Occupied America and Its Shadows, Research Paper Example

To what extent did Chicanos’ demonstration of patriotic duty through military service during WWII benefit them socially (and/or politically) afterwards?

If we put aside the general perception of Chicano/a as a post-World War II concept — “Chicana reflects a political consciousness marker for those of us coming of age during the 1960s and 1970s” (Ruiz) — we can probably say with justification that many Mexican-Americans ex-soldiers and sailors did benefit individually from their military service if they survived the war more in good physical and mental health (a significant restriction), but that their general cultural and socio-economic conditions did not improve enough to prevent fostering the Chicano/a mindset of protest and resistance that developed among many of their children.

It should first be pointed out that Mexican-American servicemen were eligible for GI Bill benefits, including those that enabled millions of servicemen to attend college. However, that needs to be looked as part of the wider phenomenon of post-war aid. Consider the Marshall Plan, which sent millions of dollars to Western Europe to spur development in war-devastated countries and so prevent their falling into the Soviet Communist orbit like Eastern Europe did. The only countries that actually benefited significantly from that aid — its effects lived on after the aid ended — were those that had strong economies before the war. Northern Italy did, but southern Italy did not. And after the Marshall Plan had come and gone, southern Italy remained mired in its generations-long poverty and lack of development while northern Italy revived and prospered. This kind of pattern probably held true among individuals as well. Those who came from families for whom college and the professions were at least a plausible dream did well on the whole. But for those for whom that kind of advancement was beyond their culture probably did not, on the whole, benefit from GI Bill benefits as much.[1]In other words, minorities like Mexican-Americans were somewhat analogous to undeveloped countries before the war. But the same pattern probably held for a lot of Southern and rural whites as well, and clearly for blacks and native Americans. Another aspect to this problem is that war in general is just not a good deal for most of the people who have to fight it. Veterans coming home are appreciated but do not necessarily get preferred treatment for long. Generally speaking, in spite of wartime changes that transformed the home front, the socio-economic world soldiers and sailors left was the socio-economic world they came back to, and although that world began to change quickly and generally for the better for millions of men and women alike, many were left behind:

It became clear to many returning Mexican American veterans that their community did not have the educational human capital to take advantage of the new opportunities . . . what good did it do a veteran to be eligible for a stipend to go to college if he or she did not have a high school education, or to have the right to get a loan for a house? (Acuña)

Just as in the essay-question below, we can compare the experience of Mexican-Americans with others, this time soldiers. Japanese men who were U.S. citizens, after spending time in relocation centers, either volunteered or were drafted into the army. Japanese-American units fighting in Europe were given extremely dangerous assignments and suffered very high casualties as a result. Many were decorated for bravery. Many Japanese-, African-, and Mexican-Americans[2] fought heroically in WWII when given the chance, but for few or none of them did their success in battle translate into newfound social and economic equality upon their return stateside.

The comparison of Japanese with Mexican Americans is particularly apt because they had long been allies in the agricultural fields where they toiled under brutal conditions. Acuña describes several joint strikes and labor actions dating to 1903, when the two groups formed the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association. And both stateside ethnic groups were suspected of disloyalty during the war and subject to intense surveillance by the FBI (Acuña). Yet, ironically, it was the Japanese Americans of the time (the Nisei), so clearly tarbrushed as being associated with a hostile power hated by U.S. troops who fought them in the Pacific even more than they hated the Germans they fought in Europe, who very successfully pulled themselves out of poverty (or allowed their next generation, called Sansei to do so). How and why did this happen?

I suspect that it is really the same problem of Mexicans migrants being in oversupply and Mexican-Americans assumed by default to be non-citizens in America illegally. Even the Japanese here were granted (grudgingly) the assumption of citizenship. Japan rebuilt itself with remarkable speed and quickly became a nation of customers as well as competitors. They improved and lowered the price of cars for many Americans and introduced competition to the fields of film and copiers, once dominated in the U.S. by Kodak and Xerox. Can you think offhand of a Mexican company that did the same thing? Japanese stateside culture remained quiet and insular to a great degree, retaining their Little Tokyo’s and their language, prospering under the radar.[3] The Sansei did not, by and large, succumb to the temptations of militancy during the 1960s. In short, succeeding Japanese generations quietly assimilated in ways that the Mexican Americans are widely misperceived not to have done, even as millions of them have.

Many thousands of poor white soldiers, returning from the war, failed to prosper, as have their children and grandchildren. They became coal miners and assembly-line workers and welfare recipients by their millions, just as many Mexican-Americans stayed in the agricultural fields and service elevators in their turn. Many of the latter have lived in barrios all their lives. It is really the next generation that benefits the most through the process of assimilation. The GI Bill aside, returning vets have a lot in common with immigrants. Much is new and unfamiliar and unlikable. Nothing is granted them save the basics. It is not fair. It’s just the way it is.

Was the Chicano Movement successful? How do you know? What were some of the strategies/efforts used tosubvert/extinguish the Chicano Movement? What were some of the gains/victories (culturally, artistically, politically,socially, educationally)?

