Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  • • •

  IN 1940, PRESIDENT Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the first peacetime draft in American history. The secretary of war drew the first selective service number and it belonged to Pedro Aguilar Despart, a Mexican-American from East Los Angeles. Up to half a million Latinos would follow Pedro into uniform, including 375,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and more than 72,000 Puerto Ricans.

  They volunteered for the most hazardous duties and military specialties. They won more than their share of decorations for bravery. A remarkable seventeen Latinos won Medals of Honor, America’s highest military decoration. It had been only some eighty years since the first Latinos won the decoration “for conspicuous gallantry” during the Civil War.

  Military units were often drawn from one geographical area, so the housing segregation in force in their hometowns often followed Latino servicemen and women into service. Many served in entirely Latino units: the 88th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, called “the Blue Devils” in the Italian campaign; Company E of the 141st Regiment from El Paso, Texas; and from Puerto Rico the “Borinqueneers,” the 65th Infantry Regiment. They fought ferociously. One general said of his Latino soldiers, “They were the first to fire and the last to lay down their arms.”

  The stories of Latino servicepeople both illustrate their evolving status inside American society, and remind you of the amazing—and sometimes peculiar—personal journeys that can happen only in America.

  Rafaela Muniz Esquivel had trained as a nurse in San Antonio and started work in the last months before the war began. She joined the Army Nurse Corps as a second lieutenant and worked in a military hospital stateside. As the war moved toward its bloody climax, Muniz Esquivel moved toward the front. She treated mounting numbers of casualties in England, then France, then Luxembourg. In what was once the summer palace of the Duchess of Luxembourg, she received both American and German wounded. She recalled to an oral historian, “That was where they used to bring the wounded back by loads. We were always on the go. Most of the time we were dressed. We didn’t have time. There was no way that we could really get undressed to sleep.”

  Patients arrived on litters, and were then placed on top of cots until a triage nurse could determine whether a patient needed to head right to surgery or into a ward. “It could have been beautiful before all those casualties were there,” Esquivel says. “The grounds were big, but I never went on the grounds.”

  While it is easy to determine how many Puerto Ricans from the island were drafted and enlisted during World War II, it is harder to figure out how many Puerto Ricans served from families that had already migrated north. Eugene Calderon was one of them, and his strange story tells you something about the difficulties a legally segregated military had in dealing with Latinos.

  Eugene Calderon. In the segregated military of the Second World War, white officers complained when the young Puerto Rican New Yorker was assigned to their unit. When he was moved to the famed Tuskegee Airmen, black soldiers and aviators did not understand why he was with them either. After the war, Calderon founded some of the institutional pillars of Latino New York. CREDIT: COURTESY OF CALDERON FAMILY

  Calderon was born in San Juan in 1919, and moved to New York as a boy with one of the earliest waves of Puerto Ricans in the 1920s.

  “My father was a gang leader in East Harlem,” recalled his son Gene. “And the police in the area were cracking down. They got a hold of his group and were arresting them. They missed catching him by about three feet.

  “The following day he enlisted in the military and that is how he began his military career.” Calderon told the military he wanted to fly, and he was sent to Alabama. “When he landed in Tuskegee they put him in with the white officers, and the white officers complained that he was not white. So they moved him over to the black officers in the black barracks and they complained because he wasn’t black. He ended up being in the third barracks, where he and another Latino were, and they were the only two in the barracks.” Calderon became a company clerk for the now famed Tuskegee Airmen.

  Calderon told his son the army used a subtle dodge to control the number of fliers of color by monitoring their flying hours. “And as soon as they got anywhere close to certifications they would transfer them to a different area and then they would have to start accumulating those hours again.

  “When he got close to his hours they moved him [from Tuskegee] out to South Dakota in the middle of the winter. Here is this Puerto Rican from New York City in South Dakota in the middle of the winter. Then they sent him to the Midwest. Here he is trying to do something, wanting to contribute, and yet every time he came close it was like he was being tempted with a treat and as soon as you got too close it was taken away from you.

  “In Tuskegee he had a real sense of what discrimination was all about. He never thought of it in New York, because in East Harlem there were Italians and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Jews and Irish. When he went down south they didn’t have that kind of integration, so he got the full sense of, ‘Why am I being separated?’”

  Guy Gabaldon could trace his family’s presence in America back to the arrival of Spanish soldiers in the American Southwest, some four hundred years before. Gabaldon was born and raised in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. At the age of ten, he was already earning his own money, shining shoes downtown.

  Gabaldon was tough, and ready for whatever he might face. Friends like Lyle Nakano remember young Gabaldon as a wild boy: “Guy was always trying to prove he had a lot of guts. He used to jump out of second-story windows, hop trucks, ride freight trains on a dare and sometimes without a dare. But one thing: Guy always stood by his friends.”

  His life took a peculiar turn for a Mexican kid from Boyle Heights. A Japanese-American family took him into their home during his middle teen years. He didn’t know it at the time, but the Nakano family was giving him life-changing gifts. “They taught me Japanese,” Gabaldon said. “But mostly, they taught me how to love.”

