgotten. His life disintegrates as he
comes into conflict with the white-dominated world of
California. Louie's Chicano/Latino community regards
him as both a local hero and a loser: a courageous young
man who fought for his country and as a foolish youth
who ruined his life fighting to be accepted. Louie
eventually hocks his combat medals for booze and drugs,
and in the end of the poem Louie dies alone, in squalid
conditions. Poet Montoya becomes so disheartened with
Chicano/Latino participation in the Korean War that he
founds what he calls the RCAF or the Royal Chicano Air
Force. The acronym RCAF is a spoof on the Royal Canadian
Air Force, which critiques both Canada's and Mexico's
willingness to follow the U.S. in its imperialist
endeavors. The group consisted of political activists
and other protest-poets who would dress in WWII bomber

9
pilot outfits and drive around East L.A. in an old army
jeep donated by a fan.
12

Even in a hyper-patriotic text such as that of
ultra-right wing anti-Castro mercenary Felix Rodriguez's
Shadow Warrior (1989), the sense of being non-American
permeates the entire book. As a Cuban ex-patriot living
in the U.S., Rodriguez's cultural difference is
prevalent throughout the narrative, often serving as the
catalyst for the over-exalted patriotic ethos of the
biography. For instance, Rodriguez opens his book with
a picture of himself lying next to a dead Che Guevara,
proudly taking credit for his participation in covert
CIA operations designed to capture and kill Che. In the
final section of Rodriguez's autobiography, he lists all
the articles and books that refer to him and his para-
military activities in a desperate attempt to inscribe
himself into Cold War U.S. history. Rodriguez's
autobiography Shadow Warrior is an unquestioned and
unquestionable embrace of U.S. patriotism. Whether
offering a political critique of Chicano/Latino
participation in U.S. military interventions such as
Hinojosa and Montoya, or fully embracing U.S.

10
nationalism as does Rodriguez, this Korean War
literature reveals a willingness for writers to
participate in the national discussions of war and
nation.
Twenty-five years later, by the time the U.S.
military is in Vietnam, the complicated relation between
war and nation is once again at the center of
Chicano/Latino war narratives. To writers and social
activists such as Luis Valdez who fought for justice
alongside agricultural workers and on the streets of the
inner city barrios, the fact that there were a
disproportionate number of Latino males in the military
was a contradiction. For Valdez, Chicanos (and Latinos
in general) had been deceived into embracing a
nationalist ethos that failed to offer substantive
political and economical integration. As "Hijo," one of
the protagonists in Valdez' anti Vietnam war play
Vietnam Campesino states,
The war in Vietnam continues, asesinando familias
inocentes de campesinos. Los Chicanos mueren en la
guerra, y los rancheros se hacen ricos, selling
their scab products to the Pentagon. The fight is
here, Raza! En Aztlán.
13

11
Ultimately, the impact of the Vietnam War upon
Chicano/latinos engendered such a profound loss of trust
in the U.S. that is unleashed a cultural re-evaluation
of what it meant to be American. For many within the
community, the liberal idea of a functional "democratic
nation" was no longer viable; the continuous problem of
racism coupled with the overrepresentation of working-
class men in combat units engendered tremendous
disillusionment with the federal government.
Nonetheless, what emerged, suggests Carlos Munoz in
Youth, Identity, Power, The Chicano Movement,
14
was a
politically savvy Latino cultural consciousness that
understood that the U.S. was, and always would be, in a
state of formation and that all of its citizens are
active agents in the process. And what was true for the
general population became true of the literary discourse
regarding war: Chicanos and Latinos writing about war
contribute to the larger, more general political debates
regarding the U.S. as nation.
People who think of themselves as citizens have a
different relation to the state than people who think of
themselves as subjects. War makes this distinction

12
clear. For many Chicano/Latino men who fought in Korea
and Vietnam, military service and its aftermath led to
either feelings of civic empowerment or to the
reification of social alienation. In either case,
literary responses to the wars reveal a unique cultural
consciousness—a heightened sensitivity to national
obligation transformed and informed by a history of
colonial resistance. My project explores the intertwined
ideas of nation and race present in war novels and
autobiographies written by Chicano/Latino authors who
fought in U.S. Armed forces during the Cold War years.
I use an interdisciplinary approach to theories of
nationhood because disciplines such as literary studies,
history, and gender studies have begun the difficult
process of introducing ethnicity into discussions of
nationhood. They have done so through an exploration of
ethno-nationalism. Ethno-nationalism assesses both
traditional "objective" factors in nation formation as
well as "subjective" elements of a post-industrial
society. My use of ethno-nationalism takes into account
elements such as memory, value, sentiment, myth, and
symbol, in an effort to understand the complex relation

13
Chicanos/Latinos had to nation during the Cold War era.
15

Ethno-nationalism moves away from elite analysis that
uses a "top-down" structural model in which
intellectuals manipulate and/or create nationalist
sentiment for the general population. Instead, ethno-
nationalism stresses the dialectical relationship
between various elite groups and the people they aim to
represent. This allows for a more fluid relation
between the state and the people, one that recognizes
the power of ethnic groups in the formation of national
ideologies.
Because theories of ethno-nationalism often
recognize the political developments of disenfranchised
communities, they allows for the analysis of social and
cultural patterns over a significant period of time,
sometimes several generations. My project spans roughly
thirty years, and I am careful to safeguard against the
possibility of a "retrospective analysis of
nationalism,"
16
which would mean reading into the
conditions and politics of earlier generations the
collective goals and nationalist aspirations of the
later, or present generation. Additionally, an ethno-

14
nationalist approach directs attention to the ways in
which earlier forms of collective identity may influence
the rise of a communal sentiment over time. I take my
lead here from Walker O'Connor
17
and John Breuilly
18
who
offer a nuanced understanding of the differences between
a "nation" and a "state." Drawing upon their work, I use
the word "state" to describe a social group that
occupies a geographically defined territory that is
organized under a shared political institution. The term
"state" functions within a geographical and political
domain, while the term "nationalism" has an ideological
foundation that transcends place as well as the abstract
parameters of a political doctrine. These definitions
of "state" and "nation" make clear that what have often
been called "marginalized" or "othered" ethnic groups
are in fact nations. Ethnic-nationalism means loyalty to
an ethnic group as with Chicano Nationalism or Black
Nationalism. Nationalism does not necessarily mean
loyalty to the state or simply patriotism.
19
Although
these distinctions may seem rather nuanced, they help
clarify the terminology I use for the discussion of
Chicano/Latino nationalism in war narratives specific to

15
the Koran War and the Vietnam War during the Cold War
years.
Contemporary theorists of nationalism such as
Walker Connor, Benedict Anderson, Anthony D. Smith and
John Breully believe one must look beyond traditional,
tangible attributes of nationalism such as common
language and religion and focus on moments of collective
sentiment. The basic requisites for nationalism are
subjective and primarily consist of the "self-
identification" of people with a particular group. Many
of the veteran authors and fiction writers I cover in
this dissertation self-identify as Chicano/Latino, or as
Mexican Americans and believe their ethnicity is
compatible with other forms of nationalism within the
U.S. For example, Rafael Chacon's autobiography
"Memorias,"
20
describes both his fear as a young boy when
he witnesses the American military invasion of Mexico
and later his excitement while serving in the Union
army. The war narratives of Jose Policarpio Rodriguez
and Santiago Tafolla, two Mexican American cousins born
in Texas also offer early documentation of self-
identified Mexican Americans fighting in the civil war.

16
In contrast to Chacon's narrative, however, these two
cousins joined the Confederate army and were later
forced to desert because the brothers discovered that
along with other fellow troopers they were about to be
lynched by white soldiers for being "greasers."
21
Both of
these examples prefigure the diversity in nationalist
trends I work with in the Chicano/Latino war literature
of the Cold War.
In contemporary war narratives political expression
is one of the most powerful forces behind the growth of
Chicano/Latino nationalism. The benefits of the G.I.
Bill allowed Mexican Americans and Puerto Rican
Americans to move into the middle class and to think of
themselves as equally deserving citizens. As one young
man who had signed up for service stated, "[w]e too,
were entitled to work, play, and to live as we pleased.
Weren't all Americans entitled to the same
opportunities?"
22
The material realities of WWII helped
develop Chicano/Latino cultural consciousness because
they broke down local cultural barriers and/or the
general attitude of non-involvement at the federal
level. Participation in the war and the imposition of

17
the draft fostered new contracts between the state and
lower levels of rural society which lead to support for
new kinds of politics. For example, organizations such
as the Associacion Nacional Mexico Americana and the
American GI Forum were composed entirely of WWII
veterans and focused heavily on issues of voter
registration.
23

In order to contextualize my use of the words
"state" and "nation," I focus my literary analysis
within specific political developments in the
Chicano/Latino community during the Cold War. I
emphasize political development because civilian
participation in state policies often serve as markers
of changing nationalist attitudes. Indeed, I treat
Chicano/Latino nationalism as an ideology of political
maneuvering within the context of the Cold War. In
writing of the political environment of Chicanos in the
Chicano movement during the Vietnam War, literary
scholar George Mariscal claims:
At the center of virtually all Movement projects
was an understanding that the majority of Mexican
Americans had been denied access to the promised
rewards of liberal democracy and the American
Dream. The gap between the expectations generated
by U.S. ideologies of upward mobility and the

18
material conditions faced by the Chicana/o working
class was simply too great.
24

The theoretical task of this project, therefore, is to
explore Latino nationalism in literature of war, while
periodizing it within the larger political culture.
I find this approach particularly useful since it
interrogates nationalism within a more inclusive social
framework. I am not arguing that the state causes or
produces nationalism, but rather ethno-nationalism makes
sense when considering the circumstances that helped
shape the modern state. As Breuilly argues, nationalism
is "a form of politics that arises in close association
with the development of the modern state."
25
This is
important when dealing with ethnic nationalism because
under state pressure of homogeneity during war time,
nationalistic movements generate unique literary
responses from the community, these would include
autobiographies, novels and other genres I include in my
study. These literary responses inform the way in which
I understand pan-ethnic Chicano/Latino nationalism.
Since I work through constructions of nation in
Chicano/Latino war narratives, I focus also on the
social, historical, and political events that

19
accompanied or preceded their appearance in print.
Consequently, I have a number of guiding questions
focusing my archival research for this project. How,
for example, can contemporary theories of nation,
informed by authors such as Benedict Anderson, Homi
Bhabha, Edward Said and Frederic Jameson help one
understand the silent, often unacknowledged, literature
of Latino/Chicano men who served in the U.S. Armed
Forces? Are the theoretical paradigms of masculinity,
developed by scholars such as R.W. Connell, Harry Brod,
and Michael Messner, appropriate to the types of
masculinities that undergird conventional heterosexual
Latino male war narratives such as those found in Un
Mexicano en Vietnam (1983), Oddsplayer (1989), The
Useless Servant (1993), Dogs From Illusion (1994),
Shifting Loyalties (1995), and Gods Go Begging (1999)?
Are they applicable to gay biographies of soldiers such
as Jose Zuniga's Soldier of the Year: The Story of a
Gay American Patriot (1994)? To what extent do feminist
sensibilities influence the construction of nation in
war narratives such as Elena Rodriguez's Peacetime:
Spirit of the Eagle (1997), where the main character,

20
Private Medrano, and other working-class women in an
all-female platoon find themselves under constant sexual
harassment by male GIs in boot camp? In what ways do
war memoirs such as Everett Alvarez's Chained Eagle
(1998), Roy Benavidez' The Three Wars of Roy Benavidez
(1986), and Felix Rodriguez Shadow Warrior (1989)
function as testimonios in which the "I" voice of the
narrator also serves as a collective communal voice?
26

And finally, is there an identifiable literary genealogy
in the U.S. consisting of war narratives tracing back to
Mexican Corridos as Ramón Saldívar has suggested?
To understand nationalism during times of war it is
necessary to understand the role that gender plays in
armed conflict. For Chicano/Latino men, war offered a
unique opportunity to validate "masculinity" when other
sources of masculine identity were structurally blocked.
To be clear, I am referring to political power and its
correlative financial capital. Sociologist Alfredo
Mirande treats Latino masculinity as an adaptive
characteristic associated with visible and manifest
resistance to racial oppression. To view Latino
masculinity through this perspective does not mean

21
disregarding the maladaptive, even detrimental
consequences of overcompensative manhood, but it does
mean that one can explore masculinity in terms of
responses to structural conditions conditioned by the
state.
Why is this important? As I hope my study will
reveal, issues of masculinity in regards to war are
highly politicized. As Leo Braudy has written, "From
its beginnings war has meant mobilization, not just
materially but also culturally, not just to fight the
enemy but also to define who the enemy is and what the
enemy wants to take away."
27
War is politicized not only
because it functions as a tool for power amongst men in
the military, but also because it is sensitive to
ideological pressures created by the state.
Consequently, the politics of masculinity often gets
projected onto the larger social arena of the military
and finds ways to serve, or to validate, the masculine
subject's sense of himself as male/man. If war is
essentially about killing and surviving, then critiquing
and questioning can often be interpreted as "whining" by
a "weaker" man who is unable to endure what a "stronger"

22
man can. For instance, the leitmotif in the
autobiography of Vietnam Veteran and Medal of Honor
recipient Roy Benavidez in Medal of Honor is "I was a
good soldier—I did what I was told." This type of male
"bravado" is particularly sinister for Chicano/Latino
men because of the historical hyper "macho" masculinity
Chicano/Latino men have represented in American
mythology. Military experience, however, allowed Latino
men to prove themselves in a socially acceptable
context; war allows for a hypermasculinity across racial
lines. However, race complicates some of the
traditional issues associated with service in the
military. For example, does military service grant
Latinos access to the "warrior myth"? Can the military
offer an experience of equality amongst men that
transcends class and racial barriers? And finally, can
military service grant Latino soldiers, regardless of
race and origin, access into a nationalist civilian
community, or as Cardinal Mahoney implied of Jose
Antonio Gutierrez-- are they destined to remain members
of "two families"?

23
George Mariscal's Aztlan and Vietnam (1999) and Ben
Olguin's article "Sangre Mexicana/ Corazón Americano:
Identity, Ambiguity, and Critique in Mexican-American
War Narratives" (2002) remain the two major studies that
deal with Chicano war narratives. In his text Mariscal
culls disparate writing samples such as short stories,
testimonios, letters and poetry, all of which are
specific to Vietnam. His book is divided into two
parts: the first section consists of narratives written
by Chicano soldiers who supported the Vietnam War, and
the second focuses on the literature contesting Chicano
participation in Vietnam. Mariscal provides an extended
introduction to each section that is very informative
and useful to begin understanding the major issues at
play in this body of literature. Ben Olguin's extended
article on war narratives provides a more theoretical
exploration of Mexican Americans and war. His article
grapples with issues such as gender, economics and
sexuality, but as the title of his piece suggests
"Mexican Blood/American Heart," the structure of his
analysis functions within the same binary Mariscal uses
for his book. This binary points to the two "structures

24
of experience" that have dominated critics' discussions
of Chicano/Latino war narratives.
Two other studies unique to Chicano war narratives,
but not part of is double-pronged approach to the
analytical work are Charley Trujillo's Soldados:
Chicanos in Viet Nam (1990) and Lea Ibarra's Too Many
Heroes: Oral History of Chicanos in Vietnam. Charlie
Trujillo's work, as well as Ybarra's consists of
testimonies by soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Trujillo
collected nineteen short testimonies, and although the
sample is small--Trujillo personally admits this in the
introduction--he, like Mariscal, Olguin and Ybarra begin
to fill the void in the literature documenting by
Chicano/Latino experiences in Vietnam.
I decided, as a consequence of this lack of
literature, to conduct research and document the
war experiences of those Chicanos of my hometown of
Corcoran, an agriculturally based community of
6,000 ... situated in the Central San Joaquin
Valley of California.
28

Like Trujillo, Ybarra collected a small sample of
testimonies that serve to document the experience of
Chicano/Latino soldiers in Vietnam.
Arguably, the binary of resistance and assimilation
limits readers' ability to recognize how much Latino

25
authors have had to creatively maneuver to write about
war. This is particularly true when one begins to
explore the multiple ways in which nation and
Chicano/Latino ethnic nationalism have been associated
in war narratives. In Michael Rodriguez's Vietnam war
collection of short stories Humidity Moon (1998), for
example, nation becomes an empty signifier to which
soldiers have to assign meaning. As such, the
characters in the novel begin to establish cross-
cultural allegiances between front-line Marines of all
races as a way to give definition and meaning to nation.
Conversely, in Joe Rodriguez's Oddsplayer (1989), the
action takes place between U.S. soldiers of color and
their racist superiors. In Rodriguez's narrative,
soldiers of color connect their racist and brutalizing
superiors with the U.S. as a nation, an association that
ends with numerous "fraggings," or deliberate killings
of officers. These are just two different examples of
how authors construct and reconstruct nation in war
narratives as part of their plot structure. In response
to the patriotic narratives the U.S. espouses during the
Cold War, Chicanos and Latinos produced what I like to

26
call "narratives of response": these are narrative
interventions that disrupt and participate in the
ideological reconstruction of the US as nation since
WWII.
The binary between assimilation and resistance
reveals the need to understand nation by placing it
within the larger cultural system from which it emerged.
I take my lead here from Benedict Anderson who argues:
If nation states are widely considered to be "new"
and "historical," the nation States to which they
give political expression always loom out of an
immemorial past and ... glide into a limitless
future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism
has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-
consciously held political ideologies, but with
large cultural systems that preceded it, out of
which – as well as against which – it came into
being.
29

Anderson's statement points to the need to historicize
the concept of nation in order to understand it as a
system of cultural signification. Yet, this formulation
is also indicative of the modernity of nation and how
the contemporary expression of nation is necessarily
bound to its moment of genesis. Consequently, I remain
sensitive to the history of colonization and migration
inherited by Chicanos/Latinos as they came into contact
with the geo-political boundaries of the U.S. I hope

27
that by aligning war and narrative depictions of nation,
in what Homi Bhabha would term "textual affiliation,"
30

I can move beyond the entrenched binary consisting of
cultural assimilation on the one hand, and community
resistance on the other. What seems essential to me,
and what I hope to accomplish is an exploration of how
these narratives of response construct their own system
of cultural signification around the concept of nation.
Since the majority of Chicano/Latino titles dealing
with Vietnam began to appear in the late 80s and early
90s, literary critics focusing on Vietnam had little to
work with. These initial anthologies did, however, lay
the foundation for the criticism that was to follow.
Key texts such as James C. Wilson's Vietnam in Prose and
Film (1982), Philip Beidler's American Literature and
the Experience of Vietnam (1982), Timothy J. Lomperis
and John Clark Pratt's "Reading the Wind": The
Literature of the Vietnam War (1987) and Thomas Myer's
Walking Point: American Narrative of Vietnam (1988),
began to map out the myriad of narrative responses to
the war. They examined, among other issues, the
blurring of the autobiographical voice and the fictional

28
one; post-modern narrative techniques; gender,
nationalism and faith. More general studies such as John
Hellman's American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986)
and the first text designed for classroom use Vietnam
Anthology: American War Literature attempt to set-up
theoretical frameworks for understanding America's
Vietnam war literature.
While these texts managed to isolate a specific
genre of American literature, they have also revealed
the dearth of scholarship about war literature written
by soldiers of color. More specifically, war narratives
by Chicano/Latino soldiers have remained absent within
discussions of American War literature in general. One
of the main reasons Chicano/Latino war narratives have
taken long to come into publication, I believe, is
because there was no visible "target audience" who would
purchase the literature. Unlike other ethnic groups
such as African-Americans and Asians for whom the
federal government maintained a specific racial
category, Chicano/Latinos were categorized as
"Hispanics" until 1979. Before then the military would
designate them as "white." This meant that publication

29
houses which were not affiliated with the military saw
Chicano/Latino experiences as part of the larger "white"
American experience of war. In the instances where they
did see "Hispanics" as different, well Hispanics
constituted a very small subsection of the population.
In either case there was no recognizable community that
would be interested in purchasing the texts and so
publishing Chicano/Latino war literature may have seemed
like a risky business venture. Charlie Trujillo is a
good example of the publishing patterns related to
Chicano/Latino war narratives. After returning from
Viet Nam, Trujillo worked diligently trying to get his
collection of testimonies Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam
published in the U.S. For years he received countless
rejection letters from publication houses that felt the
Chicano experiences would not sell. Trujillo explains:
"The reason, or rather excuses, for the rejections were
along the lines of, 'We don't think the public would
like to read what your book has to say,'" or "'There
already is too much of that published.'"
31
As a response
to the continuous rejections by publication houses,
Trujillo was forced to self publish his own book. Chusma

30
House is now an established publishing house and
continues to print books by young writers focusing on
Vietnam.
Furthermore, I think there was a delay in the
publication of these texts because of a lingering
concern with being thought of as "un-American" if the
author/veteran critiques the war. None of the
autobiographies written by Chicano/Latino men openly
critique the war; this is in direct contrast to "white"
autobiographies.
32
Philip Caputo, Ron Kovic and Michael
Herr are all critical of U.S. participation in Vietnam.
Caputo, for example, writes in Rumor of War, "We
believed we were there for a high moral purpose, but
somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted, and
the purpose forgotten."
33
The autobiographies written by
Chicano/Latinos contain subtle critiques, but still
champion Chicano/ Latino Soldiers for their dedication
and perseverance under extreme conditions. Even in the
short biographies collated by Charlie Trujillo in
Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam and Lea Ybarra's and
Nina Genera's La Batalla Esta Aqui (1972), the topic of
discussion focuses more on what it was like to be in

31
Vietnam rather than questioning "why" they were there in
the first place.
It was not until the emergence of a minority
intelligentsia after the civil rights struggles of the
late 1960s, and the intellectual curiosity of
progressive academics, that Chicano/Latino war
narratives began to come into publication. Many of these
scholars lived through the Vietnam war and were
interested in the "native" voice. This is to say
minority academic departments invested years in
developing its own body of literature and its own
readership base. Undoubtedly, this was a necessary step
in order to begin debunking the racist "scholarship"
frequently found in academia regarding Latinos in
general, and Mexican Americans in particular.
34
Even
more significantly, it allowed minority scholarship to
develop its own voice. No longer subject to the whims
of Anglo academics scholars, minority academics were
empowered to evaluate their own strands of literary
production. As part of an intellectual movement that
took place in the early 1970s, scholarship produced by
minorities about minority issues became profoundly

32
important because it forced open the intellectual
boundaries of American literary Studies and gave books
such as Vietnam War novels written by Chicanos and
Latinos cultural currency. The publishing industry,
like any other commercial industry, worries about its
bottom line. Without a cohort of intellectuals to use
these text for their courses and decode them so students
can develop higher levels of awareness this material
would remain unnoticed.
Because citizenship is one of the central themes of
Latino literature and cultural politics during the
Korean War, my dissertation begins with Latino veterans
of the 1950s. Just like veterans of WWII, Korean War
vets struggled significantly over equal treatment as
citizens and organized themselves into political groups
engaged in civil rights issues. My first two chapters
explore the literature that emerged out of these social
struggles.
Chapter two explores "citizenship" in relation to
military service. In this chapter, I write about the
American G.I. Forum, Tomas Rivera's And the Earth Did
not Devour Him (1971), and William W. Harris' Puerto

33
Rico's Fighting 65
th
U.S. Infantry (1965). I argue that
Chicano/Latino literature of this period combats
cultural stereotypes of Latinos as having competing
loyalties: one to the nation of origin and one to the
United States. Instead, the texts I cover in this
chapter make a positive case for what Woodrow Wilson
disparagingly called the "hyphenated American."
Chapter three explores Rolando Hinojosa's Korean
War trilogy Korean Love Songs (1978), Rites and
Witnesses (1982) and The Useless Servants (1993). In
this chapter I argue that Hinojosa's war narratives
express the unfulfilled promise of U.S. citizenship;
Because of the absence of a moral premise justifying the
Korean war, many soldiers experienced little pride or
sense of patriotism fighting for their country. Similar
to non-Latino narratives about the Korean War,
Hinojosa's texts mark the general loss of faith in the
idea of nation, a notion that prefigures the theme of
"disillusionment" in many Vietnam War narratives twenty
years later.
The Vietnam War marked a sharp division in the
Latino/Chicano community, often splitting members

34
between an ideology of dutiful patriotism and a critical
consciousness of resistance. My chapters on this war
explore the competing political ideology informing the
literary output of Latinos writing about Vietnam.
Chapter four is an analysis of two autobiographies
by Mexican-American Vietnam War veterans: Roy
Benavidez's Medal of Honor: A Vietnam Warrior's Story
(1995) and Everette Alvarez' Chained Eagle: The Heroic
Story of the First American Shot Down Over North Vietnam
(1989). Benavidez is a Congressional Medal of Honor
recipient, and Alvarez was the second-longest held
P.O.W. in Vietnam. I argue that both of these
autobiographies serve as masculinist responses to
experiences of emasculation in civilian life.
In this chapter five, I return to fiction. I focus
on Alfredo Vea's Vietnam novel gods go begging (1999). I
use contemporary trauma theory to expose how traumatic
experiences of discrimination in civilian life affect
the processing of trauma during war, and conversely, how
wartime trauma affects the way Latino soldier's process
traumatic instances of discrimination as veteran
civilians. The chapter explores how the protagonist's

35
trauma of Vietnam is triggered and retrieved in his
civilian life through urban spaces. I comment on the
racial and political realities of communities of color
living in blighted inner city urban areas.

36
CHAPTER 1 ENDNOTES

1
Arax, Mark. "Green Card Marines: Radical Turn for a Rebel." L.A.
Times 28 May. 1994: 23+.

2
Non-U.S. citizen serving in the Marines. The phrase refers
specifically to those who enlisted in the armed service in order to
receive their green cards.

3
Instead of waiting three years to apply for citizenship, Green
Card holders in the armed forces who enlist after September 11, 2001
can immediately apply for citizenship. George W. Bush and his
administration established a fast tract naturalization process for
foreign recruits in July 2002 as part of his "War on Terror." Latino
Green Card soldiers were present in even during the Vietnam War, see
Charlie Trujillo's Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam.

4
Bell, Patricia. "Marine From Guatemala Mourned in Calif." The
Guardian 7 of April. 2003: 1.

5
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community: Reflections On the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. (London: New York: Verso 1991) 14.

6
Villareal, Jose Antonio. Pocho. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

7
Piri Thomas. Down These Mean Streets. (New York: Vintage, 1967)
13.

8
Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie and Juliana Torres. A Legacy Greater Than
Words: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas of the WWII Generation.
(Austin: UT Austin, 2006) p. xvii.

9
Nichols, Lee. Breakthrough on the Color Front. Colorado: Three
Continents Press, 1993.

10
Hinojosa, Rolando. Korean Love Songs. (Berkeley: Justa
Publications, 1978) 53.

11
That Louie/ Hell, man, call me "Diamonds"/ And in Korea he was/ A
courageous soldier/ Paradoxes of the gun ho soldier/ heroism and the
stockade! My Translation.

12
http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/research/JoseMontoya.html

13
"The war in Vietnam continues, killing innocent farm working
families. The Chicanos did in the war, and the farm owners get rich,
selling their scab products to the Pentagon. The fight is here,
Raza! In Aztán." Translation mine. Luis Valdez. Luis Valdez: Early
Works. Actos Bernabe. (San Juan Bautista: Arte Publico Press, 1994)
120.

37

14
Munos, Carlos. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. New
York: Verso, 1989.

15
Smith, Anthony. Nationalism Theory, Ideology, History. (Cambridge:
Polite Press 2001) 57.

16
This is a term used by Anthony D. Smith to describe a common error
with current discussion of ethno nationalism.

17
Connor, Walker. Ethno-nationalism: The Quest for Understanding.
Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994.

18
Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State. Chicago: University
of Chicago. 1994.

19
Loyalty to the state would be "patriotism."

20
Rafael Chacon's "Memorias," Santiago Tafollas' "Neating the End of
the Trail" and Jose Policarpio Rodriguez's "The Old Guide: His Life
on His Own Words" remains in manuscript from in the Bancroft Library
at the University of California in Berkeley.

21
Padilla, Genaro. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican
American Autobiography. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press)
15.

22
Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie, ed. Mexican Americans and World War II.
(Austin: UT Austin: 2005) p. xiii.

23
Chavez, Ernesto. My People First! Mi Raza Primero: Nationalism,
Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles,
1966-1978. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

24
Mariscal, George. Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the
Chicano Movement, 1965-1975. (Albuquerque: Uni of New Mexico. 2005)
p. 33.

25
Breully xii.

26
I would also add here the testimony of soldiers collected by
authors such as Alejandro Murgui in Southern Front, Charlie Trujillo
in Soldados: Chicanos in Vietnam and Lea Ybarra's in Too Many
Heroes.

27
Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing
Nature of Masculinity. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) pg. xix.

28
Trujillo, Charley. Soldados: Chicano in Viet Nam. (San Jose:
Chusma House Publication) VIII.

38

29
Anderson 14.

30
Bhabha, Homi K. ed. Nation and Narration. (London: Routledge 1990)
292.

31
Trujillo, Charley. Soldados Chicanos in Viet Nam: Narratives of
The Viet Nam War. (San Jose: Chusma House 1990) X.

32
Mungia, Un Soldado Mexicano en Vietnam, is an exception. The novel
directly critiques the novel and the participation of Latino
soldiers in the Vietnam War. It is also the only autobiography
written in Spanish. Mungia is also a Mexican National.

33
Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. (New York: Henry Holt. 1977) 17.

