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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end
of the Second World War, the event which signaled not only the emergence of the
United States as a global superpower but also a host of domestic transformations in the nation, particularly around the issues of civil rights. All soldiers, but especially African-American
and Latino soldiers, returned from the war as changed men and women. Some had encountered staggering brutality on
the battlefields of Europe, Asia and North Africa; others were exposed to
societies where ethnicity and skin color mattered much less to social
hierarchies than they did in the United States.
Military service emboldened many veterans of color to push for equal
treatment in the United States—whether at the lunch counter or in the
school-house. They had served their
nation with distinction and would not accept the discrimination that
characterized their pre-war lives.
How the war changed the lives of Latinos, in particular, has
been a subject of robust debate in recent years and is at the center of a new
collection of essays edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and B.V. Olguín entitled,
Latina/os and World War II: Mobility,Agency , and Ideology. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). The essays trace the complex ways in which
Latinos navigated issues of race, ethnicity, education and gender all the while
contributing in critical ways to the war effort. As we mark the 70th anniversary of
this watershed conflict in American history, Profs. Rivas-Rodríguez and Olguín
have offered us an important resource for understanding the war from various
Latino perspectives.
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