  History intervened to make Gabaldon’s novel life valuable to his country. Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, and the next day, America was at war. California’s place on the Pacific coast led to panic, and turned suspicion on tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Whether recent arrivals or second- and third-generation Americans, a hundred thousand ethnic Japanese were rounded up and sent inland to hastily built relocation camps.

  Marine Private First Class Guy Gabaldon (center in sunglasses). After living with a Japanese family in the years leading up to the Second World War, Gabaldon watched his foster family sent to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese he picked up along the way came in very handy after he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to the Pacific. He became the “Pied Piper of Saipan,” convincing cornered, outnumbered, and desperate Japanese soldiers to surrender rather than fight. By doing so, he saved thousands of Japanese and American lives. He is seen here with civilians on Saipan. CREDIT: STEVEN RUBIN

  The Nakanos were sent to an internment camp in Arizona. Guy Gabaldon lost his friends and the people who had become his family. “I was left alone in L.A. All my buddies were gone.” On his seventeenth birthday, in 1943, Gabaldon headed for a recruiting office. His new family would be the United States Marine Corps. An elite military force, the Marine Corps did not throw out the welcome mat to racial and ethnic minority recruits. Latino numbers were small, and the door was not opened to blacks until 1942, when a few all-black units were raised. But Gabaldon had one thing few men turning up in California recruiting offices did: He spoke Japanese. At the same time that Japanese-Americans were heading to internment camps, America was heading to war with Japan.

  By 1944, U.S. forces, including Gabaldon’s 2nd Marine Regiment, were heading west and tightening the noose on Japan’s dwindling empire. Next in the chain of islands “hopped” by the marines was Saipan in the Mariana Islan
ds. With each stepping-stone across the Pacific, American forces were closer to being able to mount regular and sustained attacks on the Japanese home islands. If Saipan was secured, enormous bombers, the B-29 Superfortresses, would be well within range of Japan.

  As America drew closer to Japan, however, the already fierce fighting became even more savage. Gabaldon’s commanding officer, Captain John Swabie, remembers the young marine’s first impressions of Saipan: “When we landed and Guy saw for the first time wounded and killed Japanese soldiers he froze. It really bothered him.”

  He didn’t stay frozen for long. His first night on Saipan, the young marine went off on his own—with no orders from his superior officers—and headed behind Japanese lines. Gabaldon remembered his early forays behind the lines: “I came back with a couple of prisoners. My commanding officer, he says, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ He says, ‘This is the Marine Corps and there will be teamwork here.’”

  His early success did not win the argument. His commanding officer went on: “‘You’re not a prima donna. You’re not working on your own.’ I says, ‘Yes, sir, very good, sir.’ And that night I filled my pockets with ammunition, and I went back into Japanese territory.”

  His secret weapon? The Japanese language skills picked up living with the Nakano family in East L.A. Gabaldon went to the Japanese soldiers, cut off from resupply, fighting American forces growing stronger by the day, and told them fighting on was pointless. “At night I’d go to caves. I’d get to one side of the mouth of the cave and say, ‘You are completely surrounded. I’ve got a bunch of marines here with me behind the trees. If you don’t surrender, I’ll have to kill you.’

  “And usually, it worked. Not always. I’d have to throw grenades in and kill. And I’d capture maybe ten or fifteen, twenty at a time.”

  He was taking prisoners. He was also saving lives. On island after island, American soldiers and marines were forced to flush out Japanese soldiers determined to resist to the bitter end, and kill them. Square mile by square mile, the Americans took more and more of Saipan, until, trapped on the tip of the island, Japanese troops began to launch suicide attacks. Many of the besieged men had concluded they had only two choices: kill or be killed. Guy Gabaldon offered them another option.

  In July, weeks after the initial American landing on Saipan, marine patrols came upon a large group of Japanese soldiers. In their midst stood a single marine. Many of the Japanese were still armed, but no longer in combat. An American teenager was ordering them around—in Japanese. Gabaldon alone was bringing in eight hundred prisoners.

  “I had them look out at the ocean and I said, ‘The war is over. Look at all those destroyers and navy ships out there. This is pointless. Go home to your families.’” He was saving the lives of Japanese soldiers, but don’t forget that by ending their resistance, he was also saving the lives of hundreds of his fellow marines who would have certainly died in brutal charges on fortified Japanese positions, manned by an enemy ready to fight to the death.

  Guy Gabaldon was given the nickname “the Pied Piper of Saipan.” That whimsical name undersold the magnitude of what a teenage marine had done. Acting on his own initiative, Gabaldon had captured half a Japanese regiment by himself. By taking more than a thousand enemy soldiers out of the action, he saved the lives of countless Americans. His commanding officer nominated him for a Medal of Honor. He was given a lesser honor, the still considerable Silver Star. Later he was given the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor, awarded for “extreme gallantry” and “going beyond the call of duty.”

  Years later, Gabaldon remembered success had a hundred fathers. “After the campaign we set up a rest camp and high-ranking officers came in and promotions and decorations were handed out to those who had earned them. Pretty much everyone in my company was promoted, except me.”