34
See Ramon Saldivar, Bruce-Novoa, Jose Limon, and Teresa Mckenna.

39
CHAPTER 2. FORGOTTEN PATRIOTS: THE MEXICAN
AMERICAN/LATINO VETERANS DURING THE KOREAN WAR YEARS

The Korean War years (1950-1953) marked a turning
point in the relationship Chicano/Latinos had to the
U.S. as nation. No longer patient with being treated as
second-class citizens, returning Korean War soldiers
(together with WWII veterans) swelled the ranks of non-
military civil rights organizations such as the League
of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
1
and Alianza
Hispano-Americano. They also created organizations that
addressed issues specific to their community and their
experiences as veterans of U.S. foreign wars. WWII
veteran Dr. Hector P. Garcia, founded the G.I. Forum, an
organization entirely comprised of returning Mexican
American and Latino soldiers who fought in WWII and
Korea. The G.I. Forum became the premier a veteran
organization throughout the 1950s and 1960s, initially
fighting for their rights as veterans and later
participating in civil rights movements of the
community. These groups provided a "home" for veterans
who wanted to engage in social rights movements during

40
the early 1950s, and they aso gave the soldiers
political visibility within the community.
Returning veterans also made an impact in the
literary field. From this cohort of WWII and Korean War
veterans came some of the most important writers in
Mexican-American literature. For example, WWII veteran
Américo Paredes wrote part of his novel George
Washington Gomez (1990) while stationed in Japan during
WWII. In 1958, he published his well known ethnographic
study With His Pistol in His Hand; A Border Ballad and
its Hero, this work eventually proved, according to José
David Saldívar, to be fundamental to the development of
ethnic studies programs throughout the nation.
2
Korean
War veteran, Rolando Hinojosa, published his book Klail
City y sus Alrededores in 1976 and received the
prestigious Premio Casa de Las Américas that same year
in Cuba, bringing Chicano veteran writers into
international literary discourse.
While the major civil rights struggles of Mexican
Americans in the 1930s and 1940s were marked by
struggles against a dual-wage system, exploitative
working conditions and rampant discrimination, veterans

41
involved in the 1950s civil rights struggles began to
focus more heavily on equal housing, access to
education, and desegregation. This is not to say that
the issues of earlier generations were abandoned;-—they
were still of great importance to the Mexican American
and Latino community at large; yet, the influence of
returning soldiers helped to push community demands into
more public social arenas.
3
In large part, the new
emphasis on civil rights can be attributed to the
creation of the G.I. Bill and the employment of many in
the service sector. These two opportunities allowed for
a sizeable number of Mexican Americans to enter the
middle class. For the first time, large numbers of
returning veterans had enough money to attend college.
Mario Garcia argues in Mexican Americans: Leadership,
Ideology and Identity, 1930-1960 (1991) that the G.I.
Bill and the education these soldiers received helped
shift the identity of the community from Mexican to that
of Americans— of—Mexican descent (emphasis mine).
4
Just
as significant was the fact that military life moved the
men geographically out of the political and social
isolation of their ethnic enclaves—-an important step to

42
understanding the nation at large and their position
within it. Soldiers were trained and stationed in
different states the U.S. and this gave them a
"domestic" understanding of how their community was
treated throughout the country.
Additionally, when Chicano/Latinos began to serve
in the military, they were exposed to American foreign
policy, specifically the policy of communist
containment. For many, the discourse of Cold War
politics buttresses loyalty to American institutions
such as the federal government, and the military. One
editorial in the Los Angeles Spanish language newspaper
L.A. Opinion
5
, for example, claimed military service
allowed for the creation of new identity, a type of
"nuevo hombre" in which the Mexican American would
emerge as the new face of America. This did not mean
that all Latino war veterans became middle class, or
blindly embraced America; it does indicate, however,
that a significant percent of the population stopped
seeing itself as predominantly as an immigrant group.
Instead, they began to see themselves as American

43
natives entitled to the same social rights as other
citizens.
Within this milieu of strong anti-communist fervor
and pro-nationalist attitudes, cultural attitudes in the
U.S. during the Korean War years forced Mexican American
and Latino veterans to struggle for national visibility,
as a reaction to their growing anxiety of being ignored
or forgotten. While most Latinos might have been content
with being recognized as "Americans," they realized that
the general population was not going to accept them as
"American veterans" unless they fought for it as
civilians. Consequently, many returning soldiers began
to struggle against discrimination by making as public
as possible their service records. The Korean War,
therefore, marked a more conscious attempt by Mexican-
Americans and Latino soldiers to participate in the
national fabric, one that had seen combat as a "right of
passage" into nationhood. If the choice for Americans
was "Put Up or Shut Up," as the now infamous front page
of the Catholic newspaper The Crucible
6
declared, then
Latinos certainly ponied up. However, "shutting up" was
never part of the arrangement. Combat experience gave

44
the men a claim to "nation," and thus a license to begin
carving out their place in America.
While the 1950s brought forth an unparalleled level
of abundance, little of that wealth trickled down into
the barrios. For the most part, Mexican American and
Latino veterans returned to their hometowns to find
little had changed. Their communities remained
segregated in the poorest pockets of town and with
little-to-no help from local governments. For Puerto
Ricans, East Harlem was the place to settle, while
Mexican Americans maintained large ethnic enclaves in
East Los Angeles and throughout the Southwest.
Physically removed from the metropolitan centers, the
community was easily ignored by the large cultural
debates of the 1950s, which focused on the growing
international threat of communism in Indo-China and the
supposed conformity of the general population that was
making the U.S. "soft." Furthermore, the beginning of
the Black Civil Rights movement was taking shape and
garnering national attention. Ignacio M. Garcia claims
that for Americans during this period "Mexican-Americans
seemed not to inspire any great social crusade, nor did

45
their problems spur any intellectual debates."
7
Not
included in the cultural debates of their time and
isolated from the general population, Mexican-Americans
and Latinos as a whole were in danger of being
forgotten.
At the federal level, President Truman's
administration did engage with issues of race, but not
with Latinos. In 1946, for example, the Truman
Administration funded a study called "To Secure These
Rights." The purpose of the study was to assess the
status of minorities in the U.S. during the mid to late
'40s. The study focused exclusively on black Americans.
Carl Allsup writes of the G.I.'s concern over their
civil rights struggle, "The federal government increased
its concern for Civil Rights, but concentrated on the
problems of Black Americans, no direction or even
support for Mexican-Americans emanated from federal
officials."
8
While the plight of blacks in the 1950s was
very real and merited extensive study, little was being
done for Mexican- Americans and Latinos in general. When
veterans from these communities returned from WWII and

46
later from Korea, they found the same apathy from the
federal government.
There were two significant reasons for the lack of
attention the military gave to Mexican-American and
Latino veterans: first, the military designated them as
"white," and second, when they returned to civilian
life, they were often restricted to social enclaves and
therefore physically "removed" from the rest of the
population. The military considered Spanish speakers of
Latin America direct descendents of European Spaniards
and therefore racially white. The fact that the vast
majority of Latin America is mestizo (a mixture of
European and indigenous races) went unrecognized. This
was the same throughout WWII. A good literary example of
the racial treatment Mexican Americans experienced can
be found in Norman Mailer's famous WWII novel, The Naked
and the Dead (1948). The Mexican character in the novel,
José Martinez, served as the lead scout for a unit
composed of various whites. While José was treated as
part of the unit, he was also portrayed as innately
prone for combat, loyal to his superiors, and prone to
fantasizing about white women. José is both considered

47
part of the white troops and yet simultaneously racially
different from the other troops in his unit.
In reality, when not isolated in urban barrios,
many of the returning soldiers moved back to the
communities they once lived in. This was a difficult
situation for returning veterans because it often meant
soldiers had to readjust to a provincial existence after
being exposed to international customs. Isolated from
the general population and no longer "white," the men
once again faced the reality of being marginalized in
America. In Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultima, for
instance, the protagonist's three brothers return from
WWII to small-town country living. Feeling bored and
forgotten, they have trouble readjusting to the slow
pace of an agricultural life. Ultimately, they do not
fit into the Mexican American social enclaves and decide
to relocate to Las Vegas.
Unsurprisingly, one of the few non-fiction books
about Latino soldiers in WWII and Korea was written with
the intent of bringing issues affecting Mexican American
and Latinos back into the larger cultural discussion of
the time. Raúl Morín, a Mexican American veteran of

48
WWII, writes in the beginning of his book, Among the
Valiant: Mexican-Americans in WWII and Korea (1963):
"They [Mexican Americans] were either left out
altogether or given an insignificant role."
9
This was
true for WWII veterans as well as Korean War veterans.
In the opening pages of the book, Morín explains that
his yearning to record the exploits of "Spanish-speaking
soldiers" stems from the realization that in the best-
selling war novels and popular war films he "could not
help noticing the glaring omissions of the Spanish-named
soldiers of the United States Army. They were either
left out altogether or given an insignificant role.
This was the inspiring motive for the book."
10
Pointing
to the dearth of information in the popular media, Morín
voices his concern over the possibility that Mexican
American participation in combat and their sacrifices
were being socially ignored, or worse, purposely
forgotten. Indeed, Morín goes to great pains to document
names, birth places, military lineage and details for
each soldier's accomplishment and the medals received.
Such meticulous documentation underscores the need to

49
make public the participation of his community in the
two wars: WWII and the Korean War.
Writing years after the Korean War, Morín was
careful not only to claim a space for Mexican Americans
in U.S. military history, but also to expose what the
war meant to the Mexican American community:
We felt that this was an opportunity to show the
rest that we too were also ready, willing, and able
to fight for our nation. It did not matter whether
we were looked upon as Mexicans, Mexican-Americans,
or belonging to a minority group. The war soon made
us all genuine Americans, eligible and available
immediately to fight and to defend our country, the
United States of America.
11

War was thus not only the touchstone of all that was
best and patriotic in Mexican Americans, but also that
which authenticated them as "genuine" Americans. Morin
took years researching his work, and must have been
conscious of the treatment of Mexicans during his
lifetime. With the onset of the Depression, for example,
over 500,000 people of Mexican heritage were forcibly
returned to Mexico under the "repatriation campaign" of
the 1930s. Close to half of them were U.S. citizens.
This pattern was repeated in the 1950s, with a campaign
dubbed "Operation Wetback." In 1954 alone, more than one
million citizens and non-citizens of Mexican heritage

50
were indiscriminately deported.
12
In the face of such
blatant assaults on the citizenship of members of their
community, Mexican American soldiers felt their
sacrifices needed to be voiced and recognized by the
general public.
Morín's Among the Valiant is a long list of
accomplishments by Mexican soldiers who went "beyond the
call of duty" to ensure their mission was accomplished
even when it meant "disregard for personal safety." The
book positions the accolades given to Medal of Honor
recipients as heroic, often revealing an overzealous
patriotism that in many ways seeks to make Mexican
Americans more "American" than Anglos. For example,
Morín uses the often--stated statistic that Mexican
Americans have were awarded more Medals of Honor per
capita than any other racial group, and then follows the
statement by directly quoting from the official award
citation notices issued by the military.
In his article "Sangre Mexicana/ Corazón Americano"
Ben V. Olguin claims that this need to prove Mexican
American identification with the U.S. "functions as a
lethal ritual of effacement that is consummated by the

51
countless battlefield deaths (often the result of
suicide missions) of Mexican-American soldiers who
heeded this racist and ultimately masculinist
prescription for Mexican American citizenship."
13
While
I agree with Olguín that part of the impulse of Morin's
book is a response to a racist and masculinist ethos, I
would add that such an impulse is a common method of
challenging stereotypes that undermine a community's
patriotism and their rights to equal treatment. For
example, the sociologist and political leader W.E.B. Du
Bois encouraged his fellow African-Americans to enlist
in the armed forces during WWI because he believed that
participation in the war would finally make them full
citizens. Du Bois made this statement even though black
soldiers had already participated in the American
Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish American war, and
had gained the right to vote through the Fourteenth
Amendment. Still, Du Bois claimed they would finally be
socially accepted if they participated in the Great War.
Similarly, German Jews served in German and Austrian
armies despite strong anti-Semitic cultural currents. In
England, as well as Germany, the experience of the war

52
was thought to bring together disparate economic classes
of people in order to forge a more cohesive national
citizenry. Oppressed groups have a tradition of
enlisting as a way of gaining social recognition—
assuming, of course, that it is recognized by the
general public. The problem with Mexican-American and
Latino soldiers, however, is that their sacrifice seemed
to be continuously ignored.
For Morin, neglecting the numerous soldiers who
returned from overseas theatres during WWII and those
from the Pacific during the Korean War was tantamount to
cultural razing. These soldiers had returned from
fighting tyranny and communist expansion to live "the
good life," and not only in the financial sense. The
federal government seemed genuinely poised to help them
live that life by making the transition from military
life to a civilian one as easy as possible. All of the
soldiers had access to financial support for housing,
healthcare and education regardless of race, religion or
gender. Both Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry S. Truman's
administrations showed unwavering support for returning
veterans, enough to overshadow the unique demands

53
different ethnic groups may have needed. As Carl Allsup
writes, "while these groups did contribute to the least
controversial aspects of the new policies, they were
essentially co-opted by the agreeable benefit standards
established and maintained by the politicians in
Washington."
14
As a consequence, in the immediate
aftermath of the war there was no real demand for such
organizations since the benefit package seemed so
agreeable.
Like all successful soldiers, Mexican American and
Latino veterans expected to rejoice in the "traditional"
social accolades given to prized warriors: honor,
respect, citizenship, and recognition for heroism.
Instead, what they faced was a kind of post-war
"reconstruction project"; their barrios were in
disarray, and their community still under the yoke of
racism.
The two major organizations for returning all
veterans, the American Legion and the Veterans of
Foreign Wars, failed to adequately work with veterans of
Mexican descent, or other Latino veterans. According to
Dr. Hector Garcia, veteran of WWII and founder of the

54
all-Latino Veterans organization the G.I. Forum, most
Mexican-Americans chose not to join the American Legion
and the Veterans of Foreign Wars primarily because these
organizations were considered Anglo American
organizations. He argued that these organizations
adhered to the prevalent culture and ethnic prejudices
of the time period, most lacked concern for and
recognition of Mexican-Americans and Latinos.
15
The
veterans' administration was often late in delivering
pension checks and medical assistance to returning
veterans who had been badly wounded in war.
Furthermore, veteran facilities were often located in
white neighborhoods, making it difficult for Mexican
Americans and Latinos to receive adequate services.
The G.I. Forum in effect was designed to bring
attention to the veterans and specific issues afflicting
returning Mexican-American soldiers and their families.
The group tried, as best as it could, to present itself
as a loyal group of the U.S. population. Its emblem
consisted of thirteen stars placed in an ark formation
above the organization's name.

55

Figure 1. American G.I. Forum flag-raising ceremony at
national headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1957

56
The background has a pattern of the stars and
stripes that in the aggregate is shaped like a knight's
shield. The thirteen stars are of course a reference to
the thirteen original colonies; the stars and stripes
represent loyalty to nation, and the shield an adherence
to a military ethos. The organization's conscious effort
to utilize early-- American iconography indicates their
desire to be linked with the birth of the nation,
positioning themselves as direct descendants from it.
Flag raising ceremonies such as the one pictured above
were conducted throughout the nation wherever they had
chapters. The ceremonies often served the dual purpose
of honoring country and as opportunities to advertise
the organization to local newspapers and community
organizations. Initially, the organization maintained an
uneasy balance between advertising themselves as
"American Veterans" or as Mexican American/Latino
veterans of the United States
16
While members of the
organization felt a camaraderie based on loyalty to
nation and ethnicity, nothing galvanized the groups need
for public recognition as much as the Felix Longoria
controversy in 1949.

57
For many Mexican American and Latino soldiers, the
Felix Longoria case solidified their need to make their
military service public. The case has often been written
about as an important civil rights struggle for the
Mexican-American community in Texas, but not as a case
intentionally used by Hector Garcia to bring into
national consciousness the military service of Mexican-
American and Latino soldiers. The Felix Longoria
controversy developed in early 1949 in the small town of
Three Rivers, Texas. Private Felix Longoria was a
Mexican American soldier whose remains had just been
returned to his family for burial after nearly four
years of refrigeration in the Philippines. His widow,
Mrs. Beatrice Longoria, was informed by Tom Kennedy, the
owner of the only funeral house in Three Rivers, that he
would arrange the young man's burial. Mr. Kennedy's
plan, Henry A.J. Ramos tells us in The American G.I.
Forum (1998), was a biting reminder of the Mexican-
American community's second--class status. First,
Kennedy arranged for Private Longoria to be buried in
the town's segregated "Mexican cemetery" and second, he

58
denied the family's request to use the funeral home's
chapel to hold a wake in honor of Private Longoria.
17

When Mrs. Longoria asked why, Kennedy was quoted as
saying "I have lots of Latin friends, but I can't let
this boy rest in the chapel because the whites won't
like it."
18
According to Ignacio M. Garcia, Kennedy
explained that the wake would create an uncomfortable
situation likely to aggravate racial tensions in the
small town. Mexicans as well as Mexican-Americans,
García writes, "were expected to understand the social
parameters in communities like Three Rivers. When they
did not, it [made] things uncomfortable and forced Anglo
Americans to enforce those boundaries."
19

Offended by this explanation, Mrs. Longoria spoke
to her sister Sara Moreno, an acquaintance of Hector
Garcia of the G.I. Forum. Garcia was furious about the
treatment of young Longoria's body and also of
Longoria's family. He said he would help and called
Kennedy on behalf of the Longoria Family. According to
Carl Allsup, Dr. Garcia, introduced himself and stated
that he was calling on behalf of Mrs. Longoria. He
requested use of the chapel for burial services. Mr.

59
Kennedy said that all of the arrangements had already
been made to the satisfaction of Mrs. Longoria. Dr.
Garcia said she had changed her mind and wanted use of
the chapel in the burial home. Kennedy refused:
Dr. Garcia: But why Mr. Kennedy?

Mr. Kennedy: Well, you see it's this way—this is a
small town and you know how it is. I'm sure you
understand. I am the only funeral home here, and I
have to do what the white people want. The white
people just don't like it.

Dr. Garcia: Yes, but Mr. Kennedy, this man is a
veteran, I mean, a soldier who was killed in action
and he is worthy of all our efforts and our
greatest honors. Doesn't that make (a) difference?

Mr. Kennedy: No that doesn't make any difference.
You know how the Latin people get drunk and lay
around all the time. The last time the Latin
Americans used the home they had fights and got
drunk and raised lots of noise and it didn't look
so good. I – we have not let them use it and we
don't intend to let them start now .... I don't
dislike the Mexican people but I have to run my
business so I can't do that. You understand the
whites here won't like it.

Dr. Garcia: Yes, I understand Mr. Kennedy, thank
you.
20

Garcia, always the astute diplomat, did two things:
First, he called reporter George Groh, who worked for
the Corpus Christi Caller Times, one of the local
newspapers, and he also called a second newspaper that
had been covering the activities of the G.I. Forum. Dr.

60
Garcia told Groh that the G.I. Forum would have a
protest meeting on January 11 in Corpus Christi. He also
sent a telegram to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson informing
him of the events. In his telegram, García called
Kennedy's action "... a direct contradiction of those
American principles for which this American soldier made
the supreme sacrifice in giving his life for his country
and for the same people who now deny him the last
funeral rites deserving of any American hero regardless
of origin."
21

The manner in which Garcia used the two newspapers
to expose the ill treatment of the Longoria family
demonstrates how these veterans were becoming more adept
at using the media as a tool in their civil rights
struggles. Had Garcia not turned to media outlets, the
scheduled demonstrations could very possibly have only
received local media coverage. Instead, this issue
became an opportunity for soldiers to remind the larger
American community that Mexican-Americans and Latinos
served in the military. The following morning, Dr.
Garcia received telegrams from U.S. congressmen John
Lyle and Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. condemning Kennedy's

61
actions. State Senator Roger Kelly expressed disgust
with the Rice Funeral Home's "un-American and
reprehensible conduct."
22
The Governor of Texas during
the period, Beauford Jestes, obtained a commitment from
the Kennedy funeral home agreeing to the request by the
Longoria Family.
That same evening over a thousand people came to
the protest. As with other G.I. Forum protests, non-
violence was the rule, but the atmosphere was highly
charged with resentment. According to Henry A.J. Ramos,
the protest organizers talked about possible ways of
responding to the situation. The atmosphere was livened
up however, when Dr. Garcia interrupted the meeting to
read a telegram he had received from United States
senator Lyndon B. Johnson.
I deeply regret to learn that the prejudice of some
individuals extends even beyond this life. I have
no authority over civilian funeral homes, nor does
the federal government. However, I have today made
arrangements to have Felix Longoria buried with
full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery
here at Washington where, the honored dead of our
nation's war rest. Or, if his family prefers to
have his body interred nearer his home, he can be
reburied at Fort Sam Houston National Military
Cemetery at San Antonio. There will be no cost.
If his widow desires to have reburial in either
cemetery, she should send me a collect telegram
before his body is unloaded from an army transport

62
at San Francisco, Jan 13
th
. This injustice and
prejudice is deplorable. I am happy to have a part
seeing that this Texas hero is laid to rest with
the honor and dignity his service deserves.

Lyndon B. Johnson, USS
23

The Longoria family decided to bury Felix Longoria at
Arlington cemetery, where he received full military
honors. Having Felix Longoria buried at Arlington
Cemetery was a significant gesture to Mexican American
and Latino soldiers who feared their sacrifices in war
were being forgotten by the general population. Raúl
Morín, Dr. Hector García, and the members of the G.I.
Forum always understood that this "forgetfulness" was
driven by the prevalent racist attitudes in the U.S.
during the Korean War years. Felix Longoria final burial
location was particularly vindicating for Latino
soldiers because it meant that through social struggle,
the sacrifices of the young man had finally been
recognized on a federal level.
The religious dimension of the Felix Longoria case
is also important to note here, since Longoria was a
practicing Catholic within a community of Protestants.
Before the years of WWII, it was easy to ignore Mexican

63
American and Latino Catholics. Catholicism in general
seemed to be a society unto itself, espousing peculiar
beliefs and acting in manners that seemed more foreign
and not "truly" American. Yet, the growing number of
Mexican Americans and Latinos in the United States post-
WWII in areas such as New York, Los Angeles and Texas
forced Catholic churches to recognize the spiritual
needs of this growing community. No longer relegated to
basement services in Irish Catholic Churches, or Italian
American Churches, Mexican-American and Latino Catholics
demanded representation within the priesthood as well as
legitimate physical space for worship. The archdiocese
in New York officially began their plans for integrating
the large Spanish--speaking community of Puerto Ricans
living in "Spanish Harlem" in 1952, right after WWII,
when Father Joseph Fitzpatrick gave his now--famous
first public conference on Puerto Ricans. In Corpus
Christi, Texas, the diocese met the Mexican American
demand for religious services by doubling the number of
Catholic schools.
24
It was also at this historical
moment that the prolific historian Carlos Eduardo
Castaneda published his extended seven volume history of

64
"Spanish-speaking people" in the United States titled,
Our Catholic Heritage. According to Castaneda, Spanish-
speaking people had deeper roots in the continent than
Anglo- Americans, and that any friction between Mexicans
and Anglo- Americans should be remedied by the church,
whose tasks had always been to create the universal
family.
The Roman Catholic Church (and Castaneda), due to
the 1950s red-baiting of the communist, made it very
clear that the "family" had no room for communists.
Stephen Whitfield writes of the 1950s: "Roman
Catholicism considered communism the antichrist itself,
and a papal encyclical (Nostis et Nobiscum) had
denounced the movement as early as 1849, soon after the
publication of the Communist Manifesto."
25
American
Catholics in particular felt that because of their
persecution of their co-religious under communist
controlled or leftist leaning governments was an
immanent threat. Communist reductive materialism or
"scientific socialism" was an affront to Catholic
beliefs of transcendental love and the afterlife.
Furthermore, communist desire to abolish private

65
property challenged the papal assumption that ownership
of property was integral to an orderly, well--structured
society. For example, American Catholics were outraged
at the federalizing of private property and treatment of
Catholics in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the persecution
of the Polish Catholic Church in 1945 by leftist rebels
are two more examples of leftist wars the American
Catholic Church condemned. By 1946, American Cardinal
Francis Spellman was urging all Catholic military
chaplains to "protect America against aggression of
enemies within her borders,"
26
concluding that anti-
Catholic bigotry, despite its long lineage of
persecution by Protestants, could be traced to
communists.
While the majority of Mexican Americans voted as
Democrats in the fifties (the overwhelming support for
J.F. Kennedy and the successes of the Viva Kennedy Clubs
in the early 60s attests to this) they proved deeply
conservative in their Catholic religious practices
probably because retaining their Catholic practices had
already been "tried by fire" through the Christero

66
Rebellion, a direct precursor for much of the Mexican
American community's attitude toward WWII and the Korean
War. The Cristero Rebellion took place more than thirty
years before the Korean War. The Mexican government had
begun critiquing the Catholic Church for its continuous
stance against the left-leaning Mexican government of
the post-Mexican Revolutionary period. In 1926
president Plutarco Calles (1924—1934) attempted to
enforce the anti-religious church sections of the
Mexican constitution. The church hierarchy felt this
was the beginning of their persecution and responded by
ordering a cessation to all formal church services in
Mexico until the government reversed its anti-clerical
politics. Large numbers of Mexican men began to arm
themselves anticipating an all-out religious war against
the federal government. Shortly after President Calles'
decree, spontaneous outbursts against the government
were organized into a well-armed opposition to the
federal government, leading to a brutal Civil War
between the years of 1926 to 1929. The violence
propelled many Mexicans to the North and onto United
States soil.

67
Because of the civil unrest, many migrated to the
United States close to 150,000 Mexican Catholics came to
Los Angeles, during these years, establishing Catholic
churches throughout the city.
27
Clearly, the Christero
Rebellion set a precedent for protecting Catholic
practices from the perceived communist threat. From the
rebels' perspective, the religious struggle was
conceived of as primarily a noble act, where devout men
could fight honorably for a just cause. Accordingly,
fighting in Korea was akin to this noble act, perhaps
more so than in the Christero Rebellion since it merged
loyalty to the nation with a tradition of protecting
Catholic religious practices.
Many of the Mexican-American and Latino veterans
from WWII joined Catholic leaning military organizations
such as the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic War
Veterans. Many veterans returned to their local
churches and participated in youth groups. Being
Catholic in the U.S. was in the 1950s just a step away
from being anti-communist and rabidly patriotic. Anti-
Communist Catholic crusaders such as Joseph McCarthy had
linked Catholic practices with vehement red baiting.

68
The connection was so prevalent that some writers in the
Mexican American community such as Tomás Rivera
explicitly critiqued it, especially when they believed
that pro-capitalist posturing and hyper-patriotism was
detrimental to the social gains of the community.
Tomas Rivera's novel Y no se lo Tragó la Tierra/
And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971), critiques the
Catholic, anti-communist, patriotic fervor of the 1950s
and interrogates the value of military service for young
Mexican American men. The book consists of a collection
of short vignettes told from the perspective of a young
Mexican American boy. Each vignette deals with
different social issues in Mexican American farm life of
the 1950s: religion, labor, migration, language, and
family. One fifth of the book's vignettes also deal with
a family's young son serving in the Korean War who has
gone missing for two months. Two vignettes in
particular demonstrate Catholicism's inability to
reconcile military service and patriotism for Mexican-
Americans: "A Prayer" and "The Portrait."
Rivera's "A Prayer" is told by the mother of a
missing soldier in the first person. The mother prays

69
to God during a critical moment of desperation after not
hearing from her son for two months. In a state of
anguish, she prays to God and to the Virgin of San Juan
and the Virgin of Guadalupe for the safe return of her
son. In the prayer, she promises each of the Virgins
that if her son returns safe from war she will "pay her
homage at her shrine." Throughout her prayers, she
reveals her distrust of the federal government, doubting
the governments ability to protect her son. Instead, she
reverts to her Catholic principles for hope:
This is the third Sunday that I come to implore
you, beg you, to give me word of my son. I have
not heard from him. Protect him, my God, that no
bullet may pierce his heart like it happened to
Dona Virginias son, may he rest in God's peace.
28

Continuously, throughout the prayer, the mother draws
attention to the childhood attributes of her son-turned-
soldier in order to emphasize the young man's innocence.
In contradiction to the traditional military ethos in
which a young man is responsible for protecting the
interest of his country, and responsible for taking part
in the war effort, the narrator points to her son's
childlike nature in order to undermine his
accountability in such affairs and to point out the

70
injustice of sending young boys into battle; "I still
keep his toys from when he was a child, his little cars,
little trucks, even a kite that I found the other day in
the closet."
29

Edward Said reminds us that we do not write or
speak in a vacuum, but that all discourse is either for
or against a particular position.
30
Writing in the 1970s
Tomas Rivera clearly indicts the U.S. for sending young
Mexican American boys to war in a far off land. But, he
also interrogates the Catholic Church for failing to
help its followers question the political circumstances
that directly impact them. "I have made a promise to the
Virgen de San Juan to pay her homage at her shrine and
to the Virgen de Guadalupe, too. He also wears a little
medallion of the Virgen de San Juan del Valle and he,
too, has made a promise to her; he wants to live,"
31
the
narrator tells the reader. The mother promises both
virgins homage: the Virgen de Gualdalupe,
quintessentially Mexican, and the Virgin de San Juan who
is located in the lower Rio Grande valley of Texas. By
offering homage to both virgins she maintains her
Mexican tradition while recognizing the American aspects

71
of it as well. The son, however, offers only the image
of the Virgin de San Juan del Valle homage, indicative
of his Americanization and his break with traditional
Mexican Catholicism. Ironically, the son,-—who is more
American—- is least recognized by the country in this
situation. He is literally MIA in the military and
metaphorically MIA as member of U.S. society.
The longest story in the text dealing with the
Korean War focuses specifically on the need to remember
the young Mexican American men who served in the war.
"The Portrait" deals with a Mexican family who is
swindled out of some money and the only picture they
have of their dead son who presumably had died in the
war. The perpetrator is a traveling salesman who
enlarges pictures and supposedly makes them come alive
by setting the pictures within wooden inlays. Don
Mateo, the father and protagonist of the short story, is
impressed with the sample picture the salesman shows
him. Don Mateo's son, Chuy, was killed in Korea and the
salesman's promise to make the picture come alive is
particularly appealing to the father. Unfortunately, Don
Mateo realizes he had been swindled out of his money

72
when a young boy from town finds a "sack full of
pictures, all worm-eaten and soaking wet"
32
in a tunnel
leading up to the dump. Don Mateo becomes infuriated
when he realizes he has lost the only picture of his son
Chuy. Later in the story Don Mateo recognized the con
man at a local market and threatened to beat him unless
he finishes the job he promised. Out of fear, the con
man consents produces the picture, but all he has is the
phot that had been left for days under a bridge, the
image is hardly visible.
The protagonist in the vignette is Don Mateo, a
name equivalent in English to Matthew. In the New
Testament, Matthew is a Jewish tax collector who
eventually becomes one of Christ's disciples. Before his
conversion, the Romans use him to extort taxes from the
Jewish community. His fellow Jews resent him, viewing
him as a traitor and puppet of the Romans. Don Mateo's
son, who was killed in Korea while serving in the
military, is nicknamed "Chuy." "Chuy" is the nickname in
Spanish for people named "Jesus," the quintessential
sacrificial figure. The premise of the vignette rests on
having Chuy's image framed in wooden inlays in order to

73
make him look alive, a symbolic "resurrection" for the
young fallen soldier. The story attains a particularly
Catholic flavor in the final paragraph when the author
tells us that Don Mateo places Chuy's picture on a table
next to the Virgen De Guadalupe, the iconic image of
Mexican Catholicism.
Like other intellectuals such as Américo Paredes
writing about the 1950s, Tomas Rivera begins to
interrogate the endorsement of patriotism by Catholic
tradition when he exposes how vulnerable the youth
becomes when it attempts to easily merge disparate
cultures through traditional monikers of patriotic zeal.
In one of the more revealing passages in the short
story, it becomes evident that the intent of the young
man while in the military was to merge his Mexican
ancestry with that of his American one:
But you take good care of the picture for us
because it's the only one we have of our son grown
up. He was going to send us one all dressed up in
uniform with the American and Mexican flags crossed
over his head, but he no sooner got there when a
letter arrived telling us that he was lost in
action. So you take good care of it.
33

The military uniform was designed to establish
uniformity among soldiers and check individualism.

74
Military command and politicians believed that the
uniform would remove social divisions of class,
religion, and race in order to establish a collective
and cohesive military body of soldiers. The fact that he
was killed before he could take the picture reveals the
impossibility of this endeavor in the pro-American
culture of the 1950s.
If Rivera's superimposing of the military uniform
on the Mexican body is a subtle message of the erasure
of Mateo's Mexican heritage, the theft of the pictures
is a more blatant statement of cultural erasure. Chuy's
picture, like the rest of the pictures the con man took
from the village were part of the collective social
memory that was stolen, left in a tunnel "leading to the
dump" and ultimately "worm-eaten." Here again the
reader is confronted with the reality of being socially
forgotten. The salesman is an Anglo and his disregard
for the collection of pictures can easily stand for the
eradication of cultural difference.
Towards the end of the story the reader is informed
that Don Mateo sees the swindler at the local market and
then threatens to hurt him unless he finishes the work

75
he paid for. The man returns to Mateo's home two days
later with the faded picture of Chuy in a frame with the
wooden inlays and navy suit as he promised. Toward the
end of the story Don Mateo has a conversation with his
compadre in which he claims,
"Now tell me, how do you like the way my boy
looks?"

"Well, to be honest, I don't remember too well how
Chuy looked."

"But he was beginning to look more and more like
you, isn't that so?"