No one can say that they know for sure the answer to this question. There is simply no Yes or No. (For one thing, we would have to define subjective terms like “success”.) But we might begin by asking whether the Black Power and American Indian movements were successful, and also ask why there were no equally iconic, militant Asian Power movements that held organized labor strikes[4] and media-marches.

Still, the Chicano-, Black-, and Indian-Power movements arguably failed as movements because the problems they tried to address largely remain unsolved for them.[5] Meanwhile Asian-Americans, who long faced essentially the same problems, have largely overcome them without the need for widespread, militant, media-centric action.[6] But Asians did not solve those problems. They escaped them. Granting the existence of Asian criminal gangs, other than Chinatowns (which are at least receptive to and safe for outsiders), can you think offhand of any American city containing slums populated mainly by ethnic Asians of one kind or another, slums where others would feel uncomfortable visiting like they would a brown barrio or black ghetto?

Perhaps we just have to consider the Chicano Movement as a protest movement in and of itself. It has made “strides” in unionization and/or better conditions where Mexicans or Mexican-Americans are often found. But there is only so much that can be done to ease the burdens of such work short of mechanizing it or outsourcing it. The latter might be key: because Mexican labor is so available, labor organizers and social reformers somehow have to include the tide of newer arrivals as well as fight back against some of the strategies/efforts used to subvert/extinguish the ChicanoMovement, such as the effective quotas on Latin Americans imposed by the Immigration Act of 1965, which unintentionally favored Asians at the expense of Mexicans by preferring immigrants who already had family in the U.S.; and the opposition by white city bosses to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, which was seen by some to encourage rebellion; and the siphoning off of funds for that program to fund the ramped-up Vietnam War, which itself drafted more minorities than college-deferred whites.

Assimilation into American society is key. Assimilation means advancement, and that usually happens to the next generation — U.S.-born sons and daughters of new arrivals, legal or not. They are the ones who leave the fields and service elevators. But they have to be replaced, and are replaced, basically by the same kind of people — people who leave dysfunctional countries in order to build new lives in the U.S by walking and riding to and over the border without necessarily asking for permission. In the case of Mexicans, their country has been dysfunctional for generations and is arguably even more so today than ever — a borderline failed state, if not an outright one. And the same might be said for the Central and South Americans. But the same cannot be said for, say, the Chinese. Their immigrants are increasingly successful in their own right before they arrive here. That is because their remarkably controlled yet lawless society — corrupt, kleptocratic, “communist” — is also for the moment frantically functional,[7] providing millions of jobs for rural immigrants (de-housed or jobless in their villages through city-generated capital)  in growing cities in need of workers. Fewer of them need to leave China. Here we come to a realization: for immigrants to successfully assimilate here, their original homeland — their “old country” — needs to keep developing as well, thus gradually reducing the flow of its huddled-masses emigration. Mexico for whatever reasons shows no sign of doing this. Only an American recession/depression can lower Mexico’s tide of displaced persons.

Still, the Chicano/a movement has not disbanded like the Black Panthers did completely, or  like the AIM did at its national level. This may be because the Chicano movement was strongly a Chicana movement: “Since 1900, Mexican women in the United States have sparked grass roots movements at work, church, neighborhood, and, within the last thirty years, on college campuses” (Ruiz). It is an obvious pattern that male-denominated movements and nations are economically and socially sterile because women there are unable to solve the problems they encounter in their work until solving them becomes profitable, at which point the men take it over. Little incentive exists for women to innovate and their men are affronted by the suggestion that their women can. So Chicanas, seeking to break the glass ceiling, have had to fight their own culture as well as their adopted one. The existence of a persistent Chicana culture might be the greatest unifying cultural, artistic, political, social, and educational victory of the Chicano Power movement, even as that movement faced defeat and subversion from within and without: the economics of low-paying, low-skilled jobs and nativist legislative reaction.

That Chicano/a Power is still felt at the local and national level is its greatest success. Its greatest failure is that both a and o still depend on what happens south of the U.S. border.

Works Cited

Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New Jersey: Pearson, 2014. Book.

Ruiz, Vicki. Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Book.

[1] There were of course many exceptions among persons of all races, just not enough to change the general pattern.

[2] See The Story of Company E: The All-Chicano Unit in Acuña’s textbook.

[3] The Vietnamese in America, starting in 1975 with the fall of South Vietnam, have done the same thing.

[4] A Boomer friend related to me how she at first actually believed a newspaper column by the late humorist Art Buchwald about how “striking Japanese auto-workers” would conscientiously work harder as a form of protest.

[5] An NPR Morning Edition report of April 21^st on the subject of solar power reports that 18,000 Navajo-reservation homes still lack electricity. Half of all Navajos live below the poverty line.

[6] Largely succeed. Thousands of  residents of  U.S. Chinatowns still live and work in miserable conditions. But it should be pointed out too that millions of whites live in generational poverty too, much of it Southern and/or rural.

[7] Although the future of its long-lasting boom is now in doubt.