  Half a world away, in Europe, another Mexican, one who came to the United States as a little boy, was helping to bring victory for his adopted country within reach. Macario Garcia was born in Villa de Castaño in the Sierra Madre Mountains, one of ten children. The family moved to Texas to work as sharecroppers. Accounts differ as to how much schooling the young farmhand managed to get, but they agree it wasn’t much.

  Less than a year after Pearl Harbor, twenty-two-year-old Garcia was inducted into the United States Army. Less than two years after that, while Private Gabaldon was wading ashore onto Saipan, Private Garcia hit Utah Beach in Normandy. All along, he risked his life for a country still not his own.

  Garcia was wounded in the fight to liberate Cherbourg, France. He helped capture Paris from the Germans, and was in the regiment that broke through the Nazis’ defensive Siegfried line. In one battle Garcia destroyed a machine gun, took the gunner prisoner, scouted behind the German lines, and was once again wounded. By now a sergeant, the young Mexican had a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

  In November 1944, Sergeant Garcia led a squad as the U.S. Army fought its way into Germany. He and his men reached Grosshau, between the Belgian border and the German city of Cologne. Garcia found his squad held down by machine-gun fire. Macario’s son Robert had heard the story many times. “It’s an ambush. They’re getting chewed up. They have no cover. The guy next to my dad is killed and my dad is hit in the shoulder and in the foot.”

  Garcia crawled through the grass, making his way around one of the machine-gun nests. He hurled grenades and charged the gun position, killing three Germans. Because Garcia was between the two lines, he was exposed to fire from both sides, friend and foe alike. He advanced on the second machine gun, catching seven Germans by surprise. He killed three, and took four others prisoner. Garcia’s son recalls that Macario was seriously wounded. “My dad was covered in blood and in horrible pain. He couldn’t move one arm. Couldn’t feel his foot. But he refused medical treatment—flat-out refused—and kept fighting until the Germans had been decimated or ran away.

  “Then he collapsed and lost consciousness.”

  The newspapers called him “the Fearless Mexican.” He became the first Mexican citizen to receive the Medal of Honor. The citation accompanying the award told of Garcia’s “conspicuous heroism, his inspiring, courageous conduct, and his complete disregard for his personal safety.”

  • • •

  THE WAR PROVED to white America that the stereotypes about minority men and women in uniform were not just wrong, but outrageously wrong. A lot had changed while the servicemen and -women were away. Too much hadn’t. After millions of men were taken from the civilian labor market, the United States experienced severe shortages of workers. Some of that gap was filled by women, who marched into factories and offices to take the places of fathers, brothers, and husbands now in the service. The lives of Latino workingmen and -women would move on two different and vital tracks during the 1940s: battlefront and home front. Developments in both would have unforeseen impacts on the other that would play out for years to come.

  In the spring of 1942, the first alarms were sounded about farm labor. By harvesttime, it was threatened, the crops needed to feed the home front and soldiers around the world would be rotting in the fields with no one to pick them.

  In August of that same year, the U.S. and Mexican governments signed an agreement for the supply of one million temporary workers to be transported and paid by Uncle Sam. Part of the agreement promised that Mexican workers in the United States would not be mistreated.

  And so they came. Braceros, farmworkers (from the Spanish word for “arm,” brazo), began to arrive by the end of September. They went to work in twenty-one states, harvesting sugar beets, plums, tomatoes, peaches, and cotton. Almost immediately, braceros went on strike in Stockton, California, after American farmers paid less than what had been promised in Mexico. The farmers backed down, and the braceros went back to work. With each year the numbers grew: By the end of 1943, 76,000; by the end of 1944, 118,000; by 1945, more than 300,000 Mexican men had wor
ked in the United States under the Bracero Program.

  When the war was over, American farmers said they still needed the strong backs and willing labor of Mexican workers. Mexican citizens became a permanent part of the agricultural workforce of the United States from then on. The landscape had shifted from the widespread deportations of the 1930s, when there were far more American workers than there was work to do. U.S. farmers pressured the State Department to continue the Bracero Program, and more than twenty-six thousand Mexican agricultural laborers were in American fields in 1946.

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  MEXICAN-AMERICANS WERE A growing presence on the streets of California’s big cities. During the war, the streets of Los Angeles were teeming with workers who poured in to work in the plants supplying America’s vast military, alongside soldiers and sailors on leave and reporting for duty to be shipped abroad, and with a new group of young, American-born Latinos. It turned out to be a volatile mix.

  Many young first- and second-generation Mexican-Americans were below draft age, but were old enough to share in the general prosperity brought to Los Angeles by the war. There was work, and work meant money for leisure-time activities, and the public display of an evolving culture that was no longer Mexican and not quite American either.

  Styles have long zipped around America from one group to another. Look at the way in recent years baseball caps first had their brims pushed to the side, then pushed to the back. Then the familiar team logos moved from their traditional position on the front of the crown, grew in size, changed color, gained metallic stitching and ever more elaborate trim, and jumped from black and Latino urban youth to the white majority. In much the same way the man’s suit, an emblem of adulthood, respectability, and conformity, was revolutionized . . . reworked . . . reimagined . . . and somewhere along the way became the zoot suit.