"Yes, I would say so. That's what everybody tells
me now. That Chuy's a chip off the old block and
that he was already looking like me. There's the
portrait. Like they say, one and the same."
34

Don Mateo's meeting with the swindler is not one
where he demands justice for being conned out of money
and the only picture of his deceased son, but one in
which he demands that the job be finished; what Don
Mateo wants is the framed picture of his son for
posterity. Without the picture, the boy's sacrifice
would be forgotten. Yet the picture Don Mateo
ultimately receives of his son is completely faded
because of its exposure to the weather. In fact, we are
told that the face of the pictures "could just barely be

76
made out."
35
The statement makes clear the father has
learned very little in this whole event. He fails to
see that he, like Chuy, has been exploited in his push
to assimilate into American culture and like the image
of his son, the cultural identity of the father is badly
"faded." Writing in the 1970s, Tomas Rivera questions
the value for Mexican Americans and Latinos of
participation in U.S. wars when their sacrifices are
either ignored or forgotten.
In the final paragraph, the reader is told that Don
Mateo places Chuy's picture on a table next to the image
of La Virgen De Guadalupe. In a gesture that finally
unites Chuy/"Jesus" with the Virgin Mary in the
afterlife, Don Mateo brings the religious story full
circle. Whereas the New Testament states Jesus was
sacrificed so that the people may continue to live,
Chuy's military death has no real significance since
Chuy's father has not come to terms with what it means
for his son to have died while soldiering. Dead, faded,
re-fashioned in a military uniform, and placed next to
the Virgin Mary, Chuy is a haunting reminder of

77
Catholicism's complicity in the sacrifice of Mexican
American and Latino men at war.
Even with the high number of medals awarded to
Mexican Americans and Latinos for their participation in
WWII and in the Korean War, these soldiers could not
keep their courage from being questioned by white
commanders. As such, many Latinos began to see that
publicizing of their military record was necessary to
undermine this stereotype in the general population and
among the military brass. The defeat of the Spanish
Armada, the fall of Mexico during the Mexican American
War, the occupation of Cuba after the Spanish American
War, the loss of the Philippines, and the wholesale
annexation of Puerto Rico gave birth to the belief that
soldiers of Spanish-speaking descent were not committed
soldiers. Generally speaking, ranking commanders
believed regiments entirely composed of Latinos (or
blacks, or Koreans, or Japanese for that matter) would
break under the pressures of an offensive. Usually these
units would be relegated to supply lines,
transportation, or other tasks of support, but not
designated as combat units. There were exceptions of

78
course; the Tuskegee Air Combat Unit in WWII was
composed entirely of black Soldiers, and the all-
Japanese Infantry Regiment 130
th
, are now part of
military lore. Both units incurred heavy casualties and
received many medals by the end of the war, but for the
most part, it was rare to see men of color in combat
units. General Eisenhower, for example, during WWII
would not allow Puerto Rican soldiers to lead offensives
or to guard important positions because they had no
reputation as fighters.
36
Consequently, when selecting
available and battle--tested U.S. units that could be
used for combat, those with high numbers of Latino
surnames were passed up.
Many in the Mexican American and Latino community
believed the Korean War would provide these soldiers
with a public arena in which Latino soldiers could
demonstrate courage to the general population. The
earlier wars had not been enough, as prejudice and
stereotypes had cheated the men out of the explicit
rituals of masculinity familiar to the general society,
to the Mexican American community as well. One note of

79
encouragement sent to the all Puerto Rican 65
th
Regiment
read:
With the change in policies of the Military
Department in Puerto Rico initiated by Generals
Bissel and Porter, and followed firmly by the good
friend of Puerto Rico, General Sibert, the 65
th

Infantry has the glory of demonstrating the valor
and military ability of the Puerto Rican soldiers
... Borinqueneers of the 65
th
... with your conduct
in Korea, you are breaking the strings that, due to
lack of vision and unskilledness of some
commanders, our troops were tied with. You are
destroying the discrimination which hurt us so much
during the war; you are writing a glorious page in
our history ... Puerto Rico is proud of you ... We,
your comrades in the National Guard, with you good
luck and success in the New Year.
37

While war on a personal level can accrue elements of
courage, honor, and masculine bravado, only the
collective experience of war can endow a whole community
with these attributes. As the quote indicates, this war
meant more than the political containment of Communist
ideology, it had the potential for communal symbolism:
Puerto Ricans are valiant soldiers, and like Mexican
Americans in the mainland, they needed to voice this to
the general public.
W.W. Harris's book on the exploits of the Puerto
Rican 65
th
United States Infantry Regiment is an example
of military documentation that seeks to publicize to the

80
American public the courage of the Puerto Rican
experience in the Korean War. Harris is the Anglo
commander of the regiment during the Korean War. His
book is a record of his experience with the regiment
from the moment he takes command to the time of his
reassignment two years later. He begins the story of
Puerto Ricans in Korea by detailing their training
exercises while in San Juan. He assesses and
compliments their performances while practicing
maneuvers against other regiments in the service. The
final chapters of the book detail the performance of
Puerto Ricans while on combat missions in Korea. The
book goes beyond merely recording history; it stands as
a testament to the valor of Puerto Rican veterans,
directly contesting the belief that Puerto Ricans lacked
courage during battle. Harris makes this clear in the
opening line of his book, claiming that his text is "a
story of pride and prejudice" a statement that politely
undermines the stereotype of the time circulating within
military command.
Harris sees the accomplishments of the 65
th
as an
opportunity to establish a military history based on

81
valor that not only contests stereotypes, but sets
precedence for Puerto Rican men. What is re-
established, Harris claims at the very end of the book,
is faith in Puerto Rican men as courageous men and
therefore "qualified" to be accepted as brothers in arms
and part of the nation. In the very last page of the
book, for example, Harris writes a letter to two Puerto
Ricans who served under him and had expressed their
appreciation for Harris as regimental commander. Harris
writes:
Not only did the 65
th
fulfill my predictions, but by
[their] outstanding performance of duty, [their]
courage, and [their] bravery, [they] evoked the
praise and admiration of every one there from the
rank and file G.I.'s to the most senior of them
all, General Douglas McArthur. They were all proud
to be called your comrade-in-arms; I was the
proudest of them all.
38

Harris was not alone in understanding what was at stake
with the Puerto Ricans' performance in battle. Officers
in the brigade also believed that if they attained
military honor by demonstrating courage they would more
easily be accepted by the general U.S. population. For
example, in one of the letters written by Augustin A.
Ramirez, one of the officers who served under Harris,
the young soldier writes,

82
Our mutual sentiments are that through your
tireless efforts, not only has the 65
th
Infantry
become one of the most outstanding regiments of the
U.S. Army, but the respect and acceptance of the
Island of Puerto Rico and its people have been
indelibly impressed upon the minds of our fellow
Americans, and other United Nations people; to say
nothing of the lasting impression which must be in
the minds of our present and potential enemies.
39

In a second letter written to Harris on the same date,
Victor M. Navas, 1
st
LT 65
th
Infantry writes, "Not only
have you made the 65
th
one of our best regiments, but in
addition you have made the Island of Puerto Rico, and
the Puerto Ricans, known to many people of many
nationalities."
40

Like Mexican Americans on the mainland, Puerto
Ricans recognized not only that military service was a
conduit by which to gain national recognition, but also
that their service would go unrecognized unless actively
publicized. Later in the letter the same soldier
writes, "You opened a door, for so many years closed to
the Puerto Rican soldier, a door that I am sure we will
keep open in your memory."
41
The author of the letter
clearly understood that the book itself stood as
documentation of their struggles in the war. Having the
public recognize their sacrifices, and particularly

83
their deaths, is a surefire method of being remembered
and celebrated for their courage. Elizabeth D. Samet
writes in Soldier's Heart "[b]attlefield death has long
been celebrated in the Western world as the ultimate
proof of courage: in the capital of the city-state, in
the court of the king, on the village greens and city
squares of the republic."
42

One of the analogies Harris's narrative strategies
is the use of the sports metaphor in order to uses to
describe the exploits of the Puerto Ricans. In
different sections of the text Harris compares sports
and war, and invokes the British tradition of
celebrating at once a sense of fair play and a certain
national pluck. For example, in the chapter titled
"Prelude to The Big Battle," the Puerto Ricans find
themselves under a surprise enemy attack. Immediately
on the phone, Harris orders his battalion commanders to
circle around the attacking Chinese and then close in on
them. Harris writes,
And man, did those Puerto Ricans have a ball. They
moved down out of the hills and swarmed over those
North Koreans so fast they didn't know what had
hit'em. When the smoke and noise had cleared away
several days later, the 65
th
was officially credited

84
with the following: counted NKPA dead bodies – 560,
NKPA prisoners – 276 for a total of 836.
43

The tone in the passage parallels the tone Harris
employed when narrating the training exercises/game the
Puerto Ricans engaged in while training in Viques Puerto
Rico. The implication, one can argue, is that this
event was in fact practice for the "real" battle the
Puerto Ricans where destined to fight not only against
the NKPA, but against the stereotypes white soldiers
held toward Puerto Rican infantry men. Harris served
under Douglas MacArthur and was surely privy to
MacArthur's tendencies to draw comparisons between war
and sports. In MacArthur's memoir Reminiscences, he
writes that nothing in civil life prepares a young man
for war more than organized sports, "[n]othing brings
out the qualities of leadership, mental and muscular
coordination, aggressiveness, and courage more quickly
then this type of competition."
44
The training exercises
in the beginning of the book for example are
"authenticated" by real letters from other white
commanders in the field. In the similar way the slave
narratives employed a white witness to authenticate the
biography of black subjects, these letters are included

85
in the text in order to verify that what Harris is
saying is true, and that Puerto Rican soldiers can in
fact successfully perform military maneuvers.
Later in the same chapter we see Puerto Ricans
fight an enemy; all is orchestrated in front of white
soldiers who stand and observe. The 65
th
reached the
Imjin River and had to cross it in order to continue
pursuing the retreating Chinese. The Chinese, however,
had left behind various well-armed units along the other
side of the river-bed in order to retard the advance of
the pursuing armies. Harris tells the reader the
British Brigade tried to cross the river, but failed
after two or three attempts. The strong and well
organized position of the Chinese had been too much for
them. After some very serious losses to the brigade,
the corps commander withdrew them and gave the
assignment to the 65
th
. This sets up the public display
for the 65
th
and frames what ultimately becomes the
unit's "first blood" and successful crossing.
The author points out that the Puerto Ricans
succeeded in what the British Brigade failed to
accomplish. The obstacle here goes beyond that of the

86
military enemy; in effect the 65
th
's charge at the Imjin
contests the stereotype of Latinos as weak soldiers. In
what seems to be a recurring motif throughout the entire
book, the soldiers either did "just as well" or in this
case surpassed their white counterparts. The motif
challenges the stereotype much of the brass believed in
regarding the Puerto Ricans, namely that they lacked
courage under fire. Harris tells us that the Puerto
Rican soldiers were referred to as the "Rum and Coca
Cola" outfit. One of the most poignant episodes of the
type of discrimination and stereotypes the Puerto Ricans
endured becomes evident when the 65
th
gets a visit from
General Almond, Supreme Commander McArthur's second in
command. After a small battle in which the Chinese
mounted a surprise attack and retreat maneuver on the
65
th
, General Almond visits the unit to observe the
damage and to speak with Harris about his men. During
the course of the discussion Harris writes:
... General Almond said something to me to the
effect that he didn't have much confidence in these
colored troops. He said that he had had a bitter
experience with them in Italy and that he didn't
trust them. I know that he had commanded the all-
colored 24
th
Infantry Division in Italy during the
war, and I had heard that he had some trouble, but
I didn't know any of the details. At any rate, I

87
didn't let Almond's statement go unchallenged.
"General, these troops are not colored. They are
white. Oh, I do have some colored Virgin Islanders
and some colored Puerto Ricans – and my artillery
battalion and tank company are colored, but the men
of the 65
th
are white Puerto Ricans. And I might say
that the colored troops have fought like real
troopers. We haven't had any trouble with them."
45

True to form, Almond in this case shares his racist
ideology with Harris.
46
Almond's experience with the
Black troops in Italy was a bitter one. The troops in
his infantry had severely low morale and a lack of
fighting will, but not because the troops lacked
courage. Almond failed to say that black soldiers were
in a foul mood because they were not allowed to have
black officers, and the white officers they did have
treated them with disdain. I find most interesting,
Harris' method of "challenging" Almond's racist
commentary about his men: He does not challenge Almond's
indictment of black troops for supposedly being
cowardly. Instead, he challenges Almond's claim that his
men are black in the first place. Harris makes a key
distinction in his claim that his men are not black; he
argues that they are from Puerto Rico and therefore they
cannot be called black. And even the ones that do
"look" black are from the Virgin Islands and from Puerto

88
Rico proper. In other words, it is only blacks from the
U.S. that fit Almond's concept of "cowardly" soldiers.
Since his soldiers are not from the U.S., they are not
black; instead, they are strong white soldiers who
happen to be from Puerto Rico—regardless of what they
look like.
Harris' response to Almond may seem a bit
outrageous to contemporary readers, but if one takes
into consideration that Latinos were considered white by
military standards, then the rhetorical move on Harris
behalf is a little more tenable. Harris decides to focus
on nation and culture as markers of identity for his
men, instead of simply phenotypical aspects. What is
important, however, is that once he makes the
distinction, then by default his men are courageous.
For Harris, if his men are considered black in the way
that blacks are conceived of in the minds of racists
such as Almond, then there is no possibility for courage
without the public recognition of it.
Mexican-American and Latino soldiers realized in
the early 1950s that their contributions and
participation in WWII and the Korean War were not being

89
socially recognized. The lack of representation in the
popular media and WWII documentaries created a growing
concern that the participation of Mexican-American and
Latinos in the war would be forgotten. Arguably, the
cause stemmed from the fact that the military considered
many of these soldiers "white" and therefore grouped
them with other Anglo soldiers. Even though for many of
the soldiers, as Maggie Rivas writes in A Legacy Greater
than Words, it was the first time they worked side by
side with Anglos. Soldiers serving in the Korean War had
the same experience. In addition, housing was a real
issue for many of these returning soldiers. Many of the
soldiers returned to the barrios they had come from and
thus were removed from the general population and kept
away from the centers of activities specific to
veterans.
Mexican-Americans and Latino veterans began to show
their concern over the omissions of their participation
in the wars in the literature that they produced—both
documentary and fiction—as well as in the civil rights
struggles they engaged in. More than anything, the fear
of being forgotten galvanized the group as a distinct

90
racial group with special needs among American veterans.
Evidence of the concern can be found in books such as
Raul Morin's Among the Valiant, Tomas Rivera's ...And
the Earth Did not Devour Him, and William Harris' book
on Puerto Rico's fighting 65
th
U.S. Infantry. In
addition, civil rights struggles in which Mexican-
American and Latino veterans engaged in such as the
Felix Longoria case helped demonstrate veterans' need to
publicize their military experience.
There was grave risk at hand for these soldiers if
their military experience was forgotten. On a very
practical level, the benefits and medical needs of these
veterans could be easily overlooked; for many of these
soldiers, segregation—either legal or illegal—created
special needs, such as transportation and language
assistance. On a more personal note, it was important
for these veterans to have their sacrifices recognized,
because it gave them a fundamental right (in the minds
of the American republic) to demand equal treatment
under the law. A soldier could reasonably argue that he
fought for the country and should therefore be treated
like other citizens. Plus, recognition of military

91
service helped assuage the "divided" loyalty accusation
many Mexican-American and Latinos faced because of their
hyphenated identity.
In their reliance on their military records,
Mexican-American and Latino soldiers hoped to be
regarded as part of the larger national struggle against
the Cold War. Many of the soldiers and veterans of WWII
and the Korean War saw anti-communist attitudes as
inherently patriotic and American. And, anti-communist
attitudes also helped buttress their identity as
Catholics since Catholicism in the early twentieth
century in Mexico took a decisive stance against the
leftist movement. The Christero Rebellion (1926-1929)
attests to this sentiment among Mexican Americans in
different areas of the South West. Still the "pro-
American" position the returning veteran tried to
present to the general public was always tempered by the
social reality of their living conditions.
Discrimination and poverty made being patriotic a
difficult negotiation between having love of country and
maintaining pride in their ethnic heritage, between
being different while also wanting to be American.

92
CHAPTER 2 ENDNOTES

1
One of the founders of L.U.L.A.C. was a WWI veteran Alonso
Perales. For many L.U.L.A.C. Perales fought in WWI and became a
civil rights activist often writing of Latinos in the military for
La Prensa in San Antonio. He had a weekly column that ran from 1940s
to 1950s. Marquez, Benjamin. LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican
American Political Organization. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1993.

2
Saldivar, Ramon. "The Borderlands of Culture." The English
Department, October 2005.

3
Take for example, a film such as Salt of the Earth (1954) which
was censored because it was considered subversive to capitalist
ideology. In the film, Latino factory workers first led by men and
then led by women unionize and demanded to be treated the same as
their Anglo counterparts.

4
Garcia, Mario. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology and
Identity, 1930-1960. New Haven: Yale Uni Press, 1991.

5
Ruiz, Juan. "Nuestros Muchachos en Korea" La Opinion 27
th
June.
1950: A2.

6
Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. 2
nd
ed.
(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Uni, 1996) 77.

7
Garcia, Ignacio M. Hector P. Garcia: In Relentless Pursuit of
Justice. (Houston: Arte Público Press) 14.

8
Allsup, Carl. The American G.I. Forum: Origins and Evolution.
(Austin: Uni of Texan at Austin) 39.

9
Morin, Raul. Among the Valiant: Mexican Americans in WWII and
Korea. (New York: Borden Pub Co, 1963) 10.

10
Ibid 10.

11
11.

12
Lopez, Ian F. Haney, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race.
(New York: New York University Press, 1996) 38.

13
Olguin, Ben V. "Sangre Mexicana/ Carazon Americano" American
Literary History 14 .1 (2002): 83-114.

14
Allsup 29.

15
Ibid 33.

93

16
Garcia, Ignacio M. Hector P. García: In Relentless Pursuit of
Justice. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2002) 74-104.

17
Ramos, Henry A. J. The American G.I. Fourm: In Pursuit of the
Dream, 1948-1983. (Houston: Arte Público, 1998) 88.

18
Ibid 90.

19
108.

20
Allsup 108.

21
Ramos 100.

22
115.

23
Ramos 21.

24
Dolan, Jay P and Gilberto Hinojosa. Mexican Americans and the
Catholic Church,1900-1965. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame,
1997) 210.

25
Whitefield 91.

26
Ibid 95.

27
Dolan and Hinojasa, 96.

28
Rivera, Thomas. ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. (Houston:
Arte Público Press, 1987) 90.

29
Ibid 91.

30
Said, Edward, and Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. The Edward
Said Reader. (New York: Vintage, 2000) 32.

31
Rivera 92.

32
Ibid 138.

33
139.

34
139.

35
138.

36
Harris, William W. Puerto Rico's Fighting 65
th
U.S. Infantry (New
York: Presidio Press, 1965) 2.

94

37
Ibid 29.

38
200.

39
210.

40
198.

41
199.

42
Samet, Elizabeth D. Soldiers Heart: Reading Literature Through
Peace and War at West Point. (New York: Picador Press, 2008) 188.

43
Harris 118.

44
Weintraub, Stanley. Macarthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an
American Hero. (New York: Free Press, 2000) 191.

45
Harris 105.

46
Clay Blair provides an excellent description of General Almond's
bigotry in his massive study The Forgotten War: America in Korea
1950-1953.

95
CHAPTER 3. SHADOWS OF THE SOUTHWEST IN ROLANDO
HINOJOSA'S KOREAN WAR TRILOGY

Rolando Hinojosa is one of America's most prolific
fiction writers on the Korean War. His Korean War
trilogy begins with Korean Love Songs (1978), continues
with Rites and Witnesses (1982) and ends with The
Useless Servants (1993). Collectively, these novels
explore the predicament of Chicano soldiers serving in
the U.S. Army during the Korean War. The protagonist is
Rafe Buenrostro, a young Chicano soldier from the
fictional Klail City of Belken County, South Texas.
Rafe's family is among the few original landholders who
managed to retain their land despite warfare, lawsuits,
Anglo squatters, Texas Rangers, and hired assassins. The
Korean War trilogy is part of Hinojosa's Klail City
Death Trip Series (KCDTS). The KCDTS consists of
fourteen separate novels. Literary critics often see the
serial texts as installments in one continuous novel
with recurring characters, plots, and histories, but
they are also quick to emphasize that each book works as
an individual entity with its own coherent internal

96
structure. Hinojosa's oeuvre attests to the two-hundred-
and-fifty-year history of Spanish-Mexican presence in
the lower Rio Grande,the southernmost region of Texas.
The two hundred and fifty year span of KCDTS is
punctuated by a number of armed struggles such as the
Settler's Rebellion of 1835, the Mexican American War,
WWII and the Korean War. Like the history of ethnic
Mexicans in Texas, Rafe's family history is marked by a
prolonged resistance to U.S. colonial oppression.
In view of the multi-war genealogy of Hinojosa's
oeuvre, the narrative tensions between the local ethno-
politics of Klail City (the city where all non-war
narratives take place) and the international aspect of
war become clear. The local focus on Klail City is
primarily concerned with Mexican resistance to Anglo
domination, cultural affiliation, and the debunking of
sacrosanct historical narratives various academics have
constructed for Texas.
1
Likewise, Hinojosa's collection
of Korean war stories present an alternative
interpretation of the Korean War-—one not defined by
anti-communist military narratives of a conquering
nation, but rather a history constructed by the communal

97
experiences of the powerless, of the conquered, both
Chicano and Korean. It is what literary critic Jose
David Saldivar calls a "new narrative" because "through
its doctrine of the 'political unconscious' [the novel]
counters historical amnesia by restoring to the
materiality of its signifiers the buried reality of
south Texas history."
2

In what follows, I explore how Hinojosa's Korean
War trilogy challenges conventional U.S. war literature
that attempts to homogenize all soldiers as "American."
He does so by projecting the history of U.S.- Texas
colonialism within his war novels on the Korean War. He
makes the history of U.S. colonialism evident in the
novels by juxtaposing the experiences of Mexican-
Americans in Texas with the colonial aggression of the
U.S. in Korea. In this manner Hinojosa's war narratives
allow the reader to question the social bonds holding
diverse people together within a shared "imagined
community." This approach allows Hinojosa to interrogate
U.S. intervention in Korea and bring back into the
discussion of war the voices of those who have been

98
traditionally silenced by the rifles of over--zealous
American patriots
***
Korean Love Songs written as a collection of poems
in the tradition of British World War I poetry the first
installment of the trilogy. It introduces the reader to
much of the trauma Rafe endured in Korea as part of the
108
th
artillery division assigned to patrol the northern
perimeters of South Korea. Hinojosa critic Klaus Zilles
claims it is the initial moment in the series when "Rafe
Buenrostro sublimates the trauma of his Korean ordeal
through a poetic divulgence of the horrors experienced
...."
3
The main subject matter of the book is war, and as
such it grapples with themes traditionally associated
with war novels: honor, loss, isolation, fear, and
dehumanization. Yet, because Rafe is a Mexican--American
soldier fighting in Korea, the text also includes
subject matter such as segregation, racism, ethnic
pride, and social marginalization.
In one of the early passages of the text, the high
military command exposes Rafe to the history of U.S.
colonialism in South Texas. In the poem titled "The

99
Eighth Army at the Changchon," General Walton H. Walker
recalls the history of oppression and conquest germane
to Rafe's fictional Belken County in South Texas. After
Rafe risks his life on an offensive that claimed the
lives of various friends, Rafe returns to camp to hear
General Walker's "pep talk." Although intended to lift
troop morale after soldiers began to suspect China
entered the war in support of North Korea, Walker's talk
manages to undermine the fighting spirit of Mexican
American soldiers in his division. Rafe reflects:
And those who survived
Remember what he said:
"We should not assume that (the)
Chinese Communists are committed in force.
After all, a lot of Mexicans live in Texas."
And that from the Eighth Army Commander
Himself. It was touching.
And yet, the 219
th

Creating history by protecting the world from
Communism,
Brought up the rear, protected the guns, continued
the mission,
And many of us there
Were again reminded who we were
Thousands of miles from home.
4

The analogy General Walker makes between Mexicans in
Texas and Chinese in Korea involves more that high
population numbers and their supposed lack of fighting
spirit.

100
The analogy positions Mexicans and Chinese peoples
in opposition to U.S. forces. Like the Chinese, General
Walker assumes Mexicans in Texas are reconfigured as
hostile to the U.S., but since they are not "committed
in force" the U.S. military should not worry. Hinojosa,
like the real General Walker, is a native born Texan,
and as a man familiar with the region's history, he is
conscious of the effects U.S. colonialism have had on
Mexican Americans. Rafe's comment "And many of us there/
Were again reminded of who we were," recognizes that as
ethnic Mexicans, they are not considered "real"
Americans, but rather a subaltern group living in a
nation actively involved in the internal colonization of
its people and the international colonization of other
populations.
In Dancing with the Devil (1994) José E. Limón
describes General Walker's comments as ordinary for its
time. Limon writes, "As a non-Mexican, he is correct, or
at least consistent, in referring to these mostly U.S.
citizens as "Mexicans," since this is what they were
usually called by the Anglo demographic minority in
South Texas; itself, of course, largely of English,

101
Scottish, Irish, and German ancestry, mostly coming from
the American South."
5
As Limon points out, the word
"Mexican" is used to limit the social integration of
ethnic Mexican Americans since it still holds
connotations of a colonial past that mark it as "other"
or different from the "general" American population
which, as Limon points out, is thought of as western
European. This is important to interpretations of
Korean Love Songs because it underscores the reality of
Mexican American soldiers who even after serving
honorably in the military find themselves with limited
access to the general national fabric.
Rafe's recognition of his marginalized position in
civilian life may be one of the reasons he mockingly
recites the popular anti-communist phrase used during
the Korean War: "Creating history (their words) by
protecting the world from communism."
6
The Korean War,
was in fact, the first time this phrase emerged as a
reason for armed conflict. It gained currency after the
Soviets in 1949 broke the U.S. monopoly on nuclear
weapons. By the early 1950s this phrase reflected the
bitter ideological demarcations dividing the two

102
countries, one that recognized the global political
struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the
unprecedented military power supporting each position.
Unfortunately, Korea was the first nation to see these
two super powers practice what became Cold War military
strategy, a "policy of containment in peace and a
strategy of limited response at war."
7
Because of the
manner in which Rafe phrases the popular slogan, he
makes clear he is distancing himself from this
ideological posture signaling to the reader that he does
not buy into the slogan by adding the phrase "(their
words)" within parentheses. This is not surprising since
it is doubtful he has anything to gain in such a
struggle; the material wealth gained through such a
struggle will continue to privilege Anglos within the
pre-established colonial structure of the 1950s.
8

One of the reasons Rafe may have mocked the phrase
and resisted a nationalist ethos is because the social
rewards allotted to returning American soldiers were
clearly not available to him. The reason, he hints at
different moments of Korean Love Songs is because he is
racially different from the general population outside

103
of the Texas Mexican enclave in Klail City. To feel
accepted as part of the national collective would
require the general population to see beyond Rafe's
racial identity. This would be difficult for Rafe to
imagine since his life up to this point was marked by
racial strife. Mexicans in Texas during the 1950s
retained vestiges of legal segregation from earlier
years. Up until the 1930s Mexicans in many counties
throughout Texas were refused services in restaurants,
could only purchase real estate in "Mexican
neighborhoods," suffered police brutality, and were
allowed to enter only a limited range of professions.
In industrialized labor such as that of the railroad
industry and mining, they had lower wages for equal
work, separate eating facilities, and could not join
unions.
9
By the 1950s some change had been achieved,
thanks to the hard work of social justice organizations
and the progressive thinking of Anglo American allies.
But the social conditions for Mexican Americans in Texas
were still very challenging and Hinojosa reveals this
with the passages discussing PFC David Ruiz.

104
PFC David Ruiz is a Mexican American from Klail
City and a close friend of Rafe Buenrostro. Rafe tells
the reader that after being wounded twice in battle,
David one day filled out his own missing-in-action card
"just like so much equipment" and then "simply walked
away to the docks." And not long after that, Rafe and
the rest of the Chicanos who befriended each other,
began receiving cards from one Mr. Kazuo Fusaro, David
Ruiz's new identity as a Japanese business man.
Reflecting on the new identity David had assumed, Rafe
writes in his journal that the Army would never find
David since he was not only reported missing, but also
reported as dead. Underscoring the lack of commitment
the larger military community had for Chicano soldiers
at a time when they were sacrificing their lives for
their nation, Rafe believes that David can easily avoid
the military police since "To Americans he looks
Japanese" and "No one really gives a damn, one way or
another."
10
Weeks later Rafe visits David-turned-Mr.
Fusaro in Nagoya, Japan. Rafe finds out his friend is
going to wed a Japanese school teacher in the fall.
Considering the long-term demands of marriage Rafe asks

105
David "and home?" to which David responds: "This is
home, Rafe. Why should I go back?"
The discourse between Rafe and David calls
attention to the problematic relation the two friends
have with the U.S. as a nation. David's decision to
leave the military and assimilate into Japanese culture
questions traditional beliefs of nation as a "home."
Fundamentally, as Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined
Communities, what makes citizens call nation "home"
depends on how accessible the "larger community" is for
the person.
11
The fact that David decides to leave the
Army, stay in Japan, and marry a Japanese woman, tells
us that even though Japan is culturally and
linguistically different from David's Chicano
background, he at the very least thinks Japanese culture
is more accessible than that of the U.S. This scene in
Korean Love Songs once again demonstrates the inability
of Texas-Mexicans to feel part of the American cultural
fabric. As Ramon Saldívar writes:
Objects of prejudice and exploitation at home,
dying in Korea 'creating history by protecting the
world from communism' it is no wonder that they are
charmed by the allure of Japanese self-sufficiency,
integrity, and family solidarity in the face of an
occupying American Army.
12

106
Unlike David Ruiz, however, Rafe understands that it is
a utopian fantasy to believe one can erase history and
simply begin anew even if the shift is to a culture
similarly suffering under U.S. colonialism. Yet, Rafe
understands David's desire to escape the social confines
of U.S. civilian life. In fact, Rafe even testifies
before the Board of Inquiry investigating David's
disappearance stating that "to the best of [his]
knowledge Cpl. Ruiz is dead." Away from the front line
battle scenes, David leaves Rafe with a meditative
question "... Why should I go back," to which Rafe
responds "He has me there. Why, Indeed?"
13

Once the weak bonds of national solidarity are
exposed David sees the Korean War for what it is a
colonial enterprise within the power struggles of the
greater Cold War. David, as well as Rafe, is conscious
of the inescapable parallels between the war-torn
Koreans and the history of war for Mexican Americans
living in south Texas. Yet, now David and Rafe are part
of the forces of oppression, and they are seeing in
Korea their own history re-enacted: battles over land,
the creation of the subaltern, the military presence,

107
and the struggle for ideals that will generate "the
greater good." In response to such revelation David and
Rafe avoid using nationalist rhetoric to talk about the
war, and instead begin using market-based language. For
example, when David asked Rafe about the scars on his
face he asks "What happened to your face?" "Don't
answer. Injured on the job, I'll bet."
14
Rafe also uses
business--based language to describe his condition in
the army, by repeatedly stating: "I work for the
State."
15
Bereft of any nationalist pretenses, David
makes it clear they are being employed by the U.S.
government to kill North Koreans and Chinese, a job that
in earlier times would have made them mercenaries, and
not patriots.
The conversations between David Ruiz and Rafe
Buenrostro begin to question the social bonds that hold
the idea of nation together. David's decision to "go
native" draws on a theme that emerges frequently in
Korean War novels. During the Cold War the U.S.
government had an ongoing suspicion that many of its
soldiers would commit ideological Treason. According to
Arne Axelsson in Restrained Response: American Novels of

108
the Cold War and Korea, 1945-1962: "An idea was taking
hold about large-scale conversions of American prisoners
to communism as an effect of lack of stamina and laxness
of morality among the servicemen."
16
Indeed, some of the
early cultural debates that took place shortly after
soldiers returned from war were on the behavior of
American P.O.W.s. The fear was that too many prisoners
of war were susceptible to communist indoctrination
programs that "brainwashed" American soldiers into
believing communist ideology. Novels such as Duane
Thorin's A Ride to the Panmunjon (1956), Charles Howe's
Valley of Fire (1964), Frank G Slaughter's Sword and
Scalpel (1957) and Jack Lynn's The Turncoat (1976) all
contain extensive passages in which the protagonists,
after being captured and interrogated by Chinese
officers, resist the communist indoctrination to which
they are subjected. The protagonists are, however,
witness to a large number of other P.O.W. s who are not
as successful at repudiating communist ideology and
ultimately become collaborators. In Francis Pollini's
Night (1961) the Chinese interrogator is so well versed
that he succeeds in getting the main protagonist to

109
betray his fellow soldiers. Yet, Pollini does attempt to
"rescue" the protagonist, Army Technical Sergeant Marty
Lindi, at the end of the novel by having him commit
suicide after repatriation because of guilt and shame.
The military's fear of ideological treason amongst its
soldiers was so great that the Department of Defense
conducted its own investigation as to its veracity. In
its study on P.O.W.s, The Fight Continues after the
Battle (1955), the Department of Defense exonerated U.S.
soldiers suspected of ideological treason, concluding
that the P.O.W. s had not been undisciplined or
immoral.
17
Arne Axelsson claims that many in the general
population attribute the supposed P.O.W.s' weak
commitment to American ideology to public schools
because they failed to provide the American youth with
moral principles and guidelines.
18
In Korean Love Songs,
however, this fear is turned inward, that is, the motive
for "treason" is not Communism but rather U.S.' society
and its practice of racial discrimination.
For David Ruiz it was not the schools that failed
him but rather, the entire American culture. Bereft of
family and access into cultural citizenship because of

110
ethnicity, David lacks affinity with a nation that has
given him so little and to which he has given so much.
David does not betray his country as do the protagonists
of other Korean War novels. If anything, David is an
example of what happens when a country fails to equally
incorporate all of its civilians. Hinojosa inverts
governmental concern about ideological treason by
allowing David to feel betrayed by his nation instead of
the nation feeling betrayed by him.
***
Hinojosa's second Korean War novel, Rites and
Witnesses, further explores these processes of ethnic
exploitation by juxtaposing civilian life in Klail City
with the military life of young Chicanos fighting in
Korea. The text consists of thirty-five short chapters
focusing on two plot lines that Hinojosa repeatedly
juxtaposes: flashbacks of Rafe Buenrostro's military
experience in the Korean War during his second tour of
duty;and the drama surrounding the Klail-Blanchard-Cooke
(KBC) family empire. The latter involved behind-the-
scenes politics, family indiscretions, and the social
domination of Klail City by a few wealthy power brokers.

