A Historical Omission
Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and colleagues were puzzled to learn of a major World War II documentary to air without the voices of Latino veterans. And then the campaign began.
By Reginald Stuart
For nearly a decade, Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and a small army of students and volunteer colleagues around the country have been aggressively chasing and documenting a rapidly vanishing chapter of American history — the American Latino and Latina experience during World War II.
Along the way, they recorded nearly 600 interviews of about two hours each. They found thousands of pictures of Latinos in uniform, assigned to segregated units by language and, more often than not, treated with much the same disdain as their Black and Asian brothers and sisters. They found families who had as many as five sons in the war at one time and even an American of Mexican descent who had been repatriated to Mexico during the Depression only to be called to duty during the war. He gladly reported to serve.
“This is why the Latino experience is so unique,” says Rivas-Rodriguez, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and creator of the school’s U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project.
It is one of the most ambitious of several small efforts around the country to document the Latino experience in WWII before all those who know about it first-hand die.
“These people are so proud of their service,” adds Rodriguez, a former newspaper reporter whose largely volunteer corps continues to build an archive of work.