111
The chapters in the novel are written as dialogues with
a screen play, but there are no stage directions or
acts. There is only the voice of an omniscient narrator
who frequently intrudes in the dialogues to offer
commentary. The last ten chapters, however, are not
written as a screen play; instead they are written as
testimony by witnesses in a court of law. The final
chapter of the book stands alone as a 1001-C report--a
military report containing a brief summary of events,
equipment lost, and casualties. It is also the report
containing the documented death of Rafe's childhood
friend Joey Vilma, and other members of his artillery
unit.
The final chapter of Rites and Witnesses makes
explicit the underlying current of the whole book: the
gross ethnic injustice of sending young Chicano men to
die in an imperialistic war while the white corporate
structure represented by the KBC increases its wealth
and power in Klail City. For example, the chapters
describing Rafe's most intense moments of combat are
immediately followed by chapters in which the owners of
Klail City First International Bank are involved in

112
conspiracies of tax evasion and gerrymandering. In
another section of the book, the juxtaposition of plots
highlights the degree to which people of Mexican descent
are racialized in Texas. After Rafe is wounded a second
time during battle and was told he was going to receive
a purple heart and a bronze medal for courage, Hinojosa
follows the scene with the testimony of Kay Kocurek, a
Polish tire dealer who settles in Belken County. Mr.
Kocurek tells the reader of his friend Fidencio Parra
who claims "That in Belken County, that in the state of
Texas, really, it doesn't matter what you are, if you
ain't Mexican then you're an Anglo."
19
Such contrasts
echo the social restrictions General Walker implied with
his comment "Lot's of Mexicans live in Texas." But it
also makes clear the diametrically opposed position
Mexicans and Anglos have in the south of Texas' racial
order. White is the default group for all other
races/ethnicities regardless of how they may identify
themselves. This arrangement allows people to gauge
ethnic difference within a type of racial vector with
whites on one end and ethnic Mexicans on the other as
the most racialized group in the region.

113
In his essay "A Sense of a Place" Hinojosa claims
that place, or region, is indispensably important to his
writing because it provides his characters with a
foundation from which they can develop:
For the writer, this writer, a sense of place was
not a matter of importance; it became essential.
And so much so that my stories are not held
together by the peripeteia or the plot as much as
by what the people who populate the stories say and
how they say it, how they look at the world, out
and the world in; and the works, then, become
studies of perceptions and values and decisions
reached by them because of these perceptions and
values which in turn were fashioned and forged by
the place and its history.
20

For the author, region is a central element in the
socialization of people, in the continuation of group
solidarity, and in the formation of subjectivity. But
Hinojosa points out that the socialization processes of
his characters is also carried out through language
itself. "What" the characters say and "how" they say it
is more important than their actions. The implication
here is that while language serves as the central
mechanism for the development of subjectivity, it does
so only when it is organically tied to a particular
place and its history. By this perspective, Hinojosa
follows the tradition of other Chicano authors such as

114
Américo Paredes and Tómas Rivera. For Paredes, Rivera,
and Hinojosa, characters are products of language and
language is a product of region. Consequently,
characters populating Hinojosa's Klail City develop an
intimate relation with the soil they inhabit since the
author exposes them to the "daily grind," to the birth
and death of multiple generations, and gives them a
language by which to articulate the experience.
Chicano literary critics and historians have long
noted the tradition of regional adaptability residents
of border states, such as Texas and California, have
developed over the years. Beginning right after the
Mexican-American war with the signing of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, residents of the Northern
Mexico-turned-southern U.S. have developed, consciously
and perhaps even unconsciously, adaptive linguistic as
well as geographic mechanisms to protect and preserve
the integrity of their cultural place. "Adaptive
mechanisms" is my gentle euphemism for what may really
be considered "survival techniques" in border regions
that often witness hostile policing of both language and
space by state authorities. Mario Barrera's Race and

115
Class in the Southwest (1979),
21
and Rodolfo Acuna's
Occupied America (2000)
22
for example, repeatedly point
to disputes over land in many of the racial tensions
historically emerging between Mexican Americans and
Anglos. For both of these historians, native inhabitants
of former Mexican lands sustained a type of regional
subjectivity that manifests itself through language and
other cultural practices.
If one understands the passages in Rites and
Witnesses as extensions of Belken County's regional
history, then they undermine the impulse of other war
narratives to try and capture the sentiment of U.S.
soldiers fighting for their nation in Korea. The
juxtaposition of plot themes in Rites and Witnesses
makes it impossible to overlook the contrast between
KBC's land-grabbing and Rafe's suffering. The contrast
is significant because attempts to solidify one
nationalist narrative often subsume the nuanced
histories of minority populations. Hinojosa's project is
antithetical to the more popular novels about the Korean
War. For example, in James Michener's The Bridges of
Toko-Ri
23
(1953), the protagonist dies as a martyr and as

116
a scapegoat fighting the evils of communism, which
threatened to convert Indo-China into a host of
communist regimes. Lieutenant Brubaker's death at the
end of the novel points to a popular American sentiment
of 1950s Cold War politics: American lives should not be
spent in foreign conflicts, but it is necessary if the
U.S. is going to promote communist containment and free-
world solidarity. In Pat Frank's Hold Back the Night
24

(1952) the sentiment is not one of containment and free
world solidarity, but rather one of love for nation,
symbolically represented through a bottle of Scotch.
Captain Sam MacKenzie, the main character is a war
hardened officer in the Marines, who receives a bottle
of Scotch as a parting gift from his fiancée the day of
his deployment to Guadalcanal in 1942 during his initial
tour in WWII. Later as commanding officer of a combat
unit in Korea, McKenzie leads his company with "his
carbine snug against his back and the bottle of Scotch
tucked like a football under his arm."
25
Throughout the
novel the bottle of Scotch serves as a constant reminder
of McKenzie's unflinching love for his wife and as the
platoon's undying love for the values of the U.S. as

117
nation. Unlike Michener's and Frank's novels, Hinojosa
defuses the impulse to speak for the nation. Instead the
inclusion and indoctrination of U.S.' colonial history
in the Southwest undermines the nationalist impulse to
speak with only one voice.
Even if Rafe is now part of the colonial army, he
cannot avoid this reality. He is part of the colonial
army and even more problematic for him, he is now part
of Texas' military history. In one of the passages in
the latter portion of Rites and Witness, Hinojosa
includes a letter from John F. Goodman, a seventy-four
year old Texan who served as a Sergeant Major in the 12
th

Cavalry, U.S. Army. In talking about his youthful
adventures with the army he writes:
But the valley always had soldiers ... always. All
the way from Jonesville to the Arroyo del Tigre.
Know where that is? I'm talking of two hundred and
seventy- four miles from Jonesville to way up the
river.... Fifty thousand men at one time, not
counting the rangers ... that's right.
26

In the sentences that follow Goodman reminisces about
the old times when there were soldiers in Texas. Indeed
there are no more soldiers walking and policing the
streets of Texas, but as the book illustrates there are
still Texan soldiers. In matters of regional history,

118
Hinojosa demonstrates the extent to which south Texas
has been colonized when he puts Rafe and the other young
Chicano men in uniform and has them serve U.S. colonial
endeavors. Yet, Hinojosa simultaneously undermines the
power of this harsh reality by pairing this chapter with
one in which Rafe receives a bronze medal and a Purple
Heart for courage. In this chapter an officer informs
Rafe of the medal he is to receive for courage. The
fact that this scene is then immediately followed by
Goodman's letter can be indicative of a change in the
regional history of Klail City. Rafe is now part of the
Texas' military history, but it is also true that Rafe
is part of Texas' youth culture and although
marginalized, his presence in the war is part of Klail
city's developing history.
***
The Useless Servants is the last novel in
Hinojosa's Korean War trilogy. It is the longest book
and the most ambitious since it attempts to make sense
of the traumatic events Rafe endured while serving in
the U.S. Army. The book is written in the form of a
personal journal with events ordered chronologically,

119
but without an identifiable plot line. Instead, Rafe
comes across as a stenographer documenting the events of
the day including people involved and personal
reflections on the incident. The events are often broken
up, and sometimes the same event reappears throughout
the book as if trapped within a recurring nightmare of
post traumatic stress disorders. This style of collage
and meta-fiction, Jose Sald!var argues, allows the
author to push the text to the limits of post-modernist
narrative form. The entire story takes place in Korea
and Japan and it follows Rafe's artillery unit as it
responds to North Korea's aggression in June 25, 1950.
Thematically, the book treats some of the same issues as
the two previous texts: Korean Love Songs and Rites and
Witness. In fact, it revisits some of the same events,
but from a different perspective.
In this final installment of the war trilogy
Hinojosa continues to interrogate U.S. nationalism by
exposing the history of conquest not only for Mexican
Americans but for other ethnicities as well. In one of
his journal entries Rafe writes of a discussion he had
with officers about pre-selecting sites and registering

120
targets on the ridges for his artillery unit. Lt.
Brodkey was on good terms with Rafe and during the
conversation Lt. Brodkey asked Rafe if he and his
Mexican American friends faced discrimination in Texas.
Rafe writes:
Oh, hell yes, we said. But that's something
we can't let ruin our lives. He said he too was
discriminated against because he is Jewish. I said
that in Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley where we
come from, he'd be what we call an Anglo. The Lt
laughed and said there'd be some Texans who would
look at him as a Jew anyway. And so on, etc.
Told him that we'd gone to Mass at the big Rom
Cath cathedral in NW Tokyo once and saw some people
sitting in two marked-off sections to the right,
the Epistle side, as one looks to the altar. That,
at end of the Mass, a fiftyish-looking Jap Catholic
talked to us. When we asked about the people in
the boxed-in benches, he said they were Korean
Caths, and that they couldn't and didn't sit with
the rest of the faithful.
Brodkey was surprised until Charlie said,
"Hell, Lt, I don't even know where the Klail Anglos
go to Mass or if they even have a church."
27

In this passage Hinojosa draws parallels between
different ethnic minorities who are similarly
marginalized in the U.S. Both Jews and Mexicans are
brought into the sphere of colonial oppression even
though as Rafe makes clear, Jews can "pass" (if they
wanted) as Anglos in South Texas. The passage also
exposes the international manifestations of colonialism.

121
The depiction of segregated Koreans in a Catholic
Japanese church is visual proof for Rafe and his friends
that colonialism reproduces the same ugly practices of
discrimination wherever it exists. Japanese
colonization of Korea is no exception, nor for that
matter, U.S. colonization of Korea. Significantly to the
text's overall critique of Mexican American
participation in the Korean War is the passage's
depiction of camaraderie between Rafe and Charlie.
Unlike the anti-Communist nationalism animating
American soldiers during the Korean War years,
Hinojosa's war narratives point to the communal
experience of discrimination at home. He does this
repeatedly throughout the book with Charlie and other
ethnic Mexicans bringing to the foreground personal
details that make Rafe and his fellow soldiers unique.
For example, the Chicanos speak both Spanish and
English, they are all Catholic, they are young Mexican
males born in Texas, and they have family on both sides
of the border. Rafe, Charlie, and Joey are all Chicanos
from the same home town and as such they share cultural
experiences that bind them together. Other works in

122
KCDTS such as The Valley (1983), Partners in Crime
(1985) and Klail City (1987) also deal specifically with
the characters' understanding of themselves as people of
Mexican descent and what that means for the characters
living in the U.S. But only in the war narratives does
this shared cultural experience allow the young men to
interpret war within a framework that was only available
to them and those like them.
To be fair, Rafe also befriends the Anglo members
of his artillery unit. Frank Hatalski, Hook Frazier,
Crazy, Ichabod, and Lt Brodkey are all remembered
fondly. After many months spent together either in pure
boredom or life-- threatening combat, Rafe bonded with
his fellow artillery soldiers in a manner that is
completely independent of their ethnic backgrounds. For
Rafe the camaraderie he develops with the other soldiers
exposes him to what it means to be an American citizen
with all the corresponding rights and privileges.
Unfortunately, after having experienced full integration
in the military he will have to return to Klail City in
Texas, a community that remained for the most part
racially segregated.

123
Rafe's simultaneous experiences of segregation and
racial integration in the military are consistent with
the colonial objectives of the U.S. during the 1950s.
With its staunch anti-Communist stance, the U.S. was
able to project an image of national consensus and
equality even while practicing racial discrimination. As
Ernesto Chavez writes, "[This generation] was
indoctrinated with a Cold War culture that stressed
peacetime consensus, yet ignored the racial strife that
existed at the core of American society."
28
For men like
Rafe who experienced racial inequality in civilian life,
the difference between what the government said and what
it did was difficult to ignore, especially when he as a
soldier moved from an integrated military life to a
segregated civilian one. Ultimately, Rafe begins to
understand that colonialism is rather nimble, and the
terms of oppression can and will strategically shift to
continue privileging those in power. Rafe tells us so in
one of the most important passages in The Useless
Servants, and perhaps of the whole Korean War Trilogy.
Toward the end of the novel we find Rafe once again
in Tokyo General, an Army hospital, where Rafe has been

124
interned after suffering wounds to his face in a
surprise attack that killed Joey Vilma, one of his close
friends from Klail City. While interned, Rafe is
examined by Dr. Perlman, the Army psychologist who asks
him to write down his thoughts in order to begin
processing the loss of his friend and the trauma of
battle:
Let me fill you in: what we say to you and
what we say to ourselves are two very, very
different pieces of business, Doctor.
Bursting white phosphorous are words, nothing
more. Variable time fuses are also words. Missing
fingers; severed arms; headless bodies; missing
feet. More words, but talk about foul language!
Wherever did that child learn to use those words?
It certainly wasn't at home, was it, Doctor?
A Purple Heart. Words. A bronze Star with a V
for valor. Ha! You know what valor is, Doctor!
It's facing the day, everyday. That's valor,
Doctor. And your pretty brave yourself, you know
that? Your dealing with madmen here, Doctor.
Pursue and destroy? More words. But words are
to be valued since one doesn't know how much time
one has to use them to good purpose.
29

From the passage one can deduce that for Rafe the
experience of war, and the meaning of war itself is
ephemeral—it is just a sequence of words that give it
meaning. Pointing out the military and the nationalist
rhetoric espousing it -- "Where ever did that child
learn to use those words"—Rafe states, directly

125
implicating the military establishment and the national
government for assigning meaning to those words. One of
the implications of the phrase is that the federal
government teaches its citizens to kill with
nationalistic language that continues to extend U.S.
colonial objectives. But this is true and applicable to
all soldiers fighting in the war. What makes this quote
important to the position of Chicanos is the last line,
"words are to be valued since one doesn't know how much
time one has to use them to good purpose." Here Rafe has
finally articulated that the meaning behind the words
can change at any time, and as a member of a colonized
group and a foot soldier for the U.S. he has little
agency in assigning meaning to such words. For Chicanos
soldiers like Rafe this reduces love of nation to a
byproduct of advanced colonization where the meaning of
words are co-opted by the federal government and
strategically deployed for its own benefit.
But it is precisely in the narrative construction
of the war narratives where Hinojosa presents his most
significant moment of resistance. Unwilling to take a
place as a "useless servant," Rafe finds a function for

126
himself in war that goes beyond simply serving and
following directions. He assumes the role of witness and
in his own way, he attempts to have some agency over
show he understands his experience by writing down what
he sees.
Or when I think of those faces I met briefly,
Perhaps just once and never again, but whose name I
copied down faithfully as if I were some big Time
reporter instead of who and what I am: A youngster
from Texas, from the Rio Grande Valley...
30

Just as journalists attempt to document events and
relate them to a general readership so does Rafe attempt
to "record" the names of those he met for his readers
back home in Klail City and in so doing assigning his
own meaning to the rhetoric of war. This passage in
particular demonstrates some of the continuous slippage
that emerges in the narrative between this "I" singular,
and the "I" as a surrogate for a collective community
voice. Much as a reporter would record events for an
article in a local newspaper, Rafe records the war for
the Mexican community back in Klail City.
Undoubtedly, this narrative allows for a more
intimate perspective on the war. As "witness" Rafe
carries forth elements of testimony and his story a

127
level of veracity.
31
Rafe is in the middle of the combat
and his life is in constant threat. Twice throughout
the narrative he is wounded over the left eye and
hospitalized—a symbolic wound threatening his position
as the reader's witness and forcing the character into
deep moments of reflection on what he has already seen.
Such injuries often keep the reader sensitive to the
possibility of losing the narrator to death, or
blindness. But we never lose Rafe. Korean Love Songs,
Rites and Witness, and the The Useless Servants are all
testaments to Rafe's experience in the Korean War.
Collectively Hinojosa's texts question the push for a
homogenizing nationalistic ethos that embraces
Chicano/Mexican Americans when in need of strong
soldiers, but alienates and segregates them in civilian
life.
Hinojosa may have a strong reason for questioning
Mexican American participation in the war, but he is not
alone in maintaining a distaste for the Korean War in
general. According to literary historians W.D. Ehrhart
and Philip K. Jason, public support for the Korean War
was initially very strong, but dwindled away as U.S.

128
casualties mounted and the war dragged on with no
victory in sight.
32
In the minds of many Americans, the
Korean War was not a war in which victory could even be
imagined, since people understood the war as a small
battle within a much larger post-WWII Cold War
framework. Scholarship on the Korean conflict positions
the Korean War as one "front" within a larger war waged
against China and the "real culprits" of communist
ideology: Russia. As Ehrhart and Jason remind us,
"Policy makers and planners perceived Korea as a
deliberate communist diversion from the real battle
between the U.S. and USSR in Europe and Japan (a
perception dependent upon communism as a monolithic
movement directed from Moscow, which history has proven
to be largely incorrect)."
33
Consequently, the general
population understood Korea as a "hot flash" in a
"police action" designed to check communist incursions.
And the Korean War was indeed a "hot flash." By
the time the truce was finally signed on July 27, 1953,
close to a million U.S. men had served in Korea.
Between 1950 and 1953, when U.S. deployed the Eighth
Army, 54,000 men were killed. This is almost as many

129
men as were killed in Vietnam (58,000), even though the
Korean War was only a third as long. If one were to
compare the Korean War with other 20
th
century U.S. wars
up to 1953, one would note that the Korean War lasted
twice as long as U.S.' involvement in WWI, and it was
seven months shorter than U.S. involvement in WWII. With
the exception of WWII and the Civil War, Korea has
proportionally cost the most American lives.
34
And yet
the Korean War did not have the kind of impact WWII, or
Vietnam, had on the American imagination. It was not
even the central event of the fifties. Charles F. Cole,
in Korea Remembered: Enough of a War! claims "people had
other things to do and unless your son was there, nobody
seemed to care much about Korea."
35

The literature of the period did not fare well
either, Hinojosa's Korean war trilogy is one of the few
treatment of the war in Mexican American studies or in
Latino literature at large; probably because the war did
not capture the popular imagination the way other wars
had. WWII and Vietnam seem to have touched the very
fabric of U.S. society in ways the Korean War did not.
Furthermore, it became evident to the U.S. population as

130
well American soldiers, that war was a continuing factor
in human affairs. And the popular belief that the U.S.
had participated in the "war to end all wars" (WWII) was
soon dismissed. In The American Soldier in Fiction, for
example, Peter Aichinger argues that the war became a
turning point in American war narratives:
From this point onward the individual thinks of
himself first and is immune to appeals to his
idealism or patriotism – the ground that war seems
likely to be a continuing factor in human affairs
as long as men consent to serve, that the nations'
wars never seem to achieve their goals, and most of
all that fighting is a dangerous occupation.
36

Korean soldiers returned to a nation that had little
interest reading narrative expressions of a war that was
bereft of a moral high ground. The upshot of this
sentiment, Ehrhart and Jason remind us is that the
Korean war narratives did not find a substantial
readership.
37

***
Individually, each of Hinojosa's war narrative may
feel disjointed, but collectively they provide the
reader with an artilleryman's experience of war, and as
part of Klail City Death Trip Series, the war texts add
to the regional history of South Texas and the

131
experience of Texas-Mexicans fighting in U.S. wars.
Rafe's experiences in Korea can not be extricated from
the overall regional history Hinojosa lays out in the
KCDTS. To do so would create for Rafe an inchoate
history, one that fails to recognize the long story of
Mexican Americans in South Texas. Integrating Rafe's
experiences at war is important for understanding his
overall character development in the novels that ensue
the Korean War trilogy. For example, it is after the
Korean War when Rafe, stripped of all innocence, leaves
behind adolescent preoccupations with school, sports,
and girlfriends and moves on to more "traditional"
markers of adulthood: career and familial
responsibility. It is also after Rafe returns from war
that he makes use of the G.I. Bill and attends law
school. After law school, he joins the Klail City police
department, where he develops a career as a successful
detective. It is also after his participation in the
Korean War that he begins to establish strong
friendships with Anglos in both his professional and
personal life. The Korean War, then, marks a watershed
moment, not only in Rafe's life but in the entire KCDTS.

132
Joyce Lee Glover argues in her book length study of
Hinojosa's work, Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream
(1997), "The works of the sequence's middle period,"
where the books on the Korean War are found, "depict
alteration and upheaval in the changing world of the
early post-World War II period, the Korean War, and the
post-Korean War period."
38

Ania Loomba has argued in Colonialism/
Postcolonialism that "literary texts do not simply
reflect dominant ideologies, but encode the tension,
complexities and nuances within colonial cultures."
39

Rafe is a Mexican American fighting for the U.S. in a
colonial venture that very much resembles the U.S.
colonization of the peoples in the American Southwest.
His story then, is not simply the story of an American
soldier, but rather an "alternative" story of what it
meant for the U.S. to be in Korea. Rafe is both, fully
integrated in the U.S. military and simultaneously
excluded as a civilian; Rafe's story does not fully fit
into the homogenizing discourse of nationalism or
conquest, or even with sympathizers of Korea's people.
His is the tortured voice of a South Texan Mexican

133
American serving in the U.S. colonial army, and the
complexities of this situation are related to the
readers through different genres, over different time
periods but always through the perspective of the ethnic
"other."

134
CHAPTER 3 ENDNOTES

1
See Arnoldo De Leon's They Call Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes
Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1820-1900 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1983) for a robust compellation of racist and xenophobic
interpretations of Texas history.

2
Saldivar, Jose David The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy,
Cultural Critique, and Literary History. (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991) 67.

3
Zilles, Klaus. Rolando Hinojosa: A Reader's Guide. (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico, 2001) 23.

4
Hinojosa, Rolando. Korean Love Songs. (Berkeley: Justa
Publications, 1978) 48.

5
Limon, Jose E. Dancing With the Devil: Society and Cultural
Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. (Wisconsin: Uni of
Wisconsin, 1994) 6.

6
Korean Love Songs 156.

7
Blair Clay. The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950-1953. (New
York: Random House, 1987) 56.

8
Ronald Tokaki makes a similar point in writing of Latinos in WWII.
Tokaki acknowledges the contribution Latinos made to the protection
of democracy against fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, even though
they may not be able to enjoy it when they return home. Tokaki,
Ronald. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World
War II. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 2000. According to Tokaki
over half a million Mexican Americans served in WWII (83).

9
Zilles 182.

10
In fact during one of Rafe's conversations with his commanding
officer, Hook Frazier, Hook explains to Rafe that he was once
married to a Puerto Rican who died in the Philippines. He goes on to
tell Rafe that "Puerto Ricans were called gooks by the G.I's
stationed in the Caribbean" (Useless Servants 67).

11
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflection on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. (London: Verso Pub) 1991.

12
Saldivar, Ramon. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference.
(Madison: Univ of Wisconsin, 1990) 134.

13
Hinojosa, Rolando. Rites and Witnesses. (Houston: Arte Publico
Press, 1982) 154.

135

14
Korean Love Songs 52.

15
In various places of The Useless Servants Rafe calls his time in
the service, time in the "office."

16
Axelsson, Arne. Restrained Response: American Novels of the Cold
War and Korea, 1945-1962. (New York: Green Wood Press, 1990.) 65.

17
Blair, Clay. The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950-1953.
(Toronto: Random House) 940.

18
Axelsson, Arney. Restrained Response: American Novels of the Cold
War and Korea 1945-1962.(New Yourk: GreenWood Press) xxii.

19
Rites and Witnesses 82.

20
Saldivar, Jose ed. The Hinojosa Reader. Houston: Arte Publico
Press, 1985.

21
Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of
Racial Inequality. Notre Dame: Uni of Notre Dame Press, 1979.

22
Acuna, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New York:
Longman, 2000.

23
Michener, James. The Bridges at Toko-ri. New York: Ranbom House,
1953.

24
Frank, Pat. Hold Back the Night. Philadelphia: Lippincot, 1952.

25
Ibid 316.

26
Ibid 87.

27
Hinojosa, Rolando. The Useless Servants. (Houston: Arte Publico
Press, 1993) 128.

28
Chavez, Ernesto. My People First! "Mi Raza Primero!":
Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los
Angeles, 1966-1978. (Berkeley: Uni Cal Press. 2002) 9.

29
Mejia, Jaime. "Breaking the Silence: The Missing Pages in Rolando
Hinojosa's The Useless Servants." Southwestern American Literature
(1993b:62).

30
Useless Servants 183.

31
Hinojosa himself served in the Army and during the Korean War he
was called back into active duty.

136

32
Ehrhart, W.D. and Jason, Philip K. Retrieving the Bones: Stories
and Poems of the Korean War. (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
1999) xvi.

33
Ibid xvii.

34
Blair, Clay. The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950-1953. New
York: Times Books. 1987.

35
Cole, Charles F. Korea Remembered: Enough of a War! The USS
Ozbourn's First Tour, 1950-1951. (New York: Yucca Tree Press,1995.)
25.

36
Aichinger, Peter. The American soldier in fiction, 1880-1963 : a
history of attitudes toward warfare and the military establishment.
(Ames: Iowa State Uni Press, 1975) 67.

37
James Michener's The Bridges of Toko-Ri (1953), Pat Frank's Hold
Back the Night (1951) and Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H (1968) are three
novels about this conflict. And yet, none of these novels found the
readership that WWII and Vietnam war novels enjoyed. WWII novels
such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones'
From Here to Eternity (1951) and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), or
Vietnam novels such as Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977) Tim
O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried
(1990) have all been constant staples of U.S. literature.

38
Joyce Glover Lee. Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream.
(Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997) 118.

39
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism: The New Critical
Idiom. Second Ed. (London: Routledge, 2005) p 63.

137
CHAPTER 4. WHEN LITTLE BROWN BOYS GROW UP TO BE
MILITARY HEROES: ROY BENAVIDEZ, EVERETT ALVAREZ, WAR
AND THE ROAD TO MASCULINITY

During his retirement speech at Fort Sam Houston
2007, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez expressed his
desire to be remembered "as a man of character, as a man
that cared for his soldiers, that served his country
honorably, and a man of integrity" [my italics].
1
The
speech marked the end of thirty-three years of military
service, a career which many believe was cut short
because of the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison torture
scandal.
2
When the scandal broke, Sanchez was the
highest ranking US military officer in Iraq, commanding
the Allied Forces. For his part, Sanchez has denied any
knowledge of the gross mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Understandably, his retirement speech demonstrates a
real concern for his legacy as a soldier in the face of
such controversy. But what is one to make of his
emphasis on being remembered not only as a dignified
soldier, but as a dignified male soldier? Why the
emphasis on masculinity? Lt. General Sanchez is a

138
first-generation Mexican American, and his concern about
his male legacy as a soldier has an historical genealogy
among many Chicano Veterans and Chicano soldiers. Lt.
Gen. Sanchez is a Vietnam War Veteran and his concern
over his legacy and masculinity reflects a major theme
in the autobiographies of what scholar Ben V. Olguín has
dubbed "Mexican-American soldier authors."
3

Scholars working in the field of Chicano Studies
have only recently begun to explore issues of soldiering
in literature written by Mexican American veterans and
fiction writers. Jorge Mariscal, Ramon Saldívar, Ben V.
Olguín, Jose Limón, and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez are the
few contemporary scholars exploring issues of race, and
national identity associated with veteran authors.
Despite the attention these scholars have given Mexican
Americans writing about war, little has been written on
the topic of masculinity and military service.
4
In the
more general field of men's studies, scholars have
ignored the powerful impact war has had on
Chicano/Latino masculinity. For example, while WWII and
the Vietnam War remain major period markers in studies
of masculinity, almost none of the numerous films and

139
books on this theme treat Chicano or Latino masculinity
as subject matter for analysis. This is unfortunate, as
scholar Jorge Mariscal writes, "during the Vietnam War
Chicanos constituted seven percent of the U.S.
population and twenty percent of fatalities, taking the
highest rate of casualties of any ethnic group," and "in
WWII and Korea, Chicanos were the most highly decorated
group."
5
Today, as neo-nativism plays a fundamental role
in national discussions concerning war, civic
responsibility, and "personal sacrifice," it is
essential to recuperate these texts from the margins of
scholarship focusing on U.S. war literature and gender.
In what follows, I explore the ways the U.S. war in
Vietnam promoted a masculinity based on military service
for Chicano/Latino youth in the U.S. These young men,
attempting to counter a sense of powerlessness stemming
from limited political representation, poverty, police
brutality, and educational tracking, enlisted in the
armed services. For if the Vietnam War gave rise to a
Chicano/Latino movement that embraced ethnic nationalism
and Marxist-Leninist ideas, it also birthed its opposite
in a pro-American masculinist front that championed the

140
notion of the Mexican American citizen-soldier. Military
service nourished what in the 1940s the League of United
Latin American Citizens (LULAC) claimed to be the "'best
and purest' form of Americanism."
6
I use two
autobiographical authors as case studies: Roy Benavidez'
Medal of Honor: A Vietnam Warrior's Story (1995) and
Everette Alvarez' Chained Eagle (1989) and Code of
Conduct (1991). The texts by these two authors serve as
public demonstrations of masculinity that seek to
redress experiences of emasculation in each author's
civilian life.
Arguably, Benavidez' text is the best known
autobiography written by a Chicano veteran. It has gone
into publication multiple times, and Benavidez' story
has inspired a wide array of regional and national
attention. For example, at the regional level,
Benavidez emerged as a local celebrity in South Texas
after receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor from
President Ronald Reagan. He was frequently invited to
give speeches at high school graduations and at inner
city youth organizations throughout South Texas.
Nationally, Benavidez gained attention in 1986 after

141
Vietnam veteran organizations asked him to support
disabled veterans by addressing a special hearing before
the House Select Committee on Aging. His military
picture has become a standard addition to the walls of
Latino veteran organizations such as the American G.I.
Forum, American Legion Hall and the Chicano Veterans
Organization. More recently, the Army honored Benavidez
by naming a transport ship in his honor—the USNS
Benavidez currently transports military equipment to
worldwide destinations, including Iraq. Such cultural
recognition is crucial to understanding the dialogical
interplay in the text, one that binds the man in the
text—as subject of literary analysis—to the man in his
community—as subject of public recognition.
Although Benavidez has received a significant
amount of recognition for his military service both
locally and nationally, his autobiography is most
socially relevant when placed within a historical
trajectory that ties his military experience to Mexican
American concerns regarding masculine behavior. Similar
to other military autobiographies written by Mexican
American authors, Benavidez' text grapples with

142
experiences of social emasculation, public
demonstrations of courage, male bravado and social
ascendance. Literary critic Jorge Mariscal notes that
there is an unfortunate cultural practice within
communities of Mexican background to associate military
service with masculine behavior:
The drive to assimilate through military service is
exacerbated by one of the most pernicious legacies
of Mexican culture: warrior patriotism. The idea
that masculine behavior must include a readiness to
die for "la patria" is powerful in Mexican
nationalist ideology. When transferred to the
Chicano context it is especially dangerous since
the Mexican male's rhetoric claim that he is
willing to die anytime anywhere becomes a fatal
reality once it is linked to U.S. imperialist
projects.
7

Mariscal buttresses his analysis of "warrior patriotism"
by reading it against the supposed "choice" draftees had
in the '60s and '70s to refuse the draft by leaving the
country or entering the university. As he points out,
these were not real choices for Chicano youth during
this time period because of job discrimination, poverty,
and the overwhelming social pressure to prove loyalty to
nation.
8
Building upon Mariscal's analysis, I would add
that many of these youths found themselves within
socially prescribed gender roles that put tremendous

143
pressure on young Chicanos to submit to the demands of
state authority. The federal government in particular
baited young Chicano men into joining the armed services
and "prove their loyalty" to the U.S. by helping, as
then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would say,
"... guard against Communist expansion through a policy
of containment."
9

In a related essay on Chicano authors writing about
war, Ben V. Olguín also underscores how U.S. social
pressures on Chicano youth to prove patriotism presents
a particularly salient problem when young men refused
military service. In his article, Olguín draws out the
self-effacing and immanently masculinist prescription
for Mexican American citizenship in the popular
bicultural refrain often cited by Mexican American
veterans—Sangre Mexicana/ Corazon Americano—which Olguín
translates as "though our blood be Mexican, our heart is
American." Both Mariscal and Olguín, speak to a
construction of an imaginary social inclusion through
military service that can best be understood, in the
words of Stuart Hall as a "process ... that happens over
time, that is never absolutely stable, that is subject

144
to the play of history and difference."
10
Building upon
the analyses in Mariscal's and Olguín's work, I take
into account the social and cultural pressures involved
for young Mexican American men when they consented to
military service during the Vietnam War years. And,
just as importantly, I explore the conditions of Chicano
masculinity in civilian life years before enlisting.

The Many Wars of Roy Benavidez
It is easy to recognize the basic lineaments of the
"Good American Patriot" in Roy Benavidez' autobiography.
Benavidez writes in the opening page:
The following written words chronicle far more than
my life. This is a story of the cost of freedom. It
is the story of the American values that keep this
nation a free democracy and of the people whose
sacrifices must be remembered and relearned by each
generation of Americans.
11

The opening sentences in Benavidez' autobiography
highlights one of the major themes in biographies
written by Chicano/Latino veterans of the Vietnam War:
faith in U.S. democracy and its supporting values. One
can find this theme in autobiographies written by
veterans such as Everette Alvarez's Chained Eagle
(1989), Juan Ramirez's A Patriot After All (1999),

145
Alfredo Cantu Gonzalez's When the River Dreams (2006),
and Cuban American Vietnam War veteran Felix Rodriguez's
Shadow Warrior (1989). In anthologies specific to the
experience of Mexican American soldiers who fought in
Vietnam such as Lea Ybarra's Vietnam Veteranos: Chicanos
Recall the War (2004) and George Mariscal's Aztlan and
Viet Nam: Chicanos and Chicana Experiences of the War
(1999), the theme is central to half of the memoirs in
each collection. Considering the profound divisions the
Vietnam War engendered in the general American
population, it is curious to find unbridled expressions
of faith in democracy and its concomitant values in
Vietnam autobiographies.
12
Arguably, it is even more
peculiar to find it in biographies of Chicano/Latino
veterans, since the history of marginalization and
exploitation of Chicano/Latinos in the United States
would, at least one can imagine, make a soldier question
American style democracy.
Furthermore, there is a curious absence of antiwar
sentiment in these autobiographies. There are no phrases
of "La Batalla Esta Aqui" (The War is Here) or, "Raza
Si! Guerra No!" (The People Yes! War No!) two of the

146
more popular anti-war chants Chicano/Latinos repeated
when protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Benavidez'
narrative is very much in this patriotic tradition; he
does not question U.S. imperialism in Indochina. Yet,
Benavidez' acceptance of U.S. ideology during the
Vietnam War seems to have less in common with pro-
capitalist beliefs than with his tendency to associate
patriotism with public displays of masculinity.
It may prove useful to give a brief synopsis of the
autobiography before exploring the social conditions
that animate Benavidez' pursuit of masculine
recognition. Special Forces Sergeant Roy Benavidez opens
his autobiography Medal of Honor by recounting his
childhood experiences in South Texas during the 1940s
and ends it in 1986, years after receiving the
Congressional Medal of Honor. In the opening chapter to
his book, titled "Songs of the Night," he describes how
he and the rest of the Mexican American community were
treated in South Texas during the 1940s. Subjected to
taunts and segregation, Benavidez recalls evenings
having to sit in the designated "Mexican" section of
movie theatres, riding in back of buses, and not being

147
served in various restaurants because of his
Mexican/Yaki Indian looks. Unsurprisingly, in his
description of his early years, he is presented as a
troubled youth, filled with anger provoked by social
discrimination and a socioeconomic position that
rendered him powerless. As Benavidez writes, "The lines
were still pretty well drawn between the whites and the
browns when I was a boy and I was the object of racial
taunts that I could not refrain from responding to with
my fists."
13

By the middle of the book Benavidez presents
himself as a dynamic military man, a member of the Green
Berets who is about to become a Special Forces legend.
Benavidez served two tours in Vietnam. During his first
tour, Benavidez was seriously wounded after stepping on
a land mine during a routine patrol. The blast forced
Benavidez into early retirement, but finding himself
restless and bored with a military desk job, he works
hard to overcome his spinal trauma and reenlists for a
second tour in Vietnam. During his second tour,
Benavidez trains as a paratrooper and joins the Special
Forces to become a Green Beret. In what reads like a

148
1980s military action movie script, Benavidez volunteers
to rescue twelve members of a Special Forces team
operating deep inside Cambodia while under secret
presidential orders. The team was surrounded and under
heavy fire by numerous North Vietnamese soldiers.
Benavidez led a fearsome firefight and successfully
extract members of the team. Benavidez' autobiography
includes the citation President Reagan read when he
awarded Benavidez the Congressional Medal of Honor. The
citation reads:
On his second trip with the wounded, he was clubbed
from behind by an enemy soldier. In the ensuing
hand-to-hand combat, he sustained additional wounds
to his head and arms before killing his adversary.
He then continued under devastating fire to carry
the wounded to the helicopter. Upon reaching the
aircraft, he spotted and killed two enemy soldiers
who were rushing the craft from an angle that
prevented the aircraft door gunner from firing upon
them. With little strength remaining he made one
last trip to the perimeter to ensure that all
classified material had been collected or
destroyed, and to bring in the remaining wounded.
Only then, in extremely serious condition from
numerous wounds and loss of blood, did he allow
himself to be pulled into the extraction aircraft.
14

Benavidez saves at least eight men and retrieves and
destroys nearly all of the top secret documents. In the
process, he receives shrapnel throughout his body,
including some that destroyed his right lung. His mouth

149
and head were struck various times with rifle butts, he
was shot multiple times in the back, and he was even
bayoneted.
If the story were fictional, the passages
describing the rescue would mark the climax of the
narrative and the Medal of Honor award the denouement.
Instead, the narrative takes a different path. The story
culminates years after he receives the Medal of Honor
when late in his life Benavidez is invited to address a
special hearing before the Select Committee on Aging in
the House of Representatives. He, like many other
Vietnam veterans, was being forced to take a battery of
medical exams in order to verify the authenticity of his
disabilities since officials at the Office of Social
Security feared veterans were exaggerating the extent of
their injuries. After delivering his speech Benavidez
writes:
I had thought no day could eclipse the day that I
received the MOH [Medal of Honor], but I was wrong.
This day became the most important day in my life
because so many people were counting on me to
represent them, and I prayed earnestly that I would
not fail them.
15

This quote marks the culmination of the autobiography,
and similar to the opening lines of the text, ("The

150
following written words chronicle more than my life
...") they signal the "representative" nature of his
accomplishments. Like the autobiography itself, which
Benavidez claims attests to U.S. sacrifices for freedom,
his speech before Congress also becomes symbolic — it
attests to the respect Benavidez feels he has earned
from his fellow peers. The fact that other veterans ask
Benavidez to speak for them attests to the public
recognition he received by the end of his life, one very
much based on his courage during war. By the time
readers get to this point in the narrative, they have
followed Benavidez from the farm lands of South Texas to
Congress, and they have witnessed his development from a
troubled youth to a disciplined soldier, from an
enlisted "private," to a public representative of
soldiers. Benavidez' autobiography is offered to the
reader as the story of the "Good American Patriot," a
bildungsroman in which a loyal citizen is rewarded for
committing to the Stars and Stripes.
In this manner, Benavidez' autobiography is very
much a Horatio Algier story except that in his case he
does not go from rags to riches, but rather from rags to

151
manhood. For Benavidez, a successful Mexican American
masculinity is one of visible upward mobility, and the
military makes an ideal institution for such
evaluations. The military has real tangible symbols of
rank that for Benavidez publicly demonstrate social
prestige; medals, bars and patches on the uniform
identify rank and accomplishment. High ranking officials
have institutional power and respect, arguably they have
"earned" the right to create change; in fact, Benavidez
seems to want readers to believe that the military
(unlike civilian life) is the quintessential meritocracy
where anyone can compete equally for rank regardless of
class or race: where the ultimate telos is the struggle
to be, as with U.S. Army Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, a
"dignified male soldier."
In part, the framework for Benavidez' belief in
meritocracy is established very early in the text
through his discussions with his Uncle Nicholas, the man
who raised Benavidez as his own son after Benavidez was
orphaned at the age of seven. In one of the more
memorable discussions Benavidez has with Uncle Nicholas,
he is told, "We will not give up our heritage, but we

152
won't let it hold us back either. We will be judged by
the way we act and by the respect earned in the
community."
16
Such advice seems straightforward: if
Benavidez conducts himself in a manner that is "worthy"
of respect, then he can expose the duplicitousness,
immorality, and flawed social practices of
discrimination. Still, the one inescapable precondition
of Uncle Nicholas' advice is that such cultural
negotiations of racial politics be executed as public
events, otherwise, there are no "others" to witness and
interpret the act. Placed within the context of
Benavidez' military autobiography, Uncle Nicholas'
advice has to do more with how men judge each other than
how a whole community judges one of its members.
As is often the case in biographies of military
men, early demonstrations of male bravado are a way of
escaping social humiliation because they establish, as
Uncle Nicholas suggests, respect between men. In one of
the first chapters of the book Benavidez recalls an
incident in which he publicly displays his valor and
then has it socially recognized. After asking two Anglo
ranchers for employment, one of the ranchers refuses and

153
instead offers him a challenge. For a single quarter
Benavidez is challenged to sneak into the holding pen of
a two thousand pound range bull and "grab the huge sack
hanging between the bull's hind legs and give it a tug."
Benavidez explains:
I accepted the dare. Before long the fence was
lined with cowboys watching me crawl under the
bottom rail of the pen and sneaking up on that
monster. I yanked the bag. The bull swapped ends of
the pen faster than you can count to one, but I was
just a mite faster and was crawling under the
closest rail while he was still snorting and
looking in confusion for his tormentor.
17

Amidst yelps and back slaps, Benavidez is rewarded with
a quarter and some of the cowboys' dyed-in-the-wool
racist "compliments" by saying he is "tough as a boot"
and a "crazy little frijole." But what is most important
is how Benavidez felt after the event. He claims, "[T]he
experience changed me. The way they looked at me meant
more than the quarter, even as much as I wanted that."
18

The public gaze Benavidez covets in the passage
serves as midwife for the later acts of bravado he
engages in as a soldier since they earn him social
respect from other men. As a child who works the fields,
Benavidez could not gain respect within children's
spaces such as school or playground. Following the crops

154
meant he had to travel from farm to farm, constantly
reconfiguring his circle of friends and destroying
social patterns necessary for establishing communally
recognized respect. Benavidez, therefore, finds himself
transformed when he feels he has earned the respect of
grown cowboys by successfully accomplishing a task far
too dangerous (and far too foolish) for any of them to
attempt. Such social recognition of courage begins to
give Benavidez a taste for social prestige and the
patterns of violence by which to obtain it.
As if to contextualize the demonstration of courage
he underwent in the bull pen, Benavidez tells the reader
of his family's military lineage. Benavidez explains to
the reader that the men in his family have been serving
in the U.S. military since the Mexican American War:
Anti-Mexican sentiment sprang up in Texas, and the
new settlers who were rushing into the republic
didn't distinguish between Mexicans and Hispanic
Texans. Neither did those in power. In 1836,
General Thomas Rusk, commander of the Texas army,
issued an order for the detention and removal of
all Mexicans suspect of sympathy with Mexico. My
great grandfather's brother, Placido, had been a
captain in the Texas army and had participated in
the siege of Bexar under the command of General
Stephen F. Austin, which inspired the Mexican
general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to travel to
San Antonio in Bexar County and teach the Texans a
lesson. The battle of the Alamo ensued.
19

155
As with other Chicano autobiographies, such as Juan
Ramirez's A Patriot After All: The Story of a Chicano
Vietnam Vet (1999) and Alfredo Cantu Gonzalez's When the
River Dreams: The Life of Marine Sgt. Freddy Gonzalez
(2006), military family traditions serve to establish
loyalty to nation and prove that these families believe
in America. His ancestor fought against the Mexican army
and this helps to undermine suspicions of Benavidez'
loyalty to the U.S. stemming from his ethnic Mexican-
Yaki background. The discussion of his family's military
tradition also previews for the reader the trajectory
Benavidez is going to undergo in his autobiography:
Benavidez is going to follow in the footsteps of his
great-grandfather and fight against his nation's
enemies. Because Benavidez' discussion of his family's
military tradition follows on the heels of passages
narrating his demonstration of courage in the bull pen,
the narrative begins to intertwine public displays of
courage with military service.
In her discussion of U.S. masculinity after
Vietnam, Cynthia Enlow argues that public demonstrations
of courage "typically spring from masculinized memory,

156
masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope."
20
She
points out that the public display of masculinity has
its point of origin in a lost "masculinized" state and
that the "hope" to someday regain it spurs masculine
behavior into the future. Benavidez' disenfranchised
social position in the beginning of the text, coupled
with a military family tradition inspires masculine
behavior that "hopes" to resurrect a lost position
amongst men. Thus, Benavidez' discussion of his family's
military tradition points to a time when the men in his
family sustained a "warrior tradition" with other men
regardless of race until racism ruptured the supposed
"brotherhood" of soldiers. Yet, if Benavidez' narrative
expresses nostalgia for a lost manhood in the early
portions of the autobiography, the middle sections
express a "hope" not only to regain masculinity, but to
police it.
Midway through the text, Benavidez demonstrates he
has not only learned how to gain social respect through
public displays of masculinity, but how to distinguish
between different types of masculine behavior.
Benavidez tells the reader of an incident he and a

157
handful of Green Beret friends faced when they went to
an airport to await transportation. While waiting for
their flight, they encounter an "entourage of long-
haired flower children," one of whom called the Green
Berets "baby killers."
21
Enraged by the comment,
Benavidez assumes the moral high ground and proceeds to
let them know the comment "didn't seem right":
We blocked one of the hippies—a guy wearing a
headband who had been one of the loudest mouths in
the group—and his attitude changed pretty quickly
when he realized he was surrounded by several angry
Green Berets. He started to step back, but before
he could I reached down and grabbed him by the
balls, stopping him in his tracks.
22

If in the beginning chapters of the autobiography,
Benavidez grabs the bull's testicles to prove his
courage to a few white cowboys, in this instance he
squeezes the hippie's "balls" to differentiate his
military style of masculinity from a soft, effeminate,
peace-loving hippie one. The distinction between
different types of masculinities is important to note
here because Benavidez' act consciously differentiates
between types of "manhood," placing his "warrior
patriotism" above other types of masculinities. In this
passage, Benavidez positions himself as the loyal, war-

158
tested soldier—the "epitome" of the type of citizen the
nation wants during war time. He is strong, patriotic,
dutiful and willing to defend his dignity when insulted.
Accusations such as "baby killers" strike at the heart
of soldiering for they remove all honor from duty, and
reduce a soldier's activity to mere plundering.
Benavidez' emphasis on military masculinity is
counterpointed by cultural stereotypes of the hippie
male during the Vietnam War era, a stereotype, at least
from the military perspective, that positions the "tough
Vietnam soldier" as the antithesis of the "Flower
Child." In the aforementioned scene, the young man is
terrified before the Green Berets, and as a consequence
he is publicly emasculated. As the scene progresses
Benavidez once again recognizes the value of publicly
displaying his military masculinity: "We created quite a
scene. While he stood there, frozen, I pretended he was
a friend who was begging me not to go off to Vietnam."
23

He continues, "When a big enough crowd had gathered, I
finally did release my grip on him and he limped to the
door, no doubt in great pain."
24
In the passage,
Benavidez presents himself as the warrior hero leaving

159
to fight battles in distant lands while the hippie,
"begging [him] not to go," is forced into the
stereotypically feminized position of the worried "girl
back home" who fears for her lover's safety. Benavidez'
mean-spirited treatment of the other man develops into a
kind of spectacle in which Benavidez polices the
supremacy of a military manhood, not so much for the
hippie, but rather for the other Green Berets observing
him. In this passage he is able to maintain his position
as the tormentor—and therefore the validity of his
masculinity—by having an audience to witness and
sanction his motives.
The narrative provides readers with the perfect
character to validate Benavidez' actions in the form of
a police officer. Here for example, is what happened
after he released the hippie and an officer approaches
him to investigate.
We all got a good laugh out of it until a policeman
walked up to us. He looked at us sternly, and for a
minute I was afraid I was in trouble again. But he
looked me square in the eye and said, "Sergeant,
what you did was wrong. But I don't give a damn: I
served in 'Nam, too." Then he walked away.
25

The policeman's response is clearly consensual: he
realizes Benavidez assaulted the young man, he

160
recognized that he is suppose to arrest Benavidez for
such an act, but instead of fulfilling his obligation,
he aligns himself with the soldiers. The policeman's
response, "I served in 'Nam, too," marks, or at the very
least aspires to establish, a communal warrior code
between men who have combat experience. Such a code
would include issues of patriotism, social
responsibility, discipline and courage. These very
issues are antithetical to what the hippie came to
represent for many soldiers in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Such a behavior by men who serve in the
military, the narrative insinuates, supersedes civilian
law because the experience of battle provides war tested
veterans with supposed "insights" not available to
civilians.
In the final sections of the text, he posits a
masculinity based on patriotism. In one of the final
sections of the book, Benavidez tries to help two
drunken second lieutenants stay out of a brawl with
patrons in a local bar. When Benavidez arrives, he finds
one of the lieutenants, the less drunken one, trying to
persuade the other lieutenant to leave the bar in order

161
to defuse the situation. The more sober lieutenant had
flagged down a cab and was trying to get the belligerent
lieutenant into the back seat. Benavidez approached them
and asked the sober one if he needed help. The officer
said he would appreciate it, but the drunk one said, "He
didn't think he ought to be getting manhandled by some
'little Mexican non com so and so.'"
26
Upon hearing this,
Benavidez "decked" the officer, pushed him into the cab
and then saw both lieutenants drive away.
The following day Benavidez was at the door of his
captain, nervous because he was going to be disciplined
for striking an officer. While waiting to see the
captain he read a plaque nailed to the captain's door
that stated, "I do not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate
those that do." Underneath the text it had the West
point motto of "Duty, Honor, Country." When Benavidez
entered the captain's office, the Captain asked
Benavidez if he had struck the officer. The Captain,
giving Benavidez an opportunity to lie, never expected
Benavidez to confess. But he did. Surprised but
impressed by Benavidez' honesty, he demoted Benavidez
and sent him on his way. It was a light reprimand

162
considering that an enlisted man can be court martialed,
or even jailed for striking an officer. Later that day
the Captain called Benavidez back to his office and
asked him why he confessed even though he had the
opportunity to lie about the incident. He told the
Captain the plaque had made an impression on him and
that, "Someone [he knew] had been telling him the same
thing in different words all of [his] life [He was
referring to his Uncle Nicholas]. I told him I wanted a
career in the military, and I could not base it on a
lie."
27
Benavidez self consciously admits that the whole
situation is a "little hokey, or a little dramatic," but
that the incident marked the beginning of his devotion
to the West Point motto. From that point on, he claims
he lived his life according to "Honor, Duty, Country."
Benavidez' adoption of West Point's motto
associates him with West Point Academy and the
institution's military history. As the training ground
for military leadership, West Point's motto represents
an excellence Benavidez can never fully belong to (West
Point has very restrictive admissions policies and rigid
age requirements), only aspire to emulate. Although

163
Benavidez, like many of the other Mexican American
autobiographers I have mentioned, celebrates the
frontline soldier and often mocks the obtuseness of
commanders, he maintains respect for the institutions
that produce military leadership. Instead of deriding
the military academy, he revered West Point. Even after
being racially insulted by an officer, Benavidez trusts
in the wisdom of the command. His commitment
reverberating in the phrase he repeats throughout the
text: "I am a good soldier. I go where I am ordered."
In war time, especially, unquestioned allegiance to such
a motto ensures a code of conduct for soldiers on the
battlefield. The reversal of the motto, however, may be
one way to understand the sense of emptiness Benavidez
felt before joining the military, the feeling of lacking
a purpose, of being unappreciated, of not belonging.
"Honor, Duty, Country" provides him with a code that if
he succeeds in following will lead him to an externally
validated sense of honor and masculinity.
Structurally, the images used throughout the book
help to visually construct the type of military
masculinity the text champions. For example, the very

164
first set of pictures in the autobiography visually
contrasts his transformation from migrant farm worker to
military man:

Figure 2. Roy Benavidez: Migrant farm worker to
military man

165
Symbolically placed above the picture of him as a
kneeling farm worker, Benavidez' military image
illustrates ascendance in matters of honor and manhood.
Standing straight, and positioning himself in a manner
that makes visible all of his military medals
(especially the Congressional Medal of Honor around his
neck), Benavidez offers readers the traditional image of
a successful military man: a well-respected member of
the armed services and the civilian population. With
flags in the background, he makes clear he is now "part
of" the U.S. Conversely, the image of his early
childhood years as "migrant" worker makes the sixteen
year old Roy (first name only) look lithe, un-rooted and
un-integrated.
The position of the two pictures also offers a
racial subtext that associates the young image of
Benavidez with land and labor while associating his
mature image with nation and honor. The sombrero he
wears as a young man, and the caption next to the image
articulating his position as a "migrant," associates the
young Benavidez with the large number of Mexican
nationals who migrated to the U.S. to work the fields

166
during the picking season. The caption of his picture
as a U.S. soldier, on the other hand, is devoid of all
connections to farm work. Instead, it envisages a more
abstract idea of nation, one in which the iconography of
patriotism, i.e., flags, military uniform, and medals,
represent a more "developed" level of citizenship. In
the military picture race is lost, or at the very least
rendered irrelevant. Lastly, because the images are very
different in age, one can argue that the images trace a
social progression in which military service functions
as a conduit transforming a racialized farm-working boy
into a de-racialized adult American man.
This last point is made clear when one compares the
different types of book jackets Brassey publications
uses for Benavidez' text. The first publication was
released in 1995 with a foreword by Ross Perot. By the
time the book was published Presidential candidate Ross
Perot had already lost the race for the White house in
1992 and was preparing for his second attempt in 1996.
His endorsement of the autobiography indicates that
Benavidez, a small town boy from South Texas, had gained
the recognition of popular national politicians. The

167
book sold well and it was reprinted in 1999 with a
different cover.

Figure 3. 1995 and 1999 covers of Medal of Honor

In the second publication, the two images initially
placed in the middle of the book are used for the cover
jacket. This time, however, the book jacket picture
features a menacing close-up of Benavidez' face
highlighting the Congressional Medal of Honor and the

168
Military Bars. All three serve to make him seem
confrontational and authoritative. The big facial
picture of Benavidez is set of by the smaller image of
him in the background. Again, the positioning of the two
images suggests masculine ascendance and recognition.
The most important part of the new cover, however, is
the change in subtitles. No longer subtitled "A Vietnam
Warrior's Story," the new subtitle, "One Man's Journey
from Poverty and Prejudice" brings home what I have
fleshed out in the discussion of Benavidez' military
autobiography: the text aspires to more than just
telling his war story, it is a story about manhood, and
about how to achieve a publicly recognized Mexican
American masculinity in the U.S. By dropping the word
"Vietnam" from the title and adding a subtitle that
directly points to a "man's journey" into military
service as a way to escape "poverty and prejudism," the
book explicitly redraws the boundary lines around
Mexican American masculinity, championing a violent
nationalistic manhood that is "socially sanctioned" and
"publicly validated."

169
Alvarez: The Manhood in Captivity Narrative
A similar argument can be made for Navy pilot
Everette Alvarez' biography Chained Eagle (1989).
28

Alvarez' biography chronicles his experience as a
Prisoner of War (POW) during the Vietnam War. The
National Vietnamese Army shot down the twenty-six year
old Navy Lieutenant junior grade during the initial
Tonkin Gulf Operation and after rescuing him from the
water, imprisoned him for eight-and-a-half years in
different military prison camps including the infamous
Hoa Lo, later nicknamed by U.S. soldiers the Hanoi
Hilton. (Alvarez was imprisoned with 2008 presidential
candidate John McCain. McCain mentioned Alvarez in his
interview with Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in
Orange County).
29
Alvarez is the longest held POW in
North Vietnam, and the second longest held POW in U.S.
history. The initial chapters of Chained Eagle focus on
his captivity and the accompanying experiences of:
starvation, torture and survival. The latter sections of
the text detail the difficulties Alvarez experienced
while re-integrating into civilian life after almost a
decade in captivity. As the book reveals, Alvarez

170
returns to the U.S. to grapple with his wife's
desertion, the loss of the war, the divorce of his
parents, and an ethnically polarized U.S. civilian
population. Oddly enough, he also returns to a country
that treated him like a celebrity. Alvarez writes,
"[w]ith the cameras and microphones and shouting
reporters it was clear that we were instant celebrities.
It wasn't at all what we had anticipated."
30
Because of
his prolonged captivity, and his sister Delia Alvarez'
efforts to free him, Alvarez was well known among both
supporters of the war and leaders of the anti-war
movement (although his indefatigable support for the war
made him unpopular with the left). Within the military
establishment, he was somewhat of a legend, enough so
that even in captivity, "when new prisoners were marched
through the compound, cellmates would boost [him] on
their shoulders so that [he] could be seen over the
dividing wall."
31

Much like Roy Benavidez' Medal of Honor, Alvarez'
Chained Eagle is a story of social ascendance through
public displays of masculinity. Both men, for instance,
ascend from farm working boys to nationally recognized

171
military heroes. Both men envisage the military as an
institution that allows them to prove their masculinity
without having to deal with the "racial barriers" found
in civilian life. Arguably, Alvarez and Benavidez both
feel military service has the potential to legitimize
them "as men" in the eyes of other men and the general
population since military service functions as the
bedrock for a masculine code of conduct that holds
currency both in the military and in a civilian life.
Chicano historian Rodolfo Acu"a writes that men like
Alvarez and Benavidez who enlisted during the Vietnam
War "replayed the scenario of 'Soldado Raso'"
32
during
WWII, going to war to "prove themselves" to the general
American community.
Yet, Alvarez' war experience was profoundly
different from that of Benavidez'. As a POW, Alvarez
could not "test his military mettle" on the battlefield,
or prove his leadership skills as a commanding officer.
33

Instead, throughout Alvarez' war narrative he remained
unarmed, isolated, and completely dependent upon his
captors for survival. His only weapon of resistance, as
he tells the reader, was his unwillingness to cooperate

172
with North Vietnamese army soldiers and their demands
for propaganda materials. In writing about Vietnam POW
autobiographies, scholar Elliot Gruner claims "POWs were
routinely asked, then coerced, tortured, and blackmailed
into writing autobiographical statements, making
fictitious audio tapes, and cooperating with foreign
visitors for photo and film opportunities."
34
Gruner's
illustrates his argument in one of the more famous POW
stories told by survivor James Bond Stackdale:
For Americans who became POWs in North Vietnam,
capture meant not that they had been neutralized on
the war's sidelines, but that for them a different
kind of war had begun—the war of propaganda. The
enemy admitted to us that propaganda was their main
weapon against the United States. The POWs were to
have top billing in the theatrical production.
35

Alvarez' story is unique in this respect, he too was
used for propaganda purposes. The North Vietnamese
pressured him to sign a letter of apology and to provide
valuable information. The book tells us Alvarez refused
to cooperate and consequently was severely tortured.
Yet, as Alvarez explains, as long as they did not "break
him" by making him sign an apology letter, provide
propaganda for the communists, or cooperate with the

173
North Vietnamese he retained his integrity as an
honorable male soldier.
For Alvarez, his refusal to cooperate with the
enemy strengthened his sense of honor and fed into his
overall construction of an American military
masculinity. He makes this clear in a passage close to
the end of the text in which he reconnects with his
father after years as a POW:
Everett didn't want to talk about his captivity but
he had to get one thing off his chest. Looking at
this dad he said, "Maybe I could have come home
earlier, many years earlier, but I couldn't have
looked you in the eye. I don't think I could have
lived with myself if I had voluntarily given them
the propaganda statements they wanted. I just
couldn't do it. I wouldn't have been a man. I
wouldn't be here under these circumstances.
[Italics added]
36

Drawing a link between his conduct as a POW and his
masculinity, Alvarez interprets resistance to the
Vietnamese captors as fundamental to maintaining his
masculinity since it kept him from being socially
"dishonored" in front of other soldiers. Consequently,
when Alvarez writes that he would not be "here under
these circumstances," he is referring to his position as
an "honorable" American military hero who is pari passu
with other honorable soldiers precisely because he was

174
able to protect his masculinity under extreme
circumstances.
Years after writing Chained Eagle, Alvarez
published a second biographical book titled Code of
Conduct: An Inspirational Story of Self-Healing By the
Famed Ex-POW and War Hero (1991). The book focuses
exclusively on his civilian life as a former POW
celebrity, but also covered his professional life in
public office and his "moral life" after returning from
Vietnam. Still, as in other Vietnam biographies,
stories of personal triumph and failures are metonymic
for larger cultural statements—his experiences are short
lessons designed to teach other POWs and American men in
general how living with a code of conduct leads to a
successful life. After returning from war, Alvarez
admits to feeling disturbed by the civil rights struggle
because the "racial, ethnic and economic differences
between people were being politicized."
37
Such an
approach to social problems, he felt, was fomenting
permanent divisiveness. In lieu of such social
polarization, Alvarez offers his second book as a type
of social "code of conduct" that may serve as a basis

175
for national unity and reconciliation. Early in the text
Alvarez tells the reader:
... I have come to realize that the lessons that I
and my fellow captives learned about surviving with
honor apply to all aspects of personal and national
life. What we were before the ordeal, what we have
become since, what we still believe, are essential
ingredients in understanding the ability to get
through life's toughest tests.
38

Code of Conduct, as the name suggests, puts into writing
Alvarez' moral code and its applicability to civilian
life. While large sections of the text expose Alvarez'
rather naïve embrace of the U.S. as the world's beacon
of freedom, it also deals with more complex issues such
as his strained relationship to the Latino community,
the rejection of the Chicano movement, and his critique
of Delia Alvarez, his sister and anti war activist.
Arguably, the major undercurrent to both Chained
Eagle and Code of Conduct is Alvarez' emphasis on "how"
he "survived" the trials of captivity and the challenges
of civilian life while remaining an "honorable man." For
Alvarez, a good citizen is one that lives by a code of
conduct that safeguards against possible violations of
personal honor. Such a method of surviving ensures a
level of personal integrity that will inevitably yield a

176
code of behavior for an honorable masculinity. This may
be one of the reasons why Alvarez, although not the
longest held POW of the Vietnam War, is often the symbol
for the POW experience. In fact, Floyd Thompson is the
longest held POW of the Vietnam War, but remains
relatively unknown. In his biography (tellingly titled),
Glory Denied (2002), Thompson, an Army Special Forces
Capt, tells of his captivity for almost nine years—just
four months longer than Alvarez. His story is equally
amazing.
Thompson's observation plane was shot down by small
arms fire causing him to crash land, Thompson broke his
back and suffered severe burns because of the crash.
After months in captivity he regain partial use of his
legs, but was then targeted for interrogation by North
Vietnamese intelligence officers. This meant about
three months of torture that almost killed him. Thompson
survived the Vietnamese prison camps, but not the
psychological trauma it engendered. Shortly after his
return, Thompson continued his military career but took
to heavy drinking, eventually becoming a severe
alcoholic. The drinking tore his family apart along with

177
his hopes for promotion. He developed health problems
and ultimately suffered a stroke that left half of his
body paralyzed. Shortly after, the military
establishment forced him into early retirement.
39

While Thompson's personal and professional life
spiraled out of control after returning to the U.S.,
Alvarez emerged as the model POW survivor. Shortly after
his return, Alvarez settled his divorce and went on
speaking tours. He attended law school, became an ardent
Republican and slowly ascended in public service jobs
until Ronald Reagan appointed him Deputy Administrator
for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was awarded a
slew of medals, including the Silver Star, two legions
of Merit, two Purple Hearts, the Distinguished Flying
Cross and various others. At the height of his public
career he was an insider within right-wing political
circles—first with Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan,
and finally with George H. Bush. Alvarez' successes and
his controlled public persona made him a darling of the
right (his book Code of Conduct has blurbs by Bob Dole,
Ronald Reagan and 2008 G.O.P Presidential candidate John
McCain).

178
Somewhat surprisingly because of his harsh
invective against identity politics, Alvarez anchors his
success and his inveterate belief in a masculine "code
of conduct" to early childhood experiences within his
Mexican American community. Like Benavidez, Alvarez
isolated his childhood years as the catalyst for his
adult system of beliefs. Subjected to labor at an early
age, Alvarez writes of having to earn his keep in
Salinas, California—a small, farm-working town where
"the railroad tracks divided our town both socially and
economically."
40
Unlike Benavidez who credits his uncle
Nicholas for his moral compass, Alvarez credits his
family collectively for leaving an indelible mark upon
his conduct.
Their collective legacy would never be measured in
material worth. Instead it would be defined in
terms of human endurance and the need to survive.
Our lot was to struggle and to overcome. That was
best done through hard work and education. The
alternative meant yet another generation of
vulnerability to low pay for unskilled labor.
41

Some of the key terms in the quote appear
throughout the entire narrative, especially in chapters
describing his captivity. Terms such as "endurance,"
"survival," "struggle," and "hard work," become

179
overarching themes for what eventually constitutes his
version of an American masculinity. In Code of Conduct
he returns to these same key terms to describe his
approach to civilian problems such as employment,
marriage, and faith. In civilian life these terms come
to represent the "positive" influence of his family and
his Mexican heritage. They are positive precisely
because they are transferable values, useful anywhere
regardless of geographical location or cultural
surrounding.
Yet, later in the same passage Alvarez makes a
cultural comparison that emphasizes the need for
transferable cultural values that are not culturally
specific. Alvarez' emphasis on such values is
significant because they demonstrate to the reader that
he is not solely tied to a Mexican background but is
willing to draw from different cultures to construct a
general code of conduct that appeals to all Americans.
Pointing to the Japanese laborers that also worked the
fields one of his family members claims,
"See those Japanese. It's Sunday and they're still
working. They're the ones whose children are going
to be successful because they're working to send
their kids to school. One day they're going to have

180
a lot of money because they work so hard." Then
balefully, they'd compare them with some of the
Mexican laborers, who partied so wildly on Saturday
nights that they couldn't do anything but nurse
hangovers on Sundays.
42

While Alvarez attributes to his Mexican cultural
background the values for "survival" and "endurance," he
is also quick to critique the culture for its
shortcomings. Implicit in the quote is Alvarez'
distinction between "good" hard working people of
Mexican heritage who ascend through a boot-strap work
ethic, and "bad" Mexican laborers who will never
transcend their own vices. Alvarez isolates the negative
qualities in the Mexican American community in order to
make a general point about living an undisciplined life:
basically, that in the land of opportunity it is un-
American to not try and improve one's station in life.
This approach to social critique allows him to position
himself as the "average American man" who reaches
national recognition because of his adherence to an
American code of conduct. Such a perspective provides
Alvarez with a moral justification for the publication
of his two books, as he writes: "I could do it, so could
others with a decent code of conduct as a guide."
43

181
Still, the value system that his family gives him is
only part of the code he uses to succeed. It is not
until he describes his relationship to his childhood
friend Joe Kapp that his value system takes on overtly
masculine dimensions.
In what must be one of the strangest narrative
twists in POW war narratives, Alvarez tells the reader
his childhood best friend up to his first year of high
school was Joe Kapp, the famous football quarterback who
led the Minnesota Vikings to a Super Bowl Championship
in 1973. Aside from his family rearing, the only other
background information Alvarez provides readers is of
his friendship to Joe Kapp, a half-Mexican kid from the
"same side of the tracks." Alvarez writes that he and
Joe were inseparable, joining basketball and football
teams together. While Alvarez makes a minor point of
their friendship in the biography (he only dedicates two
pages to it) the relation was profoundly impacting since
it taught him the importance of role modeling.
Joe left me with a lifelong legacy: he had toughed
it out with the kids and earned their respect. I
had seen him strive and I had watched him succeed.
It was an inspiring lesson in will power. It was
also the stuff from which character is built. I

182
remember it well as I crouched in the isolation of
my dismal cell.
44

From a very early age Alvarez recognizes "toughness"
equals "respect." As with Benavidez who publicly taunted
the bull and later the hippie in order to gain social
respect and recognition, Alvarez understands that Kapp's
public display of toughness earned him respect from
younger boys. Unlike Benavidez, however, who
demonstrated courage as a child through dangerous or
violent means, Alvarez turned to sports. As a star track
athlete, Alvarez was able to publicly demonstrate his
competitive edge. In his work on males and sports,
sociologist Michael Messner writes that organized sports
are "gendering institutions" because they "help to
construct the current gender order. Part of this
construction of gender" Messner argues, "is accomplished
through the 'masculinizing' of male bodies and minds."
45

As an athlete and as a friend of Joe Kapp, Alvarez was
able to forge a bond with Kapp through athletic physical
training. Alvarez writes, "We were inseparable, whether
riding together at six o'clock in the morning to serve
as altar boys or, more often, to play sports."
46
In the
end, Alvarez' friendship with Kapp ended when Kapp moved

183
to Los Angeles with his family and Alvarez went to
college. Nevertheless he kept in contact with Kapp and
witnessed Kapp's rise to football stardom.
Alvarez, on the other hand, made the best of his
situation, he went to college and then into the Navy. He
chose to study mechanical engineering because of its
stability and its marketability. In Code of Conduct he
tells the reader he joined the Navy because he fell in
love with flying. In one of the more pleasant childhood
experiences be tells of a farmer in Salinas who took him
on a crop duster flight to spray pesticides. Overwhelmed
by the beauty of flying, he began to harbor secret
feelings of becoming a pilot. He believed the military
would allow him to fly, an experience that would
liberate him from the sedentary practice of engineering
work in a corporation. Alvarez claims both his
experiences with his family and his experience with Joe
Kapp gave him the "code of conduct" necessary for
survival in captivity; from his family Alvarez gained
the value of hard work, discipline, survival and
integrity, from Kapp he learned to integrate those
values into an American code of conduct for manhood.

184
Still, in an effort to try and represent himself as
an "all American male," he elides ethnic identification
as a Mexican American; the story of Alvarez the POW is
not the story of a Mexican American but rather an
"American man." For instance, during the narration of
his capture by North Vietnamese soldiers, Alvarez writes
that the soldiers initially asked him a series of
questions. To try and confuse them, Alvarez responded in
Spanish: "'Que? No entiendo. No entiendo.'" Alvarez
writes: "One of them coaxed, wondering if I [was]
Vietnamese: 'Vietna? Vietna' The others looked at the
length of my body and shook their heads. I was too tall
to be a native."
47
Suggesting that "real" American men
do not speak anything but English, Alvarez decides to
address the Vietnamese in the "non-American" language of
Spanish. In effect, his decision to make Spanish
language alien to the U.S. exposes his misperception
that the U.S. is monolingual English speaking country.
It also plays on the fact that the Vietnamese assume he
may actually be Vietnamese because of his dark features.
The scene echoes events in narratives of other Chicano
veterans of the Vietnam War such as Charlie Trujillo's

185
Dogs From Illusion, who write about the phenotypic
similarities between Chicano/Latinos and Vietnamese
people and the occasional confusion between them.
Alvarez seems conscious of the reason for the Vietnamese
confusion over his nationality: his physical appearance
does not match what the Vietnamese assume Americans look
like, i.e. fair-skinned people. He assumes, however,
that what "revealed" his true identity was that his
height made him too tall to be Vietnamese. Still, the
passage never reveals that the North Vietnamese soldiers
then assumed him to be American, he was simply not
"native" Vietnamese, and not "native" American. It was
only through interrogation that Alvarez confessed he was
a U.S. Navy pilot.
The assumptions that underlay the initial
interaction between Alvarez and the Vietnamese are key
to understanding why Alvarez distances himself from
identity politics. In Code of Conduct, Alvarez confirms
he does not emphasize his Mexican background because he
believes it is socially divisive. According to Alvarez,
ethnic identification means making distinctions between
Americans and this leads to a "fractured" America in

186
which only a select few can truly call themselves
"Americans." Thus he must down play his ethnicity in
order to gain recognition as the symbol for the "all
American man." To do so he makes a clear distinction
between what is American and what is not. His decision
to speak Spanish to the Vietnamese means Spanish
speakers are not Americans. Alvarez tends to be a bit
disingenuous, however, with his disparaging of identity
politics. I say this because later in life he
"identifies" as Mexican American when he applies for
government grants specifically designated for minority
owned companies. (Alvarez was very critical of
affirmative action programs such as the one he benefited
from.) In Code of Conduct, for example, he writes:
One of the reasons I take a stand on ethnic matters
that isn't fashionable today is that dwelling on
differences in race, skin color, national
background gets in the way of cooperation. More
than in any other area of American life, these
distinctions are being phased out in the military,
and they simply didn't exist in the Hanoi Hilton.
48

This is not to say that Alvarez is unwilling to
recognize racial differences between Americans. On the
contrary, he is quite conscious of their existence and
he continuously rejects them. For instance, in one of

187
the early passages of Chained Eagle, he tells readers of
a rather piquant teenage experience he had when dating
an Anglo girl from "the other side of the tracks." After
the first two dates, he decided to pick her up at her
home. After meeting her parents, the young lady tells
him she could not date him anymore because her parents
did not want her "dating a Mexican." Dejected over the
news, he refuses her offer to date in secrecy and
terminates the relationship. When he gets home he tells
his father of the situation and his father responds by
saying:
Listen, son. Don't let it bother you; don't let it
surprise you. You're a good, clean kid. Not a bum.
This guy is ignorant... There's something wrong
with people, when they judge you on account of your
color or your race or whatever.
49

While this is one of the few places in the text where
racism at home is directly addressed, he easily
dismisses it as another person's problem and not as a
ubiquitous social ill that continued to limit him and
other peoples of color during the late '60s. In doing
so, he reduces the racist practices of the 1960s to a
personal issue between individuals and not as part of a
systemic structural problem.

188
Alvarez seems to believe that he can not position
himself as part of (or in support of) Mexican Americans
or the Chicano movement since it would "limit" his
viability as a "regular" all American male. To be blunt,
it would pigeon home him into an ethnic category. In
Code of Conduct Alvarez writes,
If you think about hyphenates like Mexican-
American, Afro-American, Italian-American of
whatever, you'll find that they tell the whole
story from my point of view. The first word-
Mexican in my case- represents the past; the second
word- American in all cases- represents the present
and future.
50

Alvarez' definition of ethnic identification with
anything other than American as a thing of the past
reveals his desire to want recognition as simply
American. While this is not uncommon in military
biographies, or autobiographies about men of Mexican
background who fought in Vietnam (Roy Benavidez has a
similar perspective in Medal of Honor) what makes
Alvarez' story unique is his intentional maneuvering
away from his Mexican background as a "necessary
requirements" to attain a larger, more general and
cohesive recognition as an American man.

189
In writing of Vietnam POWs, Elliot Gunner claims
that the plight of the POWs became one of the few issues
that unified American sentiment regarding the Vietnam
War.
51
Americans in general, regardless of whether they
supported the war or not, agreed it was immoral to
abandon American POWs in Vietnam prison camps. As a
result, the administration did its best to champion POWs
as heroes of the war since they represented, in the
words of President Nixon, the "United States emerging
from the darkness of struggle and uncertainty."
52

Comparatively, if one thinks of Vietnam POWs and POWs of
other wars such as the Korean War or WWII, the number of
soldiers captured during Vietnam was much smaller but
received the largest amount of media attention. Vietnam
had only 800 American POWs, while American soldiers
captured in Korea amounted to 7,140, and American POWs
in WWII numbered 130,201. Vietnam War POWs, received
extensive media coverage upon return, and Alvarez was
one of the most famous among them. (Story has it that
during the POWs welcome home ball at the White House,
actor John Wayne confessed to Alvarez's date "I have
such admiration for Cmdr. Alvarez that every time I look

190
him I just can't help but cry"
53
). Alvarez was one of the
few men who attained heroic status as a result of his
Vietnam experience, and therefore he protected his image
carefully against "ethnic divisiveness."
One of the ways Alvarez uses his books to protect
his image as the "American man" and ward off overt
ethnic identification is through his discussion of his
sister Delia. She emerged in the 1960s as a visible
anti-war activist in California. Active in the Chicano
Movement, and outspoken about her opposition to the
Vietnam War, news of Delia's activities in the U.S.
would travel all the way to the Hanoi Hilton where
Alvarez was imprisoned. As part of their propaganda
campaigns North Vietnamese guards showed Alvarez his
sister Delia's anti-war activity, including newspaper
clippings and other news coverage. Often, in their
effort to convince POWs that the Vietnam War was
immoral, the North Vietnamese would circulate videos of
antiwar demonstrations and play radio speeches by anti-
war activists condemning the war. This was all part of
the propaganda campaign against the U.S. While in
captivity, Alvarez writes about the difficulties he had

191
with other POWs because of his sister's anti-war
activities. The other soldiers felt she hurt the
overall "war effort," but Alvarez recognized her right
to speak freely as part of civilian guarantees granted
by the U.S. constitution.
Delia's activities were by no means out of the
ordinary for antiwar activists of her time, basically
focusing on organizing demonstrations, spearheading
petition drives and giving public speeches. In fact,
most of her activities demonstrated a frustration at not
being able to bring her brother home. Still, what seems
most threatening about Delia's activities was the
possibility that her political views might also be
"suggestive" of Alvarez' "true" feelings about the war—
her activities made him suspect to other soldiers. As
Alvarez' sister and as a member of the Chicano movement,
Delia was representative of his family and the political
developments of his ethnic group. As such, Delia
undermined the strong male image Alvarez worked hard to
portray and called into question his "Americaness" along
racial lines. Both of Alvarez' texts express ongoing
disapproval of Delia's activities—although his critique

192
was always tempered by his recognition of her
constitutional right to protest.
But Delia is only one of two women in Alvarez'
narrative that threatens to undermine his male-centered
world. In the text, the worst of the "female" offenders
is Alvarez' first wife, Tangee. As if on par with Jane
Fonda who became the "quintessential traitorous figure"
of the Vietnam War, Tangee is indicted for abandoning
Alvarez, collecting his Pentagon payments, and marrying
another man. However inappropriate her behavior may have
been (Alvarez claims she continued to receive his
military pay while living with another man), one of the
major results of her actions was Alvarez' wholesale
feeling of abandonment and male rejection. In Chained
Eagle, his reception of the "Dear John" letter was the
lowest point of his captivity; the emotional devastation
he experienced superseded the torture and the death of
his friends. It was also the point in the narrative
where we as readers empathize with him most, since
Tangee's desertion took from Alvarez the hope of
reuniting with his wife—the one hope that carried him
through the darkest moments of captivity.

193
The pain was so devastating that Alvarez tells the
reader he did not want to include it in the text, but
was coerced into doing so because Tangee's betrayal was
the "selling" point of the book. It was the narrative
twist that made the story specially compelling:
The publishers would just stare at me, and I would
fumble around saying that I had in mind a sort of
Stalag 17 thing, an account of how we survived on a
day-to day basis by developing communications
codes, helping each other, following our senior
officer's directions to make them torture us for
propaganda so on. If they didn't actually yawn,
their eyes would glaze over until somebody, usually
Swifty, brought up the fact that my wife had run
off with another man and my family had been active
in antiwar protests. I could see their interest
come alive then, and I cringed, I didn't even want
to talk about those things, let alone write about
them.
54

Tangee's betrayal (narrated in the chapter titled
"Betrayal"), and Delia's anti-war movement become the
narratives selling points precisely because the women
come to represent the "personal" betrayal of the
American man (it was probably also an appealing selling
point because it undermined the stereotype of the "loyal
Mexican wife" and the Mexican male patriarch). Group
solidarity, communication codes and kindness are stock
techniques for survival among POW's (American POW's
prisoners during WWII and the Korean War did the same),

194
but the betrayal of women back home puts a twist on the
honor and male code of conduct touted as essential for
survival.
In sharp contrast to Delia and Tangee, Alvarez
champions his current wife Tammy Alvarez in Code of
Conduct. She, more than any other woman in either book,
saves Alvarez' masculinity by proving her unconditional
loyalty to him and assuming a domestic life. Tammy re-
establishes traditional gender roles, one in which she
is the home maker and Alvarez the public figure. Tammy,
a woman of Middle Eastern background used to rubbing
elbows with political elites, "saves" Alvarez from what
would have amounted to a post- captivity "gender chaos."
She shows up to save the image of the "good women" who
values Alvarez' war time experience and respects him for
it. In talking of Tammy, Alvarez writes, " Tammy, ...,
was different. This was the women [I] knew [I] wanted to
settle down with and raise a family."
55
With Tammy,
Alvarez is able to reestablish his position as a
sexually desirable man, one no longer subject to shame.
As with Benavidez, Alvarez' use of images
throughout Chained Eagle buttresses his trajectory from

195
a farm-working boy to a publicly recognized military
hero. In Alvarez' text the montage of pictures trace
the story from childhood innocence to public persona,
although in neither texts does the narrative develop
chronologically. For example, in the very first image of
the book, Alvarez presents the reader with a baby
picture of himself dressed as a sailor.

Figure 4. At the age of four and a half, wearing
sailor's suit [Original Caption]

As if telling the reader he was predestined for service
in the Navy, the picture has Alvarez holding a sailor
hat and sitting in a contemplative pose. The baby
picture, perhaps previewing the adventures to come,

196
helps to create an air of innocence—a child ignorant of
the brutal trials he will endure on his journey to
manhood via the military. And, since four year old boys
do not dress themselves, the picture is also
demonstrative of his family's support of the military,
the U.S., and the notion that sons in uniform are
beautiful.
If one compares the first picture to the last
picture used in Chained Eagle, Alvarez' narrative of
attaining public recognition for his masculinity comes
full circle. The last picture in the series has Alvarez
delivering a speech at the Vietnam Memorial. As the
representative figure for POWs in Vietnam, he symbolizes
U.S. war efforts and all the pain experienced by the
soldiers. Yet, because of the social standing Alvarez
commanded when he delivered the speech at the Vietnam
Memorial, it can be argued that he also represents U.S.
soldiers victory over the trauma of Vietnam. It is
important to remember that the Vietnam War memorial was
established years after the war ended, primarily because
of the divisiveness the war engendered on the home
front.

197

Figure 5. I spoke in my capacity as Deputy
Administrator of the Veterans Administration at the
dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, November
11, 1982 (Veterans Day)

In fact, the memorial dedication was so controversial
that Ronald Reagan decided not to attend, opting to send
a representative instead. Consequently, the final image
of Alvarez delivering his speech at the inaugural
functions as a national portrayal of reconciliation, one
in which a POW, a member of a minority group, and a
recognized war "hero" is able to bridge the fissures

198
dividing public opinion of the Vietnam War. In Code of
Conduct, Alvarez writes that he wants to be seen not
only as a military man, but as a new model for the
typical American citizen: "I have tried in my own
person and career to represent another kind of America,
an America of unity and open opportunity."
56
If, in the
initial picture, Alvarez is depicted as a young boy
dreaming of a sailor's life, then the last picture of
the text represents what a successful life in the
military can "en"gender: public recognition for being an
"all American man," a symbol of reconciliation between
the soldiers who fought and suffered and those who
refused to support the war effort. Alvarez' second book
after all, had nothing to do with war, but everything to
do with war's impact on civilian life. The book jacket
to his second book is one of a business man and
politician not one of a military figure. Wearing a suit
and tie, and with the American flag in the background,
the text presents readers with an all-American man: a
business man and a public servant. In fact, the first
blurb in the back of the jacket is written by Bob Dole,
a WWII soldier, and a presidential contender at the time

199
of the book's publication. The blurb reads "[m]ake no
mistake, Everett Alvarez, Jr. is a true American hero.
His story should be required reading." Although Alvarez
is famous for being a POW, he does not wear a navy
uniform. Instead, he is the icon for a recovered
Vietnam veteran, a functional and successful part of the
American society.

Figure 6. Jacket cover for his second book, Code of
Conduct (1991)

200
The image makes it clear that Vietnam exists in the
past, that it may inform his conduct, but that it does
not limit him. The trauma of combat often associated
with Vietnam veterans is not an issue for Alvarez, his
masculinity is intact, not impaired by what happened to
him as a POW for eight and a half years. In fact,
Alvarez goes as far as hinting that his POW experience
"strengthened" his resolve as a man. He writes in Code
of Conduct:
As a member of Captain Mitchell's group in
Pensacola I shared the emerging consensus that
keeping honor intact throughout the POW experience
had actually strengthened us in spite of some
lingering physical pain and disability.
57

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the connection
Alvarez draws between a code of conduct and his public
display of masculinity is his short character spot on
People magazine.
58
People ran an article focusing on
Alvarez and his first book Chained Eagle in 1989. The
article reads like a sensational bit of news reportage,
going into explicit detail of some of the more gruesome
tortures Alvarez endured while in captivity. It begins
with the physical torture and then relates the
psychological scarring that occurred as a consequence.

201
The article provides the reader with an idea of what is
contained in the biography: the public display of
Alvarez' very private psychological anguish and the
processes by which he overcame the trauma. In addition
to the torture, author David Grogan also highlights
Tangee's betrayal of Alvarez, writing "Alvarez's spirit
was nearly broken in this seventh year of captivity,
when the North Vietnamese handed over correspondence
announcing that his wife had divorced him, remarried and
given birth to a child with her new husband."
59

The author suggests that Alvarez survives torture
and his wife's betrayal by remembering his upbringing in
a "Mexican American family." In the interview for the
article Alvarez admits that his family's advice helped
him stay sane. Alvarez explains to Grogan that one of
his earliest memories was of his father telling him
"Look, son, men don't cry. Keep your chin up." He also
added that his mother sent him to work in the fields the
summer after he graduated from the sixth grade telling
the foreman "Don't pay him, just teach him to work."
Drawing upon his cultural background, Alvarez suggests
that his father's lesson on the proper behavior for men,

202
and his mother's tough lesson on the necessity of values
such as hard work and personal integrity gave him the
strength to survive the ordeals of his captivity. But it
is not until the final sentences of the article that
Alvarez repackages his message to the general American
man. Grogan writes:
For Alvarez the process was painful but, in the
end, worthwhile. "I thought I had gotten over the
war experience until the book," he says. Above all,
it served to remind him, again, of the simple joy
of freedom. "I can't go through life carrying a
heavy burden of anger," he says. "I'm lucky to be
back."
60

This final sentence in the article presents Alvarez once
again as the symbol of reconciliation. After being
severely tortured by the Vietnamese, after being
betrayed by his wife, Alvarez shows his "noble"
upbringing by "forgiving" those who hurt him. The act of
forgiveness disencumbers him from the anger and from the
reality of losing the war. For civilians, Alvarez serves
as a symbol of the chivalric warrior who can be fierce
in battle, but also gentle during peace time, willing to
forgive the sins of others. As readers, we are supposed
to see him as an "honorable man" and as such, an example
of an "all American masculinity."

203
Because of his public service and his aspirations
to be seen as a regular "all American man," Alvarez
attained a privileged gendered position in the U.S., one
that no other famous Mexican American veterans obtain
(and only a few white Americans veterans reached). On
the national level, this becomes evident when Alvarez
made a guest appearance in 1980 on one of the leading
television news magazines, "Prime Time Live." He was
recruited as a spokesman for the network's Thanksgiving
Holiday. Dressed in civilian clothes, he is filmed
walking somberly along the wall of the Vietnam Memorial
in Washington DC. He walks past the names, staring into
the camera and delivers a short speech on the meaning of
Thanksgiving, covering issues such as sharing,
forgiving, and family. The fact that Alvarez was chosen
to deliver this short television spot during the
Thanksgiving holiday demonstrates he had reached mass
appeal, beyond that of the Mexican American community.
As a former combat soldier and POW, he is the bearer of
national values and an example of the "tough American
male-soldier" come home to make peace through
reconciliation.

204
Conclusion
I began this chapter with a quote from Lt. General
Sanchez' retirement speech to illustrate that although
U.S. wars are always historically situated, they often
highlight and even add to, preexisting conflicts and
contradictions in American society rather than resolve
them. Alvarez' and Benavidez' texts are part of a
sizeable body of literature that express, from an
autobiographical point of view, the experiences of
Chicanos/Latinos who fought in Vietnam. They represent
many of the views found in other autobiographies written
by Chicano soldiers such as Juan Ramirez' A Patriot
After All, the semi auto biographical book Un Mexicano
en Vietnam and John W. Flores recently publish biography
on Marine Sgt. Freddy Gonzalez When The River Dreams.
At some level all of these autobiographies and
biographies, demonstrate a preoccupation with the public
recognition of Chicano masculinity. To redress the
social emasculation that represents Chicano masculinity
as inherently deviant with stereotypical images of the
hyper-violent "machista," or its opposite in the
complacent worker, many of these men enlist in the U.S.

205
armed services. The military, for their part,
frequently lures these young men with images of a
successful and disciplined masculinity that sustains
"valid" cultural currency both in the military and in
civilian life.
Furthermore, many of these young soon-to-be-
soldiers see the military as an antidote to nativist
charges of being unpatriotic because they are
"hyphenated Americans." For many of them, military
service "authenticates" their status as Americans. While
Benavidez and Alvarez recognize their Mexican heritage,
they see it only as a point of origin, a place from
which they begin a trajectory that will ultimately lead
to American citizenship deflecting charges of having
divided loyalties, or of being as Alvarez says "sunshine
patriots." Still, it is clear that for Alvarez and
Benavidez the process by which they begin to identify as
"American" men of Mexican heritage, is also part of
their process of "re-masculinizing." Thus they can tap
into more abstract theoretical constructions of
masculinity that speak to all U.S. men and not just
Mexican American males. For Benavidez this was found in

206
the West Point motto; for Alvarez this was laid out in
his code of conduct.
While the political debates of the time did have
direct bearing on the reasons for enlisting, the
decision to fight was always mixed with other social
factors. It would be unfair to reduce military service
to civilian gender dynamics. For example, in writing of
the famed Marine Sgt. Freddy Gonzalez, John W. Flores
writes,
To Freddy, in 1965 when he joined he Marines, the
war was new with noble airs about it, and young men
like Freddy saw it as an essential sacrifice for
America. He was ostensibly fighting to help save
South Vietnam from Communism, but really he was
there for his mother, his grandmother, his extended
family and friends, his old high school and
hometown, and his Marine buddies fighting next to
him in battle.
61

Flores' description captures well the complex matrix of
reasons behind men of Mexican American, or of Latinos in
general, who decided to fight in Vietnam. Framed within
the context of their civilian life, war is not solely
about political disagreements. Instead, as with Freddy,
war takes on symbolic overtones in which a young man's
performance on the battlefield is representative of
family, community and region.

207
Still, it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge
that while these men pursue an aggressive type of
masculinity through the military, they ultimately
participate in the recreation of a military masculinity
that helps institutionalize, and maintain, a gendered
system upon which patriarchy is based. Other types of
masculinities, or female perspectives, while constantly
present throughout the texts, are whole heartedly
silenced or indicted. "Hippies," peace activists and
women are often portrayed as antithetical, or
threatening to an American military masculinity based on
patriotism and violence on the battle field. Still, this
is not unique to Americans writing about war in general;
what does remains unique in these texts is that both
authors anchor their drive for military excellence in
civilian "racialized" experiences of emasculation.

208
CHAPTER 4 ENDNOTES

1
"Veteran US Army Lt.-Gen. Sanchez Retires." Science Daily 2 Nov.
2007.

2
In 2003, numerous accounts of abuse and torture of prisoners held
in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (also known as Baghdad Correctional
Facility) occurred. The acts were committed by personnel of the
372nd Military Police Company, CIA officers, and contractors
involved in the occupation of Iraq such as CACI International. An
internal investigation by the United States Army commenced in
January 2004, and reports of the abuse, as well as graphic pictures
showing American military personnel in the act of abusing prisoners,
came to public attention in April 2004, when a 60 Minutes II news
report (April 28) and an article by Seymour M. Hersh in The New
Yorker magazine (posted online on April 30 and published days later
in the May 10 issue) reported the story. The commanding officer of
the prison was Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski. While Sanchez was not in
direct command of the prison, he was Karpinski's superior officer.

3
Olguín, Ben V. "Sangre Mexicana/Corazón Americano: Identity,
Ambiguity, and Critique in Mexican-American War Narratives."
American Literary History Mar. 2002: 83-114.

4
Jorge Mariscal's Aztlan in Vietnam, Ramon Saldivar's, The
Borderlands of Culture, Jose Limon's Dancing with the Devil, and
Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez' (ed) Mexican-Americans & World War II.

5
Mariscal, Jorge. "In the Wake of the Gulf War: Untying the Yellow
Ribbon." Cultural Critique: The Economics of War. Ed. Donna
Przybylowicz. (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press, Fall 1991) 97-118.

6
Chavez, Ernesto. My People First! 'Mi Raza Primero!" Nationalism,
Identity and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles 1966-
1978. (Berkeley: Uni of Cal Press, 2002) 24.

7
Jorge Mariscal, Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana
Experiences of the War. (Berkeley: Uni Press, 1999), p. 27.

8
Ibid 28.

9
McNamara, Robert S. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of
Vietnam. (New York: Random Books, 1996) p. 53.

10
Stuart Hall, "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference," Radical America
23, no 4 (October- December 1989):15.

11
Roy Benavidez. Medal of Honor: A Vietnam Warrior's Story.
(Washington: Brassey's, 1995) 23.

209

12
I am thinking of the more famous Vietnam War texts: Michael Herrs'
Dispatches, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, Tim O'Brien If I Die in
a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, Ron
Kovic's Born on the Fouth of July.

13
Benavidez 25.

14
Ibid 179.

15
184.

16
17.

17
34.

18
40.

19
3.

20
Cited in Ann McClintock, " 'No Longer in a Future Heaven':
Nationalism, Gender and Race," in Becoming National, ed. Geoff Eley
and Ronald Suny (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1996) 260.

21
Benavidez 105.

22
Ibid 129.

23
129.

24
130.

25
129.

26
167.

27
168.

28
Alvarez, Everette and Anthony S. Pitch. Chained Eagle. New York:
Donald I. Fine Inc. 1989. Pitch cowrote the text with Alvarez.

29
McCain, John. Interview. Pastor Rick Warren Interviews
Presidential Candidates. NBC, California. Aug 16, 2008.

30
Alvarez, Everette and Samuel A. Schreiner. Code of Conduct: An
Inspirational Story of Self-Healing By the Famed Ex-POW and War
Hero. (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989) p.10.

31
Ibid, p. 3.

210

32
Acu#a, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 5
th
ed.
(New York: Pearson/Longman. 2004.) p, 328.

33
Unlike Benavidez, Alvarez did go to college and studied Electrical
Engineering. After college, he enlisted as an Officer in the Navy.

34
Grunner, Elliott. Prisoners of Culture: Representing the Vietnam
POW. (New Jersey: Rutgers Uni Press. 1993). p.15.

35
James B. Stockdale, foreword to Prisoner of War: Six Years in
Hanoi, by John McGrath (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), vi.

36
Alvarez, Chained Eagle, p. 277.

37
Alvarez, Code of Conduct, p. xii.

38
Ibid xvii.

39
Philpott, Tom. Glory Denied: The Sago of Jim Thompson, Americas
longest help Prison of War. (New York: Norton, 2001.

40
Alvarez, Chained Eagle, p. 84.

41
Ibid 83.

42
84.

43
xii.

44
86.

45
Kimmel, Michael and Michael Messner eds. Men's Lives. "Boyhood,
Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities." (Boston:
Allyn and Bacon , 2001) 97.

46
Ibid 85.

47
Alvarez, Chained Eagle, p. 26.

48
Alvarez, Code of Conduct, p. 206.

49
Ibid 206.

50
205.

51
Grunner 13.

52
Ibid 14.

53
Chained Eagle, p. 296.

211

54
Code of Conduct, p.36.

55
Chained Eagle, p. 300.

56
Code of Conduct, p. xii.

57
Code of Conduct, 94.

58
David Grogan, "Eight Years a POW in North Vietnam," People, 19
February 1990, 25-28.

59
25.

60
26.

61
Flores, John W. When The River Dreams : The Life of Marine Sgt.
Freddy Gonzalez. (Indiana: Author House) 8.

212
CHAPTER 5. THE HILL THAT WILL REMEMBER YOU:
VIETNAM WAR TRAUMA IN THE URBAN LANDSCAPE OF
ALFREDO VEA'S GODS GO BEGGING

Midway through Alfredo Vea's novel, gods go begging
(1999), Jesse Pasodoble recalls one of his early Vietnam
War experiences: Sitting within sight of a North
Vietnamese Army (NVA) encampment, he notices North
Vietnamese soldiers eating something resembling "green
rocks." Jesse asks one of the ethnic Montagnard soldiers
fighting alongside the Americans what the NVA soldiers
are eating. The man answers, "They are eating green
rocks. Can't you fools see? They are swallowing green
rocks. They seek out the power in jade."
1
After the
Montagnard finishes talking, the American soldiers
remain silent, transfixed by the mysterious quality of
what they have heard and witnessed. It was Private
Mendez, one of the Spanish-speaking American soldiers,
who breaks the silence by asking Jesse a random question
that seems just as mystical, "Jesse, my friend, do you
suppose that there will ever be Mexicans in space?"
2
The
men in the platoon laugh loudly at a question that in

213
the moment seems rather outrageous. To the American
soldiers the notion of a Mexican astronaut is strangely
far-fetched, more extraordinary even than NVA soldiers
eating jade. The idea, Mendez' sergeant confesses,
conjures images of "low-rider rockets and pachucos on
Pluto ..."
3

Mendez' question sits squarely in the middle of the
novel, and its implications are central to the text's
commentary on U.S. soldiers of color, since it sets up
the historical reconstruction in the ensuing chapters.
In the next chapter, titled "Mexicans in Space," Jesse
speculates on the "space" Mexicans would occupy in the
American imaginary if during Hernán Cortez' initial
voyage, the winds had blown Cortez' small vessel north,
and instead of landing at Veracruz, Cortez and his men
had landed on Plymouth Rock. Jesse supposes
4
that under
colonial Catholic Spain, North America would have a
different concept of ethnicity-- one in which natives
and Europeans would have mixed in a North American
version of "mestizaje," thus creating a racial/cultural
hybridity consisting of both indigenous and
Spanish/European blood. Such a construction, Jesse

214
believes, would soften rigid North American racial
categorization and allow Americans to imagine a greater
potential for communities of color in the U.S.
5
Jesse
drives the point home by chiding his fellow American
soldiers for not knowing about what he calls the Mexican
Aeronautical Space Agency, an agency he abbreviates with
the provocative acronym "MASA."
6
The acronym provides a
witty retort to the soldier's laughter since it
effectively recalls the history of slavery and
discrimination in North America, making the very idea of
Mexicans in outer space bizarrely funny. "MASA" is also
a pun on the Spanish word mása, a maize-based dough
Mexican indigenous people use to make tortillas and
tamales. The acronym introduces into the familiar
concept of space travel an unfamiliar genealogy that
includes a Mexican American, indigenous and African
American historical presence that links "MASA" to mása
to NASA. In short, Jesse's flashback, Mendez' question,
and the ensuing discussion of historical circumstances
highlight the central theme of the novel: How does the
trauma of war affect communities of color that have
endured the trauma of internal colonization in the U.S.?

215
Discussions of internal colonization in military-
themed novels are not unique to Vea's text: Different
configurations of the same question emerge in the
fiction of Mexican-American writers focusing on the
Mexican American experience in the Vietnam War. Novels
such as Jose Rodriguez's Oddsplayer (1988), Charlie
Trujillo's Dogs from Illusion (1994), Michael W.
Rodriguez's Humidity Moon (1998), and Elena Rodriguez's
Peacetime: Spirit of the Eagle (1997) call into question
the history of discrimination against Latinos in the
U.S. These novels then intertwine that question with
stories of trauma endured while serving in the US armed
services. In this manner, narratives of war expose how
the trauma of discrimination in civilian life affects
how trauma is processed during war; conversely, they
also explore how wartime trauma affects the way Latino
soldiers process traumatic instances of discrimination
as veteran civilians. What is unique to Alfredo Vea's
novel, as the title of this chapter suggest, is how the
trauma of Vietnam continues to impact communities of
color living in blighted urban landscapes during peace
time. In this chapter, I argue that Vea's novel gods go

216
begging links Vietnam War trauma to the urban landscape
in order to draw parallels between the international
colonial endeavors of the U.S. in Vietnam and the intra-
colonization of urban youth of color.
gods go begging is a murder mystery. The novel's
protagonist, Jesse Pasodoble, is the public defender for
an African-American boy named Calvin Thibault (nicknamed
"Biscuit") accused of a brutal double murder. As the
narrative develops, the author weaves into the murder
mystery Jesse's war time trauma linking Vietnam War
experiences of the past with the victims of the present.
We find out, for example, that the two murdered women, a
Creole named Persephone and a Vietnamese named Mai, were
married to men who killed each other during combat.
Persephone was married to an African-American soldier
from the South who did not believe in the war, and Mai
was married to a North Vietnamese soldier who believed
war was necessary to expel the Americans. Jesse served
with Persephone's husband, and Jesse's most traumatic
war experience took place in the battle that claimed
both husband's lives. In the end of the novel "Biscuit"
is acquitted, but it was another young African American

217
boy named Reggie who actually committed the killings: a
dangerous, traumatized youth with a tragic history of
violence and incest.
The main investigation focuses on the double murder
case but as lawyers often work on more than one case
simultaneously, the story also contains a smaller, yet
related, rape case of a little girl named Minnie
Skelley. The case concerns a disturbing tale of incest
in which Minnie is believed to have been sexually abused
by her uncle Bernard Skelley. Bernard's guilt, however,
remains uncertain since Minnie cannot remember the
incident; she too suffers from trauma and experiences
memory lapses. One of the few things she remembers about
the incidents of rape was the presence of an eagle
during the sexual abuse. The police hold Bernard (a
white supremacist) as the prime suspect because of a
tattoo on his chest of an American screeching eagle. The
city of San Francisco--where the novel takes place—-
assigns Jesse as Bernard's attorney, forcing Jesse to
represent a self-proclaimed white supremacist.
7
Jesse's
investigation uncovers the true culprit in Minnie's
rape, Minnie's father, Richard Skelley, another white

218
supremacist with a liking for weaponry and things
military. Jesse solves the case and wins the trial by
making the bed upon which the abuse occurred the central
piece of evidence in the prosecution. Jesse finds
Minnie's bed hidden away in Richard's storage room, the
head piece on the bed consisting of a massive, wood
carved screeching eagle. The eagle, carved in the image
of the Marine's Semper Fi, clutches in its talons a flat
wooden globe with a carving of Vietnam.
Vea weaves one last story into the narrative, that
of Guillermo Carvajal-—a Mexican American army chaplain
serving with Jesse in Vietnam. During the most intense
battle Jesse's platoon endures, Carvajal loses his mind
and walks straight into the jungle of Vietnam never to
return to his unit. He reappears five years later in
Hong Kong, living with a woman named Cassandra. The
narrative details his trajectory from Vietnam to Hong
Kong and eventually to San Francisco where he is
instrumental in solving the double murders. Carvajal
brings the narrative full circle by the end of the novel
because he serves as a witness to the trauma experienced
by different characters throughout the story, allowing

219
different characters in the text to release their trauma
and begin to process it.
The three intertwined stories in the novel work
collectively to express a familiar complaint soldiers of
color often voice regarding their Vietnam experience:
they were drafted to fight against people resisting a
U.S. colonial domination that they personally as
minorities in the U.S. should be resisting. As one of
the black characters in Vea's novel declares after
learning of Dr. Martin L. King's assassination, "Jesus
Christ! … Why the fuck am I shooting at zips? They ain't
never did me no wrong, never called me nigger. I should
be back home shooting at the man, shooting at the Klan!"
8

Similarly, Jesse feels resentment about serving as an
agent of colonial expansion. As a Mexican American
civilian turned soldier he remains sensitive to the
history of discrimination against the Mexican community
throughout the American southwest and yet he maintains a
level of U.S. patriotism. To an extent, Jesse is both a
victim of colonialism and simultaneously an agent of
global U.S. colonial endeavors. More importantly,
Jesse's involvement in U.S. colonialism is unavoidable

220
since he understands his military experience in Vietnam
as a flashpoint within a more extensive ideological
conditioning that begins in childhood often presenting
itself as part of "normal" American life. In an
interview for a Chicano magazine titled Mi Gente, Vea
told the interviewer:
I read other books about the Vietnam War. Some were
very good: The Things They Carried, Dispatches, A
Rumor of War, but none of them satisfied me as to
the nature of war and the reason why so many young
men are willing to go see what it is. Anecdotal
tales of combat are meaningless to Americans, we
absorb tales of violence like a sponge.
Mythological violence is second nature to us. The
real thing is not. War begins long before battle,
it begins when we are boys longing for the
initiation rite of the warrior and everything it
promises: sexual prowess and sexual license. War
lasts long after the last bullet is fired, into old
age and death we go carrying a secret knowledge
that no one wants to know about. War is the
opposite of sexual prowess. War is desire stripped
of humanity.
9

For Vea, as for his protagonist Jesse, the
experience of war functions as a ritual that marks the
transition of young boys into adult male sexuality. Such
a ritual has a long lasting effect: It provides insights
into the psychological nature of war, but more
importantly, it tells us what we value as a nation.
Powers, sexual license, desire, are all elements of a

221
male youth culture that begin to take shape at an early
age, years before the actual experience of armed combat.
Furthermore, Vea's statement reveals the extent to
which he believes the minds of all young men in the U.S.
are colonized from a very early age. As he explains,
violence is so ubiquitous in U.S. culture that it
obfuscates the country's history of violence and the
method by which violence is used to subjugate different
communities within its own citizenry. Violence
represents a male's rite of passage, a natural
development that turns boys into men— a tool
intentionally used by the State to legitimize its
control over the population. Violence as a tool for
intra-colonization is one of the reasons Mexican
Americans such as Jesse can be turned into "agents" of
the State even after being colonized by it.
***
Vea's war narrative provides readers with
experiential knowledge unique to fiction written by
veterans. In 1971, Vea was drafted and sent to Vietnam
where he served in an Army combat unit. He returned to
the U.S. after finishing his tour and took various jobs

222
to pay his way through law school. Like his protagonist,
Vea worked as a lawyer in San Francisco for clients of
limited resources. Exposed to poverty, to war, and to
the inner workings of the U.S. legal system, Vea equips
Jesse Pasodoble not only with the sensibility of a
public defense attorney but also with that of a
traumatized soldier. Trauma theorist David Aberbach
claims that writing by and about survivors "often
present with rare clarity the characteristics of grief
and may, therefore, be treated as paradigmatic of
creative responses to loss."
10
I draw from Aberbach here
to suggest that Vea's fictional account of war and
trauma exposes other sites of trauma such as those of
blighted inner-city landscapes.
Textually, Vea sets up this parallel by
interpolating into the murder mystery plot entire
chapters focusing on Jesse's experiences as an infantry
soldiers serving deep in Vietnam's jungles. As such, the
author juxtaposes Potrero Hill (where the double murders
take place and where Jesse conducts his investigation)
and the hills of Vietnam (were Jesse is stationed). In
many ways, Tourette's Hill functions as the doppelgänger

223
for the hills of Vietnam; its topography and the
sentiment Jesse attaches to it parallel the sentiment he
attached to the hill he once protected as a young
sergeant. Within the narrative, Potrero Hill is one of
San Francisco's worst urban areas: riddled with crime,
narcotics and violence, the urban blight so extreme that
locals nickname it "Tourette's Hill" as in Tourette's
syndrome. The nickname refers to the visceral physical
reaction visitors experience as they approach the area.
Literally, people begin "twitching" from a desire to
commit crime. As Jesse's assistant Eddy puts it, "The
closer you get to the top of this terrain, the less
control you'll have over your faculties, your senses,
even your conscience."
11
The brutal violence that
profoundly scarred Jesse in Vietnam is played and
replayed on this hill. Vea's juxtaposition of spaces
allows him to comment on the urban landscape in what
David L. Eng would call the "animation" of history in
order to make trauma "active rather than reactive,
prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than
lacking, and social rather solipsistic."
12

224
One of the social critiques Vea accomplishes by
partnering the hills of Vietnam and the urban landscapes
of Tourette's Hill is to expose the material realities
urban youths experience, analogous to living in a
"combat zone." The words Vea uses to describe Tourette's
Hill draw from the language of war, and by rhetorically
linking these two geographical spaces he is able to
project the sentiment of war onto the urban landscape.
The following, for example, is how Vea describes a
soldier's feelings after enduring a particularly heavy
fire fight:
The fear had been overwhelming, suffocating,
completely debilitating. The fear had been
bestial. He had been paralyzed by the desperate,
selfish need to survive. Even hours afterward, his
muscles were still quaking spasmodically, coming
down from a deluge of adrenaline. The muscles of
this jaw were swollen from clenching, his teeth
hurt, and his intestines ached from the internal
pressure.
13

Immediately following the chapter detailing this
firefight Vea introduces Tourette's Hill where the
double murders took place. Here is how Vea describes
Tourette's Hill when Jesse first walks its streets:
Jesse began to feel that a sharp, involuntary
twitch had developed in his right hand. It began
as a small tug on his wrist muscles but soon grew
into a violent, twitching spasm that contorted the

225
muscles of his upper arm. Jesse gritted his teeth
and grabbed his right hand with his left. No matter
how much force he exerted he was unable to control
it.
14

In both passages, the language suggests a loss of
physical control, and an overall vulnerability to
external forces that overpower individual agency. In
Tourette's Hill, it is the overall effect of the hill
that controls Jesse's behavior and that of other
inhabitants. Likewise, in the lines describing the
firefight atop the hill on Vietnam, the stress of battle
forces the body into involuntary action.
The comparison turns Tourette's Hill into a combat
zone, where the physical and violent realities of the
place promote extreme forms of emotional response from
the young men. Jesse, for instance, continues to revisit
Tourette's Hill as part of his investigation, and unlike
other attorneys who avoid cases in the area, Jesse
embraces it. But he does so at a cost.
As Jesse drove south down Highway 280 and made the
exit at Potrero Hill, his troubled mind was, once
again, climbing another hill, one that rose up in
his thoughts a dozen times a day from a time long
ago and a place half a world away. Sometimes Jesse
truly believed that the hill near Laos was the
true, concrete world of the present, while the
lawyer and his cases in San Francisco were merely

226
wishful phantasms—the fabricated, desperate dreams
of a frightened soldier.
15

These lines are typical of the way trauma functions in
the novel. For example, it is precisely at the moment
that Jesse enters Potrero/Tourette's Hill that the
trauma resurfaces. In this manner, the trauma held by
the landscape in the urban setting releases the trauma
Jesse carried from Vietnam. In the lines "[s]ometimes
Jesse truly believed that the hill near Laos was the
true, concrete world of the present," Vea exposes his
suspicion about the impossibility of ever truly
overcoming wartime trauma. Instead of looking from the
present back toward the past, Vea positions his
protagonist in the past, in the very moment of trauma,
in order to interrogate and try to understand his
material realities of the present.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud
argues that the repeated nightmares and flashbacks of
shell-shocked soldiers constitute a violent attempt on
the part of the unconscious to master the trauma in all
its horror in order to overcome it. Freud observes that
shell-shocked soldiers return in their nightmares of
combat to the scene of trauma only to awaken in a state

227
of terror since nightmares represent a "re-entry" into
the experience and not necessarily a simple flashback.
He continues, "[the soldier] is obliged to repeat the
repressed material in a contemporary experience instead
of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it
as something belonging to the past."
16
Jesse's traumatic
regression into war trauma is consistent with Freud's
analysis of the traumatic subject "re-experiencing," or
better yet "re-entering" the repressed material in a
contemporary setting. As war either directly or
indirectly becomes part of the everyday experience for
Jesse, it furnishes the only contemporary stage on which
the present can be understood.
As Freud points out, a soldier's "re-entry" into
the traumatic past constitutes a reliving of it in order
to try and violently overcome it. Jesse's trauma marks
a permanent separation from a lifestyle that is not
intertwined with the happenstance of war and
consequently he can not understand events outside of a
combat setting. Toward the end of the book, Jesse, in
making his presentation to the jury,

228
When I first met you in the jail upstairs, Calvin,
I felt the way that each of the jurors felt when
they first laid eyes on you: I felt what you were
guilty. If not guilty of the crimes charged, you
must certainly have been guilty of something. How
could it be otherwise? How could it possibly be
otherwise? You were a young black man from the
Potrero Hill projects, one of the poorest places in
the city. You live on a hill where the fences are
topped with concertina wire, them shopkeepers are
armed, and the earth is mined with failure. You are
a boy born in a combat zone.
17

The horrors of blighted urban landscapes suggest that
murder and crime are the only possible options for urban
youth living in these areas. Like the landscape of war,
behavior for the young is prescribed without much option
for deviation. Tourette's Hill, above all, is symbolic
of a mass betrayal by the government against inner city
youth comparable to the sense of betrayal felt by a
large numbers of youths fighting in Vietnam. Tourette's
Hill, like war, reduces life to an abject form that
forces people into the brutal behavior of soldiers in
combat.
Tourette's is a unique area within the city,
perhaps, a spoof on the historic "city upon the hill."
It is a self-enclosed space that polices its own
boundaries against those who are not "native." This
restriction allows for the victims of trauma, those born

229
onto the hill, to become insular and perpetuate the
cycle of traumatic instances:
Tourette's is, in part, the result of radon gases
from all this concrete mixing with hamburger
wrappers and the tons of cocaine residue that have
fallen onto the roadway. This compound ferments
underfoot and is then bombarded by that dead blue
light that pours out of television screens.
18

Unlike Jesse's memories of Vietnam, Tourette's Hill
emerges as the geographical space in which urban trauma
materializes. As the lines suggests, this time by
pairing the language of war with the language of the
inner city, the people inhabiting Tourette's now live in
a war zone. Words and phrases such as "radon gas,"
"bombarded," and "dead blue light" are as deadly on the
battle field as "cocaine residue," "concrete mixing with
hamburger wrappers," and "television screens" are for
youth living in blighted urban spaces. But the
inhabitants of Tourette's are not being indicted as
victions, instead, what Vea seems to suggest is that the
experience of trauma is self-perpetuated when it goes
unrecognized.
Building upon Freudian theories of trauma, Cathy
Caruth argues that the structure of trauma is ultimately
a disruption between history and temporality.
19
The

230
traumatic event is not experienced, or fully assimilated
at the time it occurs; instead it is experienced
belatedly in the form of an insistent and intrusive
recurrence. As a consequence, traumatic events are not
available to memory in the usual way. Caruth's analysis
emerges out of Freud's famous account of trauma in
"Moses and Monotheism (1939)," in which the event that
caused the trauma returns after a period of latency.
Freud writes:
It may happen that a man who has experienced some
frightful accident—-a railway collision, for
instance-leaves the scene of the event apparently
uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks,
however, he develops a number of severe physical
and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his
shock, the concussion or whatever else it was. He
now has a 'traumatic neurosis.'
20

According to Freud, a person can escape a horrific event
without any visible physical wounds, but the mind
registers the trauma and it remains imprisoned by the
initial shock until released as "traumatic neurosis." In
this manner, the trauma endured in one location
manifests itself in another place and in another time.
Vea's novel vividly illustrates this phenomenon.
Vea's text is dedicated to "all the boys on all the
hills." The dedication speaks to the overwhelming

231
nature of the traumatic past, which cannot be contained
by memory, and is therefore always already leaking into
the present. From the beginning of the book, Vea lets
the reader know that the plot of the novel cannot flow
smoothly and seamlessly from the past into the present.
The word "all" in the dedication conflates the young
soldiers fighting atop U.S. occupied hills in foreign
lands with the young urban boys fighting atop urban
hills against poverty and social degradation. Jesse, for
example, experiences a traumatic event that is never
fully processed because places such as "Tourette's Hill"
continue to re-injure and re-triggers past trauma.
Jesse paused for a moment during his summation. He
glanced at some notes, but his mind was elsewhere.
The war that left two women and four boys dead on
the eastern slope of Potrero Hill did not begin
this year, or in this decade. It did not begin in
this city. It began years ago—eleven thousand days
ago, to be exact—on another hillside far from this
courtroom, far away from here.
21

As this reveals, trauma produces for Jesse a "problem"
with history since it plays out in the present but has
its origin in the past-never entirely back in the
mountains of Vietnam, but never entirely atop Tourette's
Hill either. When he writes that the war began years
ago "eleven thousand days ago, to be exact," Vea imports

232
the experiences of Vietnam into the contemporary making
the murders of the present very much a continuation of
violence in Vietnam.
Caruth's insistence on the inherent belatedness of
the understanding of a traumatic experience challenges
the idea of a straightforward historical narrative. For
if history is no longer available to a person as an
understandable chronological sequence of events, but
instead exists as an "incomplete sequence of
experiences," then the person is forced to rethink how
he/she engages with the past. In Vea's text, readers
have to ask themselves where unprocessed trauma really
exists. The event is, after all, not processed either in
the past or in the present and therefore Jesse's trauma
escapes historical placement within the narrative. It
just keeps reemerging.
Thus the narrative reveals that only when the
protagonist goes back in history to the initial site of
trauma can he begin to understand the material realities
of his present state. In the area of Tourette's Hill,
for instance, Vea is able to identify an extension of
the historical "belatedness" that Caruth mentions.

233
The result [of living here] is an insidious
chemical gas that slowly leaches the human spirit
out of these kids. It attacks and destroys the
hippocampus so that these kids have no future and
no cultural memory. Without a hippocampus they are
forced to live in the eternal now. The same thing
happens to all the young vatos in the Mission. The
gas robs all of them of their souls. Like soldiers
in extremis...
22

In the same way that the hills of Vietnam exist as
the site of trauma for a whole generation of soldiers,
Tourette's Hill exists as the cite of trauma for
generations of inner city urban youths. Except that
here the trauma is more insidious since it provokes the
loss of a community-wide cultural memory—- affecting
elders, women and children. Furthermore, as Jesse notes
when he refers to the "vatos in the Mission," the
process is systemic, since the same type of cultural
trauma is taking place in other urban areas of San
Francisco. Finally, the phrase "Like soldiers" in the
last sentence reminds the reader yet again that these
kids are, much like soldiers, being robbed of their past
and consequently of their future.
This juxtaposition of the two hills has
implications for how the U.S. as a nation is depicted in
the narrative. Jesse spends large portions of his time

234
in Vietnam talking to his fellow soldiers about America
as a historical concept. This conversation is informed
by Vea's deep understanding of the price paid by
marginalized groups in order for the U.S. to be the
colonial power it was during the Vietnam War. And
although the narrative isolates people of color as
bearing the brunt in the forging of America, Vea extends
the argument to include all soldiers, including poor
white youth, fighting the war.
America had fully expected to win without
suffering, without loss. The boys on the hill
knewdifferently. The American Dream—the two
bedroom house with a white picket fence—had always
been built on a graveyard. It had always been built
at the expense of the Huron Nation, at the expense
of the bison, and the expense of the Vietnamese. It
had always been built on a hill.
23

In this last sentence, the entire U.S. is included in
the analogy Vea draws between Vietnam and Tourette's
Hill. The trauma it holds as a geographical region
rests upon a "graveyard" that holds a history of death
beginning with the native Americans, with the "The Huron
Nation."
***
Superficially, the novel's subplot of rape and
incest provides a moral cautionary tale of "street

235
justice" for pedophiles since the perpetrators
ultimately meet unsavory ends: They are either shot
dead or permanently institutionalized in jails or
psychiatric wards. As a narrative device, however, the
sexual abuse of minors exposes what critic Elizabeth
Barns claims are "personal and political struggles and
anxieties in relation to the development of cultural and
ethnic identities."
24
Is the trauma of older generations
inflicted on younger ones? How is incest connected to
war and nation? One way to understand the presence of
incest in the novel is to unpack its connection to
nation: Incest functions as wartime trauma manifesting
itself in civilian life. What Vea seems to signal
through the theme of incest is that the trauma of abuse
we see in these families is analogous to the abuse a
nation perpetrates on its minors through the military.
Minnie Skelley is the ten-year-old daughter of
Vietnam veteran Richard Skelley. She is taken into
child services shortly after authorities discover she is
being sexually molested. The prime suspect is her uncle
Bernard Skelley, Jesse Pasodoble court-appointed client.
Bernard's guilt is questionable since Minnie can not

236
remember the incident; she suffers from trauma and
experiences lapses in memory. One of the few things she
remembers about the incidents of rape was the presence
of an eagle during the moment of sexual abuse. The
police hold Bernard as the prime suspect because of a
tattoo on his chest of an American screeching eagle.
Jesse's investigation uncovers that the true culprit of
Minnie's rape is Richard Skelley, Minnie's father, a
white supremacist with a liking for weaponry and all
things military. Richard's sister, Margie Skelley Dixin,
secretly contacts Jesse and asks him to visit her
because she may have information he can use in the case.
Upon Jesse's consent, Margie takes him to a large barn
where Richard stores a large collection of military
weapons, white supremacist paraphernalia. He also finds
the bed Minnie slept on. The bed's headboard contains a
massive, wood-carved screeching eagle with an image of
the Marine's Semper Fi. The eagle clutches in its talons
a flat wooden globe with a carving of Vietnam. This
serves as the central piece of evidence Jesse uses to
solve the case and win his trial.

237
The Semper Fi Marine motto engraving on the
headboard makes evident the nation's complicity in
Minnie's rape: Vietnam has severely traumatized Richard
and Minnie's rapes are a consequence of her father's war
time experience. In one of the more revealing passages
of the text, Vea makes clear the nation's responsibility
in the abuse:
If she refuses to name him, we may have to put this
case in front of twelve people. If the prosecutor
is hardheaded, you might have to take the stand. A
jury will have to decide which of the two eagles
has savaged little girls—this one or the one on
Bernard's chest. To my mind, this bedstead is
enough for a reasonable doubt. I know it'll
shatter Minnie's world into a thousand pieces, but
it may be a world that needs shattering. It won't
be easy, but you can help her make it. You are her
family now, Margie.
25

Jesse blurs the line of responsibility in this passage,
directly indicting the nation. Jesse's phrasing in fact
directly imports the nation's culpability into the
courtroom, where he can take the state to trial and a
jury can decide culpability. Minnie will also have to
assign blame and in the process "shatter" the image of
her father as a protective paternal figure. Such an act
parallels the type of "shattering" Vea seems to want
readers to experience when they recognize the nation as

238
a source of trauma (through war) rather than a
protective force.
The shattering of Minnie's world coincides with
what Caruth calls the moment of "realization," when
trauma becomes recognizable, and the assumed reality of
the contemporary can no longer co-exist with new
knowledge.
26
Minnie can never think of her father in the
same way again—precisely in the same way that citizens,
after the experience of war trauma, cannot think of the
nation in the same manner. In describing the bed, Jesse
explains:
He placed his hand on the quilt. It was a bed of
living, waking nightmares, a mattress of cold
fusion, a machine built to destroy the budding
hippocampus and create girls who have no memory—-
girls who live in an eternal present that is their
only defense against a terrible past, little girls
devoid of romance.
Jesse's voice dropped down to less than a
whisper. Girls like Margie and little Minnie had
seen war and would live to share the nightmare.
27

At this point in the novel it becomes clear that
Margie, like her niece Minnie, was abused by Richard.
That Richard abused two generations of women in his
family supports the idea that trauma is repetitive and
cyclical. This needs introduction I think this is the
second instance in the novel where Vea refers to the

239
hippocampus as the area in which memory is located. On
a purely biological level this would be true, since
current medical studies have isolated the hippocampus as
the area of the brain in which long-term memory is
stored. But more importantly for Vea, the hippocampus is
symbolic for what gives us identity. Trauma limits the
access to long-term memory, and Vea signals that these
instances of destructive trauma are more
institutionalized than Americans would like to admit.
Trauma is not immediate; it has a long and painful
history that is often forgotten in order to cope with
the present. Without the cultural memory of such trauma
the characters are destined to continue living in the
eternal present.
Richard's abuse of Minnie also challenges the
traditional family dynamics espoused by many American
politicians during the Cold War such as the nuclear
family with a citizen-soldier as patriarch. In Vea's
novel, the concept of the nuclear family is inverted.
Instead of serving as a structure of safety and support,
the family becomes a source of trauma, sexual
exploitation, and lost memories. As an abusive father,

240
Richard simultaneously functions as both the protector
and the oppressor: He is the soldier father who because
of war time trauma now exploits and abuses the female
members of his own family. Jesse makes this clear in one
of the conversations he has with his Vietnam vet friend
Hollis:
Vietnam was supposed to be a place where the boys
who made it got to go home and screw everything in
skirts. It was supposed to make us into men, but it
turned us all into stone."
28

The sexual license afforded to returning soldiers
becomes detached from any moral compass in civilian
life. Men are left emotionally dead, unable to "feel"
remorse even in the act of rape.
Vea's depiction of incest at the hands of white
supremacists further complicates the belief in nation as
a protective social structure for civilians. In Werner
Sollar's study Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (1997)
Sollars draws an analogy between the cultural anxieties
specific to "incest" and those of "miscegenation." As
Sollars explains, American society since the nineteenth
century was very concerned with miscegenation, often
seeing it as a "pollution" of the racial purity of
whiteness. In the 1900s, most believed miscegenation to

241
be as detrimental to the national culture as acts of
incest.
29
Sollar demonstrates in his study that the
notion of "blood purity" has currency in discussions of
race as well as family. In Vea's novel, Richard's
belief in white supremacy discernibly leads to incest.
As a white soldier who inherited a national history of
racial prejudice against "the other," and a person who
wants to maintain racial purity, incest offers a twisted
logic to him since it turns him "inward" and channels
erotic desire toward "one of his own." As such, Vea
seems to suggest that the nation's history of racial
colonization of people of color creates a perverse
inclination to self-destructive behavior even among
those it intends to privilege. Richard's crime against
his daughter is a white-on-white sexual transgression
with origins in wartime trauma that socially undermine
commonly held beliefs of nation as protector.
Vea provides readers with a similar critique of a
"national culture" with the second story of incest
concerning the Johnsons, a black family living on
Tourettes Hill. The second case of incest involves on
the family of Reggie Johnson, the young black man who

242
commits the double murders on Tourette's Hill. During
the investigation, Jesse decides to explore Reggie's
background for possible leads. One of the ways he
accomplishes this endeavor is by speaking to Reggie's
mother, Miss Princess Sabine Johnson. Sabine is a
beautiful former beauty contestant who lives alone atop
Tourette's Hill and who "The world was ignoring … worst
yet, the world had forgotten."
30
Sabine is the daughter
of Butler Johnson, and as the tale unfolds, Vea
discovers that Butler Johnson was an old pedophile who
cruised teenage social spots looking for possible
victims. Butler abused Sabine, and it was from that act
of incest that Reggie was born. Later in life, Sabine
herself develops a liking for minors and finds herself
publicly humiliated for sexually molesting young boys,
including her own son Reggie.
The story of Butler Johnson and Sabine comes to an
abrupt end when Anvil Harp enters the narrative. Anvil
Harp more than anyone in the story is the one person who
really cares for Sabine. As a teenager, Anvil falls in
love with Sabine, but she does not return Anvil's love.
Anvil enlists in the Marines to leave town. Upon

243
returning from the Korean War, Anvil again tries to woo
Sabine, but he finds out her father, Butler Johnson, has
been abusing her for years. In a rage, Anvil uses his
military rifle to gun down Butler in public. By the
time Jesse speaks to Anvil about the double murders and
his investigation, Anvil is serving an extended prison
sentence from which he will not be free until his early
seventies. As a Korean War Veteran, Anvil comes to
represent an extension of nationally sponsored violence-
—the patriotic soldier trained to kill. Unable to cope
with a civilian problem such as sexual abuse, he turns
to military force. Anvil uses his Korean War issued
rifle to carry out the violence.
Then I went out to the shooting range and zeroed in
the sights. It felt really good to shoot – it's
been a long time since Inchon. Then I looked at the
targets and polished up the brass, just like the
old days in boot camp. Then, when I was all locked
and loaded, I commenced to go lookin' for that old
bastard. That's right, Mr Eddy, I went hunting.
31

Anvil's brings past military experience in the Korean
War into civilian problems of the present. He prepares
for the killing of old man Johnson in the same manner
soldiers prepare for combat: cleaning weapons, practice
shooting, and calibrating the sights. He even uses the

244
well-worn phrase of battle ready soldiers: "locked and
loaded." Anvil's war time experiences manage to turn the
"ghetto" into an open battle field in which problems are
resolved through a soldier's code, one in which killing
the enemy is a viable solution. In what is a naïve and
violent approach to the problem, Anvil believes that
killing Johnson will somehow both bring justice and stop
the cycle of incest.
The problem, of course, does not end. The trauma of
incest is then perpetuated by Sabine upon Reggie, and we
are left to believe that Reggie, already a victim of
incest, will inevitably become the perpetrator of it in
his turn. The problem, Vea implies is much bigger: The
historical realities of trauma endured by communities of
color have predisposed people within the very same
community to continue victimizing themselves. Old man
Johnson, in a sense, was "already" a victim by being
born into a community that had been systematically
marginalized and oppressed through racism. He was born
black, poor and in a blighted urban landscape. His
abuse of his own daughter can be seen as a manifestation
of the abuse he already carried within him.

245
This is not to absolve Old Man Johnson of
culpability; my intent is to show how Vea underscores
the history of trauma and the propensity of trauma to
continuously manifest itself in those who carry it. In
a moment of reflection, Anvil comments on Sabine's
liking for young men by stating, "But it weren't her
fault, Mr. Eddy. It weren't her fault. She didn't have
no choice in it. After what happened, well, I went and
enlisted for Korea. Ain't there some kind of saying
about love and war."
32
Obviously not everything is "fair
in love and war," especially when a soldier's skills are
used to murder the father of a loved one. Sentenced to
prison for over half of his life, Anvil becomes the
symbol of the trauma present in the intra-colonization
of communities of color: trained by the military and
inheritor of national violence, he reacts in the only
way he knows how—-through violence. Anvil is a warped
version of a military that cannot function within
civilian mores, and he is therefore incarcerated and
segregated from the general population.
In both the incest of Minnie and the incest of
Reggie, the experiences of trauma focuses on the youth.

246
This is in step with the way both Tourette's Hill and
Vietnam are sites in which the nation is responsible for
the perpetuation of trauma. In fact, Vea seems to
extend the argument of incest to the war itself. In one
of the passages focusing on Jesse's wartime trauma,
Jesse complains to his Lieutenant about the absurdity of
their war, telling the captain that what the war amounts
to is an abuse of the young by the nation.
The infamous blue ballet," translated the sergeant.
"The infamous blue ballet is a French phrase that
means lewd acts with underage boys. That's exactly
how it's described in the French penal code.
That's all this fucking war adds up to, lieutenant:
Lewd acts with boys.
33

The trauma of sexual abuse makes sense when framed
within the context of U.S.'s treatment of its young.
Under normal circumstances, minors like Minnie and
Reggie would be under the protection of the federal,
state and local government. However, as the quotation
demonstrates, in this novel, the state is paired with
Richard and "old man Johnson" as older entities that
prey upon a powerless national youth.
***
The complement to experiencing trauma is witnessing
it. While war narratives often underscore the effects

247
of trauma on soldiers, they also tend to underestimate
the impact of witnessing it. This contiguous element of
trauma (the person who experiences it and the person who
witnesses it) is of fundamental importance, since the
recognition of trauma requires the presence of another
to confirm the event. Retrieving trauma involves the
presence of another person so that the person listening
and seeing bears witness to the reality of the event.
In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Dori
Laub writes that the process of recovering trauma
requires a listener who can verify the act.
In spite of the presence of ample documents, of
seating artifacts and of fragmentary memoirs of
anguish, [the victim of trauma] comes to look for
something that is in fact non-existent, a record
that has yet to be made. Massive trauma precludes
its registration; the observing and recording
mechanism of the human mind are temporarily knocked
out, malfunction. The victim's narrative- the very
process of bearing witness to massive trauma- does
indeed begin with someone who testifies to an
absence, to an event that has not yet come into
existence, in spite of the overwhelming and
compelling nature of the reality of its
occurrence.
34

For Laub, a witness is necessary for trauma victim
to begin processing a traumatic event. Alone, a
traumatized person cannot verify that an event actually
occurred and therefore the victim of trauma can not

248
retrieve the traumatic experience in order to process
it. For the event to come into full consciousness,
"what happened" must be articulated and it must be
voiced to a person "designated" as listener. By
extension, the listener to a traumatic event becomes a
participant in the traumatic event itself: to use one of
Laub's phrases, the listener becomes "co-owner" of the
trauma. Through the listener the person experiencing
the trauma can retrieve the event and bring it into
consciousness through a process in which the person
speaking "re-lives" the event. The listener then
witnesses the process and serves as the conduit for the
victim's ability to "re-experience" the event, and
hopefully assuage the power of the trauma.
Vea provides the reader with the quintessential
witness to trauma in the figure of the Army Chaplain,
Guillermo Moises Carvajal. Originally just a Chaplain,
"Padre" Carvajal becomes one of the key figures in the
novel—he links Jesse's war time trauma to the murders
and to Tourette's Hill. He is also the figure who brings
the narrative to a close. It is through Father Carvajal
that Jesse is able to finally purge some of the trauma

249
he carries from his own experience in Vietnam. When
Guillermo Carvajal is first introduced, he is serving in
Vietnam alongside Jesse. Originally named Guillermo
Moises Carvajal by his Sephardic family, he later
changes his name to William Calvert in order to
assimilate into English speaking U.S. culture and into
Catholicism.
Carvajal works with all the Catholics in the
platoon, including the large portion of young Catholic
Latinos. The high level of stress over war and the high
death rates erode Father Calvert's faith. During one of
the attacks in which his military camp was almost
overrun Calvert goes mad: the deaths of so many boys
make him insane, putting him in a trance-like state in
which he walks into the Vietnam jungle, never to return.
He journeys through the forest, often left alone by
Vietcong soldiers who realize he has lost his mind.
Eventually, Carvajal falls into a river and is left for
dead until he reemerges years later in a small
apartment, where he lives with a women named Cassandra.
For years, Calvert lives with this woman without
remembering anything pre-dating the day of the attack.

250
Gradually is revealed that after being rescued from the
river he lived in a Vietnamese brothel catering to Thai
soldiers. Calvert cared for the women in the
establishment, providing them with spiritual health and
hope. Cassandra re-named him Vô Dahn, a Vietnamese word
for "nameless." After regaining his memory, Carvajal
feels an overwhelming sense of guilt for having
abandoned his men. He then migrates to Tourette's Hill
in search of some of his old platoon buddies and to be
close to Cassandra. Tourette's Hill eventually provides
Calvert with an opportunity to continue serving as
Chaplain to those needing him.
35
After witnessing the
murders committed by Reggie, Carvajal decides to
intervene. He kills Reggie, claiming a mercy killing. In
the final pages, Carvajal is cleared of all charges.
Feeling that he has finally finished his "mission" on
the Hill, he walks away from Tourette's and into the San
Francisco bay committing suicide.
I suggest that Carvajal's trauma is a vicarious one
since he was a chaplain, not a soldier. As such, he
bore witness in two different ways: at one level, he
personally witnesses the brutality of war, and at

251
another, he bears witness to war through hearing
confession. Part of Carvajal's job includes listening
to soldiers and bearing witness to their traumatic
experiences. What may be called the chaplain's "double
witnessing" unlocks much of the trauma throughout the
novel since it provides different characters an
opportunity to better understand their traumatic
experiences. In her book Trauma Culture, E. Ann Kaplan
claims that "vicarious traumatization" may be a
component of witnessing, "[b]ut instead of only
intensifying the desire to help an individual in front
of one, witnessing leads to a broader understanding of
the meaning of what has been done to victims, of the
politics of trauma being possible."
36

Kaplan's argument is exemplified by the scene in
which Carvajal loses his mind. Carvajal misses one of
the most intense attacks his platoon has faced, and as
he discusses the attack with Jesse (then a young
lieutenant in the field), Carvajal begins to understand
the significance his presence held for the young
soldiers in his platoon,

252
Where the fuck were you last night, padre? ...
Lopez said his last confession to me and I'm no
priest! Lopez wanted you, padre. He had to settle
for me! He wanted to tell you that he stole money
from his mother when he was young, and that he used
to spy on his younger sister when she was naked in
the shower ... You let then all down!
37

The priest's presence was essential for Lopez since it
would have allowed Lopez to confess and have a spiritual
witness to exonerate his sins and prepare him for death.
Carvajal's presence would have allowed Lopez to die
fully immersed in Catholic rituals. It is understandable
then, that in the absence of Carvajal, Jesse must
intervene and bear witness to Lopez' trauma. The last
phrase indicates that in "witnessing an event" the
witness becomes completely, if not partially,
"responsible" for the release of the trauma.
38
Later in
the same scene, Carvajal asks Jesse to explain what
happened. Having failed the other soldiers at the
moment of battle, he wants to allow Jesse himself an
opportunity to purge his trauma and have a witness.
Jesse in turn tells the priest, "I can't tell you,
padre. I can't tell you what happened ... I don't ever
want to think about it again. Never again! I will die
before I ever think about this place again."
39
Unable to

253
release the traumatic event, Jesse internalizes the
trauma. Carvajal then looks into Jesse's eyes and states
"You're not the same. I can see you're not the same. I
don't know why, but I can see it. I know I should have
been here. I know I should've been here."
40
Because
Carvajal was the one who bore witness to the soldiers,
his eventual inability to serve his flock brings the
concept of "failed responsibility" to the forefront.
When we encounter Carvajal again years later, he is
living with a Vietnamese women named Cassandra in Hong
Kong. He returns to the narrative, both literally and
figuratively, when he regains his memory. He regains his
memory while lovemaking as if experiencing a form of
rebirth during the sexual act. Cassandra in a sense "re-
delivers" him into the world: "he awoke from his
drowning dream…, sweating, naked and breathless, his
erect male penis inside a woman who called herself
Cassandra."
41
At this point Carvajal's trauma is
relieved, since he finally finds someone who can nurture
him back into consciousness and bear witness to his
trauma. Cassandra does in fact become Carvajal's
witness; Carvajal tells her about his past in the

254
service and of his formative years in Mexico. In so
doing he brings the past back into the present. The
novel fulfills Laub's claim about the essential need for
a witness to bring forth "an event that has not yet come
into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and
compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence."
42

For Carvajal, Cassandra becomes the conduit by
which he is able to access his past and come to terms
with it. The processing of trauma between Cassandra as
witness and Carvajal as speaker is encapsulated in the
phrase he often repeats to her, "It seems that
remembering means forgetting."
43
Only after Carvajal
retrieves his memory is he able to process the trauma
and move forth. The phrase "remembering means
forgetting" also brings the narrative full circle since
it is after he remembers his experience in Vietnam that
he is once again overwhelmed by guilt for failing to
"witness" the reality of war to those he served as
Chaplain.
Cassandra, te quiero. Something deep inside me
loves you more than I can say. But I have to go
back to a hill and find my last flock, or what's
left of it. I abandoned them all, Cassandra. I
walked away when they needed me the most. Will they
ever forgive me? They are all back in America. The

255
ones who survived. I know they are all back in the
world.
44

The realization marks Carvajal's transition from Hong
Kong to Tourette's Hill where he again bears witness to
the violence on the Hill. For Carvajal Tourette's Hill
is a continuation of what began in Vietnam. If, as I
suggested earlier, Tourette's Hill triggers Jesse's war
trauma, then Carvajal's presence in Tourette's connects
the traumas that Vietnam and urban city living impose
upon the young men who dwell on the hills. Carvajal
witnesses the murder of the two women, and he also
witnesses two other murders Reggie carries out on the
Hill. Carvajal once again finds himself in the
situation he was in while serving in Vietnam, bearing
witness to killings and witnessing the confessions of
the dying.
As a "witness" to the violence atop Tourette's
Hill, Carvajal's presence gives real substance to the
metaphoric analogy Vea makes between the Vietnam War and
Tourette's Hill. Carvajal's presence on the Hill
highlights a people at war. Not only do they both have
a chaplain, but they also include territorial struggles,
weapons caches, and battle commanders. When Reggie

256
shoots two women, Carvajal goes to them in the same way
an army field chaplain goes to a wounded soldier.
But before the final flicker of light was fully
extinguished, both women beard a single voice, a
single set of lips against their ears. A man ran
through the haze of gun smoke, up to the women,
just after the bullets found their targets. How was
a man in rags and torn shoes. He wore a filthy army
fatigue jacket and jungle boots. He kneeled down
beside the women and spoke to them despite the hail
of gun fire that sliced the air above his head.
He blessed them even as claymore mines were
being clicked all just beneath his position by
squads of desperate boys. He tended his panicked
flock despite the horrific moans of grief and pain
around him, despite the roar of air support.
45

Vea's writing at this point once again channels the
experiences of Vietnam. Much in the way readers see
Jesse move back and forth in time through traumatic
flashbacks, Carvajal's experiences on Tourette's Hill
take the reader back to his military experiences. His
use, for example, of phrases such as "running through a
haze of smoke" and "claymore mines were being clicked"
touches on the experience of Vietnam and dislocates the
actual event Carvajal is experiencing. As a reader, it
is difficult to decipher if it is Carvajal associating
Tourette's Hill with Vietnam, or if as a result of the
traumatic experience in Vietnam Carvajal is actually
having a flashback.

257
In this novel, however, "witnessing" is not neatly
allocates between observer and active agent. Carvajal
at the end of the narrative kills Reggie in order to
keep him from further murders. Here again the insights
of E. Ann Kaplan may prove useful. In writing of WWII
survivors and their trauma, Kaplan claims that people
who experience trauma do have access to memories of the
event, but that the victim of trauma sustains only
"partial memories of what happened. But at the same
time, what one remembers may be influenced by fantasies
and desires, or by a wish that things had been
different."
46
In response to the guilt and subsequent
trauma that overwhelmed Carvajal the first time he
"abandoned" his "flock" in Vietnam, in Tourette's he
decides to make a difference. Killing Reggie, Carvajal
seems to believe, is an act of liberation for all
members of the hill: Carvajal can stop bearing witness,
the people are freed from Reggie's tyranny, and Reggie
is finally free from his own trauma. In this manner,
Carvajal attempts to heal the trauma he gained in
Vietnam and carried into Tourette's. When Jesse
questions him about the murders, Carvajal testified,

258
"There are mercy killings during wartime... When there's
no choice, no way out, when someone in wounded beyond
hope. Reggie struggled for air, but he did not really
resist."
47

Carvajal's explanation of Reggie's death closes the
three narrative strands: Jesse's murder trial, the
double case of incest, and Carvajal's own trajectory
from Vietnam to Tourette's Hill. For reasons we never
know, the novel tells us the prosecutor never filed
charges against Carvajal. Carvajal, nevertheless, once
freed from the responsibility of witnessing, is
physically and spiritually free and so without any need
for him he walks into a river and drowns himself.
Perhaps as a final symbolic act of rebirth into the
after life, or as an act of cleansing himself of the
violence, the river's water swallow him up, along with
the trauma he witnesses throughout the novel.
***
In Gods Go Begging, trauma influences the different
stories for each character. In response to his wartime
trauma, Jesse becomes a lawyer and works with urban
youth, whom Jesse views as urban soldiers. Sabine's and

259
Reggie's trauma lead to tragedy; unable to escape the
realities of urban living atop Tourette's Hill, each
succumbs to a violent end. In this manner, each one
becomes an example of the cyclical nature of trauma
within a culture that remains unconscious of the pain
and injury it has suffered. Carvajal's trauma leads him
back to Tourette's Hill where he can be close to
Cassandra and reinserts himself into a landscape that
continues the war he left behind in Vietnam. Trauma
serves as the catalyst that binds these characters
together, whether Chicano, Black, Vietnamese or
Sephardic Jew, but it is also the legacy of a damaging
past that imposes itself onto the present urban
landscape these communities inhabit.
Trauma also represents the violence and brutality
that are the endpoints of a nation actively colonizing
its own civilians. The community that lives atop
Tourette's Hill finds itself under an ideological
assault by the nation that keeps it from questioning,
from having the opportunity to resist. Consequently,
their trauma is not registered in the way Jesse's is.
Only when they are taken out of the environment and see

260
their living conditions from a distance are they able to
understand it. For example, when Biscuit finally gets
out of jail and returns to Tourette's, "he saw what he
had never seen before: roaming squads of fatherless
boys, single mothers living on C-rations, marauding
bands of tiny mercenaries proudly wearing their insignia
of rank and assignment."
48
Biscuit is saved in the end;
the young man is the one character in the novel who has
a transformative experience that actually helps him
survive. His time away from the Hill awakens him to the
problems of the urban experience. Ironically, because he
is poor and black, jail is the one option he has to step
out of his daily routine. This technique of distancing
characters from the moment of trauma as a way for the
character to "recognize" injury Vea uses continuously
throughout the novel. It is the one surefire way for his
characters to escape the ideology around the trauma that
keeps them from understanding what has happened. Writing
of the Cold War in whose context the Vietnam War took
place, Stephen Whitefield says:
It was not invented but inherited, and some of its
components were intensified under the political
pressures of the era. The belief system that most
middle-class Americans considered their birthright—

261
the traditional commitment to competitive
individualism in social life, to the liberal stress
on rights in political life, and to private
enterprise in economic life—was adapted to the
crisis of the Cold War.
49

Vea's extended reflection on the nature of trauma
for Mexican Americans and communities of color works
intertextually with other Vietnam War novels such as Joe
Rodriguez's The Odds Player and Charlie Trujillo's Dogs
From Illusion. In Rodriguez's novel, for example, the
trauma of war blurs the line between opponent and
oppressor. The book's two protagonists, Private
Hernandez and Private Perez, feel like victims of both
the Vietcong and the US since both continue to be the
source of trauma. In the end the soldiers frag their
superior officers in an attempt to keep from being
pushed into the front lines. In Charlie Trujillo's Dogs
From Illusion the characters work themselves up to such
a pitch because of repetitive trauma that the narrative
transitions into depictions of surreal violence where
trauma itself becomes the norm and peace becomes
abnormal. As with Vea's book, Trujillo indicts the
nation for being the source of trauma, the characters in

262
his book are poor farm workers who try to escape the
poverty of the fields by enlisting in the Army.
Vea presents his readers with the voices of those
who are victims of traumatic violence though war. He
documents the seemingly endless cycle of violence and
abuse perpetuated in various forms by the nation. The
voices bear witness to their own experiences; it is up
to the reader to discern the points of interconnection
between the characters in the novel not only atop
Tourette's Hill in contemporary San Francisco, but also
on the hills of Vietnam almost thirty years in the past.
Vea's polyphonic text is not content to narrate the
story of an individual in relation to the events of his
or her own past, but moves beyond this to the way in
which individual trauma is always tied up with the
trauma of a nation.

263
CHAPTER 5 ENDNOTES

1
Alfredo Vea. Gods go Begging. (Dutton: New York. 1999) 109.
2
Ibid 109.

3
110.

4
"Suppose" becomes and on going game that Jesse creates and plays
with other soldiers. It is a game in which one takes a historical
moment, changes some of the initial variables about the moment, and
then "supposes" what the present would be like if it would have been
true.

5
Even though the Spanish took an enormous toll in the human lives,
they followed a policy of bringing Christianized Indians into the
colonial society that they were building. The "place" of the
Indians in this society was at the bottom; nevertheless, they were
counted "in" rather than "out." This policy of the Spanish led to a
high degree of intermarriage with Europeans. As a result, by the
time Mexico achieved independence in 1821, the culture and
population of Mexico was much more 'Indianized' than was the culture
and population of the United States.

6
The Mexican Aeronautical and Space Agency does not exist. There is
a Mexico Space Agency named the Agencia Espacial meXicanA (AEXA).
The space agency focuses primarily on astrophysic and astronomic
research.

7
This created an odd dynamic since Jesse is Mexican and he has to
represent a White Supremacist.

8
Vea 134.

9
Zarazua, Daniel D. "An Interview with Alfredo Vea." Mi Gente,
March 2000.

10
Aberbach, David. Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and
Psychoanalysis. (New Haven: Yale Uni Press, 1989) 81.

11
Vea 97.

12
Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian (ed). Loss: The Politics of
Mourning. (Berkeley: Uni of Berkeley Press, 2003) 344.

13
Vea 97.

14
Ibid 167.

15
159.

264

16
Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (New York: Norton
and Comp, 1990) 110.

17
Vea 272.

18
170.

19
Cathy Caruth. Ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: John
Hopkins Uni Press, 1995) 3.

20
Freud 65.

21
Vea 274.

22
Ibid 170.

23
197.

24
Elizabeth Barnes. ed. "Natural and National Unions: Incest and
Sympathy in the Early Republic." Incest and the Literary
Imagination. (Gainesville. Uni Press of Florida. 2002) p. 2.

25
Vea 232.

26
Caruth 23.

27
Vea 223.

28
Ibid 223.

29
Sollars, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both. (New York:
Oxford Uni Press, 1997.) p. 54.

30
Ibid 185.

31
259.

32
261.

33
96.

34
Feldman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing
in Literature. (New York: Routledge, 1992) 57.

35
Cassandra, the women he lives with for five years was the same
Cassandra who lived with Persephone and whose husband was an NVA
soldier killed in battle.

36
Kaplan, Ann E. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in
Media and Literature. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press, 2005) 23.

265

37
Vea 135.

38
Kaplan 125.

39
Vea 135.

40
Ibid 137.

41
207.

42
Shoshana and Laub 57.

43
Vea 207.

44
Ibid 213.

45
290.

46
Kaplan 42.

47
Vea 304.

48
Ibid 300.

49
Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. 2
nd
ed.
(Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni Press 1996) 53.

266
CHAPTER 6. EPILOGUE

After the events of September 11, 2001, street
vendors in my neighborhood, mostly undocumented
immigrants from Mexico and Central America, stopped
selling bottled water and red roses and began selling
U.S. memorabilia. Bright flags, stickers, pins and t-
shirts with the American eagle overflowed from pushcart
baskets at freeway exits and street corners. For that
first week, my block was draped in red, white and blue.
People hung the American flag on their porches, and the
street cars along the road carried (almost in uniform)
little plastic flags on old greasy radio antennas. This
was the closest I had ever come to really experiencing
collective national sentiment. I was born in 1973, in
the latter days of the Vietnam war and far after Korea,
the Kennedy assassination, and the bombing of Pearl
Harbor.
I knew that both I and the people in my
neighborhood were having a collective experience because
for the first time people of different racial and ethnic
backgrounds in my community were in agreement—we had

267
been attacked. In the ensuing conversations with
neighbors, it became clear we all felt we had been
attacked, even though it was not altogether clear who or
what "we" meant. America had been attacked, and on
September 11, at least for that week, it seemed as if we
were all Americans. I was fascinated to see how a
community that had, for so long, voiced disgust at anti-
Latino xenophobic attitudes in the U.S. had all of a
sudden become overtly patriotic, embracing the general
US sentiment of the time.
In the weeks that followed, I watched closely the
military actions that unfolded first against
Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Up to that point, I had
avoided following wars too intently in the media; they
always seemed too distant and far too disconnected from
my daily experiences in the South side of Los Angeles. I
did take notice of a few military skirmishes that
followed, but it was not until I began to see yellow
ribbons on my neighbors' trees that I began to pay more
serious attention to Americans fighting overseas.
I began this project by exploring the literature of
war written by Latinos who fought in the Korean War and

268
Vietnam War. I studied the responses of Latino veterans
of the Korean War to civil rights issues. In many
respects, these Korean War veterans set the stage for
Latino veterans of the Vietnam War by focusing on the
importance of public recognition of their service, not
only as Americans but as Americans of Spanish-speaking
background. Consequently, my dissertation reveals that
military service is not intrinsically tied to "civic
responsibility." As a matter of fact, serving in the
military due to civic obligation is something that
rarely emerges when Latinos write about war. This is
probably because almost all of the writers I cover
recognize in some section of their books that Latinos
are being culturally exploited in areas of labor,
housing, education and/or federal resources. This is
especially true for writers who served in the Vietnam
War, since during this time period many in the community
began to question U.S. government propaganda regarding
the value of patriotism. Indeed, the Chicano Movement as
a whole served as a counterbalance to a "pro-American"
national stance that sought to draft large numbers of
minorities, not only Latinos, but also blacks, Asians,

269
and Native peoples. Such recognition by Latino soldiers
makes it difficult to entertain feelings of obligation
to "Nation," even when they remained grateful for many
of the opportunities available after their families
migrated. Furthermore, national messages of patriotism
had to contend with the cultural nationalism of the
Chicano movement as a whole. While this cultural
nationalism also contained inherent problems, activists
succeeded in furthering political awareness among
Latinos and among Americans in general about the
country's Latino population.
The impact of the Chicano movement in particular
problematized traditional communal beliefs of national
belonging. While the WWII generation of Latino soldiers
fought to establish a community in which everyone
obtained equal citizenship, internal disagreement
regarding the value of assimilation along with the
emergence of racial/ ethnic nationalism basically
problematized what Benedict Anderson would call an
"imagined community." Within the Latino community there
existed a very pronounced division as to how to relate
to Nation as a whole. One the one hand, many in the

270
service wanted to see themselves as part of the nation,
different from other Americans only in hyphenation, as
say, a Mexican- American would differ from an Irish-
American or an Italian-American. On the other hand,
those who opposed the wars (Vietnam in particular) began
to see themselves as a native group subjected to
American colonization. Critical of U.S. intervention
oversees, Chicano movement participants interrogated
ethnic traditions of pride in military service. This
lead to one of the various fractures in the Chicano
Movement. The soldiers who returned sided with an
acculturation process, mainly because they saw
themselves as Americans first and then as
ethnic/racially different second.
One of the arguments I make in Chapter 4 is that
the desire to assimilate occurred because many of
veteran authors believed in a meritocracy. Authors such
as Roy Benavidez, Everrette Alvarez, and Freddy Gonzalez
often looked at civilian life in the same way they
looked at the military experience, one in which a person
ascended based on merit. This is not to say they did
not recognize real structural obstacles such as racism;

271
they did, and mentioned it in their writing. But they
saw meritocracy as the more progressive way of "wishing"
civilian culture to be. Arguably, to them it was the
most "fair" since it structurally omitted racial
preference and rewarded those who deserved it. For many
in the anti-war movement this was a naïve expectation at
best, since it failed to take into account the history
of racism and discrimination that explained the real
social conditions of the community.
The cultural division over nationalism also
filtered into conflicts over masculinity for Latino
soldiers and veterans. In the literature I cover, many
of the men felt that military service provided them with
a viable option to redress experiences of emasculation
endured in their youth. The military provided these men
a socially acceptable and viable structure to reassert
manhood without it being socially destructive, as it
often is when done in an inner city setting.
Furthermore, they felt that service in the military
provided meaning to masculinity at a national level and
at a local community level. It provided such meaning
because it was tied to military objectives and the

272
assertion of an aggressive military masculinity to
accomplish a set goal. Yet, this also became problematic
because turning to the military as a source of
masculinity generated its own problems. Often the type
of masculinity espoused in the military was hyper-
aggressive and it participated in a very destructive
form of masculinity that helped maintain a patriarchal
social structure. Even in the military soldiers risked
constructing a deviant type of masculinity, the story of
Army Capt Ernest L. Medina being a good example. Median
returned to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1970 to face
criminal charges because he was the commanding officer
during the My Lai massacre. Such an incident
problematizes the type of military masculinity Medina
and to a large extent the writers I cover in this
dissertation sought to establish.
1

Very conscious of their masculinity in the general
culture, these men were unsuccessful at stabilizing the
image of Latino masculinity that was often portrayed as
the aberrant hyper violent pistolero, the suave
womanizer, the macho wife-beater, the gang member/
pachuco, or the lazy beer drinker at home. Arguably,

273
part of the reason military masculinity failed to gain
traction with Latino youth in general is because Latino
veterans became just another "archetype" of masculinity
within the community. For the most part their
masculinity was not so much tied to military exploits
but rather to their behavior once they returned as
veterans. As I argue in my chapter on returning Korean
War veterans, many of these men joined established
organizations designed to help the community and their
civilian behavior was eventually tied to military
experience. This is to say that Latino veteran
masculinity was not so much based on what they did while
at war, but rather on how well they controlled their
military experience once they return from it. Everett
Alvarez understood this well, his second book Code of
Silence is based on this premise and as such he
structured the entire text around the lessons he learned
as a P.O.W. and how they effects the decision he makes
as a civilian. Roy Benavidez ends his book, not at the
moment he receives the Congressional Medal of Honor, but
rather when he is allowed to speak in front of congress

274
as a retired veteran and as a representative of other
Vietnam War veterans.
We see therefore, how despite the hopes of many of
these soldiers of the Cold War era to use the military
as a path to social equality and re-masculinization they
had only limited success. And while the military was
and remains a legitimate pathway into the middle class
for individuals, it has had only marginal success in
pushing the whole community forward. Now, after the end
of the Cold War and five years into the Iraqi War the
benefits that come with military service (in particular
access to the G.I. Bill) continued to encourage Latino
men and women to enlist. Hopefully, for those currently
serving in the Iraq war the practice of writing about
their experience of war will continue to mitigate
conflicting cultural arguments regarding national
service and the impact of war on gender.

275
CHAPTER 6 ENDNOTES

1
Loren Oropeza. Raza Si! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism
During the Viet Nam War Era. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005) 188.

276
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Asset Metadata

Creator Arce, William (author)

Core Title Nation in uniform: Chicano/Latino war narratives and the construction of nation in the Korean War and Vietnam War

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 03/27/2009

Defense Date 12/12/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chicano,Cold War,Korean War,Latino,masculinity,Military,nation,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Vietnam War,War

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McKenna, Teresa (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Messner, Michael A. (committee member)

Creator Email warce@usc.edu,william.arce@uta.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2036

Unique identifier UC1126013

Identifier etd-Arce-2662 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-217517 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2036 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Arce-2662.pdf

Dmrecord 217517

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Arce, William

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu