Uncle Nicholas and Aunt Alexandria kept Roy afloat. They were his rock, the only source of stability the boy had ever known. Nicholas and Alexandria were a remarkable couple. With ten biological and adopted children, they navigated their family through the travails of poverty and racial discrimination in Texas during the Great Depression. Theirs was a quiet but steady strength, rooted in an unflappable faith in God and country. Nicholas and Alexandria were disadvantaged people living in challenging circumstances, but they believed that life in the United States offered great promise for their children. Roy’s grit, and later his patriotism, were rooted in the foundations of daily life with his aunt and uncle.
Not long after Roy’s arrival, Nicholas and Alexandria moved their large family from the cotton fields of Danevang into the nearby town of El Campo. A village of about 6,200 residents, El Campo is named for a cowboy campground that used to occupy the area. It was a quaint community in the 1940s, filled with transitory cowboys and oil workers and surrounded by vast fields of corn, cotton, and rice.1
The family moved into a one-story house on Hillje Street. The home was small and cramped. The boys shared a bedroom in the attic. In the summers, the metal roof got so hot that it burnt to touch it, even from the inside. During those scorching summer nights, the boys would lie on sweat-soaked sheets, flipping their pillows back and forth all night long in search of a dry spot. On nights when Uncle Nicholas parked a truck trailer in the driveway, they would sleep outside in the trailer bed to escape their sauna.2
When Nicholas adopted Roy, he told him, “We all work, and we share what we have.” Nicholas himself was incredibly hardworking. In El Campo, he worked as an auto mechanic and a barber while Alexandria ran the house full of children. “We are not rich,” Nicholas told Roy, “but everything we have belongs as much to you as to anyone.” “We were dirt poor,” remembered one of Roy’s adopted brothers, “but we survived. We ain’t skipped a meal in all them years.” When they weren’t working in Colorado, the kids picked up odd jobs to help the family.3
Roy was used to working. He had worked in Cuero from the time he was in elementary school. When he came to live with Nicholas and Alexandria, it was only natural for Roy to look for jobs. Their home in El Campo was about a mile from the downtown bus station, and the enterprising young boy lingered near the bus stop to offer shoe polishes to the cowboys and oil workers who passed through town. He charged a nickel for a shine and sometimes received as much as a quarter in tip. A skill that would later prove useful in the Army, shoe-shining enabled Roy to contribute to his new family. He gave most of the money he earned to his adopted parents. “Aunt Alexandria was the banker,” he explained. She kept an envelope of cash for each child and withdrew from their earnings when they needed supplies.4
Nicholas and Alexandria offered a “sterner discipline than I had been used to,” remembered Roy. Yet it was also helpful to have “very clear lines” of expected behaviors. Unlike a lot of other families at that time, Nicholas and Alexandria typically didn’t employ corporal punishment. Nicholas sometimes used a leather strap for severe misconduct, but according to Roy, the most striking punishments came in the form of stern lectures about disappointing the family. These “sermons,” as Roy called them, were deeply distressing. Nicholas chastised poor behavior not only as individual sin but a slight against their entire clan. Roy remembered times when “I would have preferred that he whip me and get it over.”5
Aunt Alexandria insisted that the children welcome God into their lives. She took her children to church, read them the Bible, and taught them how to pray. Nicholas “wasn’t the praying type,” one of the sons explained, but Alexandria more than made up for his lack of involvement with her commitment to Catholicism. She had one unforgettable ritual. Whenever any of her children would leave the house, she stood at the door to bless them with the sign of the cross.6
The other major adult figure in Roy’s life at that time was his grandfather Salvador Benavidez Sr. Born near the border in 1880, Salvador Sr. was the grandchild of Nicholas Benavides, one of the original four brothers who had settled in Victoria during the 1820s. After years of raising his family in DeWitt County, Salvador Sr. came with his oldest son, Nicholas, to Wharton. Roy remembered his grandfather wearing a large Stetson hat and playing dominoes. He’d walk for “recreation,” Roy recalled, and enjoy a beer or two.7
Salvador Sr. regaled Roy and his cousins with stories. The boy especially loved hearing about his deceased father, listening intently to tales about the dad he never really knew. Grandpa Salvador entertained all the grandchildren with legends about their ancestors, helping instill pride by teaching them about their family’s historical roles as Texas pioneers. “We loved his stories,” Roy remembered, and “gathered around Grandfather Salvador at every opportunity.” Salvador also retained an endless array of Tejano parables, many of which emphasized the concepts of communal aid and self-help.8
One of Salvador’s favorite fables involved a man selling crabs. This man had two baskets, one labeled “American” and the other “Mexican.” The Mexican crabs were preferable, the vendor told buyers, because “they don’t need no lid. They don’t try to get out.” The American crabs, on the other hand, worked together to escape. “One of them climbs up on the back of another,” the story went, “and another climbs on his back, then another climbs on his back, and on and on, and pretty soon them American crabs are getting out all over the place.” This inference—that American crabs (Anglos) work together to escape poverty while Mexican crabs (Latino) struggle individually—bears little resemblance to the true historical context of Hispanic poverty in Texas, but it captures Salvador’s point about self-help. Roy’s grandfather believed that Mexican Americans “didn’t help each other as they should.”9
Another of Salvador’s favorite stories came from his time working as a cowboy. In this story, he was a young man driving cattle through a rocky terrain when he heard a man calling from a ledge beneath the path. The man had fallen and was stranded. In a parable reminiscent of the Good Samaritan of the New Testament, Salvador stopped to help. He dropped a rope from the ledge, but it wasn’t long enough to reach the man. So Salvador tied the rope to his belt, anchored his legs into the earth and pulled the man to safety using his own body weight. “Remember,” Salvador Sr. would say, “people sometimes need help, and when they do you must help them.”10
Roy would later claim to have been greatly affected by the worldview crafted by his elders. His forebears tried to teach him that he could take control of his own destiny and that the foundations of family would serve to guide and support him. Every job, no matter how hard, was an investment in a more promising future. And good, honest behavior could also help secure a better future, not only in society but also in the eyes of God. Roy’s elders insisted that people like them couldn’t afford selfish or risky actions that might threaten their entire family. With limited access to resources, this poor family had no choice but to rely on themselves, developing a familial culture rooted in the twin pillars of hard work and integrity. Perhaps the most important lesson Roy learned was that of hope. The reason for sacrifice lay in the promise of a better life. Nicholas and Alexandria tried to protect their kids by teaching them to believe.
Nicholas and Alexandria’s approach was fairly common among their peers, a group historians have labeled “the Mexican American Generation.” Born in the early twentieth century, the members of this generation lived through the Great Depression and World War II, their lives overlapping the chronology of the better-known “Greatest Generation,” which typically refers to white Americans born in the early 1900s. The stewards of this “Mexican American Generation” were “civic nationalists” who advocated for Latino assimilation into mainstream American life. They understood and fought against racial discrimination, but they also fundamentally believed in the promise of American society, despite significant racial disadvantages.11
In 1929, several leading groups of the Mexican American Generation consolidated to create the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Founded in Corpus Christi on February 17, 1929, LULAC started as a Texas-centric organization designed to serve native-born Latinos. Within eight years, it grew to five thousand members. For years, the association was led by a small number of white-collar Mexican Americans who recognized the importance of Mexican American heritage but who also emphasized advancement through acculturation and patriotism.12
LULAC’s early leaders performed an “exaggerated patriotism,” writes one historian, to stake out their claims of American citizenship. They rejected some Mexican traditions as too antiquated and even barred Mexican immigrants from joining their organization. LULAC leaders emphasized Latino involvement in Texas history, especially the Texas Revolution, highlighting the “Texas patriots of Mexican extraction,” wrote one LULAC member in the 1930s, “[who] participated actively in the Military campaigns.”13
Early LULAC leaders required members to take loyalty oaths to the United States. They adopted “America” as their song, the “George Washington Prayer” as their prayer, and English as their official language. At one point, they even considered dropping “Latin” from their name to further promote assimilation. As an organization, they also consciously declined to openly participate in partisan politics or discuss religion, hoping to dodge the ire of white Texans who might be threatened by Hispanic political activism. Years later, LULAC would lead legal battles against racial segregation, but the bulk of their messaging in the 1930s was rooted in advocating for Mexican American assimilation. Mostly, they just wanted to prove they belonged.14
Roy’s elders shared many of LULAC’s philosophies for Mexican American advancement. They also stressed assimilation and shared stories about their ancestors’ roles in the Texas Revolution. Even Grandpa Salvador’s story about the Mexican crabs reflected the thinking of many early LULAC leaders who believed that Mexican Americans were themselves partially to blame for their own segregation within mainstream American society. As one reporter in the 1930s observed of LULAC leadership, “These founders realized that the greatest stumbling block in the way of accomplishing these ends was the Mexican-American himself.”15
But the performative patriotism and assimilation could not alter the very real racial restrictions facing Mexican Americans. Try as they might to claim whiteness through acculturation, white citizens just as earnestly sought to categorize them as non-white. The 1930 United States Census was the first to list “Mexican” as the prescribed race for all Latinos, even those who were native-born citizens of the United States. In some city directories, including Corpus Christi, new designations in the listings denoted Mexican Americans as “Mexican” or “English-Speaking Mexican,” while listing Anglo citizens as “American,” thus effectively rejecting Mexican American claims at assimilation. Even native-born Hispanics were classified as foreign.16
Hispanics also lacked the most basic civil rights. In most places in Texas, Latino citizens couldn’t exercise voting privileges because of a system known as the “white primary” that allowed only Anglos to vote in primary elections, thus limiting the possibility for victory by any candidate who might support Latino civil rights. Poll taxes and literacy tests further prevented non-white citizens from voting. Hispanic citizens were also blocked from serving on juries. One study published in 1946 examined fifty counties where Latinos comprised between “fifteen to forty” percent of the population and reported that “persons of Mexican descent have never been known to be called for jury duty.” In San Antonio—a city whose Mexican American population hovered near fifty percent—only white citizens had ever been elected to the school board.17
Mexican Americans also faced discrimination in public spaces, housing, and employment, not to mention the historical disparities created by land policies that displaced Tejano families from places like Victoria and Hidalgo Counties. They also had fewer opportunities for education, especially in farming communities, where children like Roy missed months of school to work. In counties dominated by white landowners, literacy rates for people of Mexican descent hovered around 60 percent. This was all systematic and intentional. As one Texas planter explained, “Educating the Mexican is educating them away from the job, away from the dirt.” Mexican Americans lagged behind their white counterparts because of structural disadvantages baked into society. There were notable exceptions, but any chance for a truly equitable assimilation would have required immense societal change.18
As Roy’s family promised better days in the future, he struggled to navigate his lived experiences in the present. Texas in the 1940s was a highly racialized society. There was no way of avoiding it. Roy’s adolescence was flooded with constant, stinging experiences with racial discrimination. It’s one thing to be faced with obvious disadvantages; it’s another to be taunted for them. The potential for humiliation lurked around every corner, peppering his daily life with unpleasant instances that damaged his self-esteem and hurt his feelings.19
Roy had a biracial cousin whose father was of Austrian descent. The boy had European features, including “blonde hair and blue eyes,” explained Roy. One day, the boys went out together to buy burgers, but the restaurant displayed a sign that read “NO MEXICANS OR DOGS. COLORED AROUND BACK.” As Roy paused, his light-skinned cousin strutted into the eatery and bought a burger. The biracial boy plopped down in a booth, chomping on his meal, and smirking at Roy through a window “between bites,” Roy recalled. The cousin eventually brought out another burger for Roy, but the experience stung him for years.20
Roy’s childhood jobs included a position as a dishwasher. When he would take a break for his meal, the restaurant owner wouldn’t allow him to eat in the dining room with white customers because he was Hispanic. The young boy ate alone in the kitchen, simmering with bitterness because he knew that the white customers whose dishes he cleaned couldn’t fathom the sight of him eating near their families. “That’s the way it was,” he recalled, “and I resented it deeply.”21
There was another white kid who used to tease Roy about ice cream. One day, the kid approached Roy with an ice-cream cone and mocked him with the tasty treat, knowing that Roy couldn’t obtain his own. “Sure is good,” the young man said. “I bet you wish you had a nickel to get an ice-cream cone.” Roy could smell the chocolate, and he remembered the kid’s pink tongue gliding over the ice cream. Even decades later—after Roy had traveled the globe and become a national hero—he still recalled the hurt of that kid teasing him about that ice-cream cone.22
White kids had more money, and Roy knew it. “The Anglos owned most of the land, held all of the political offices, and made all of the rules,” he remembered. These “certain lines,” as Roy described racial inequalities, “had been drawn long ago.” Roy clearly saw the racial hierarchy in his society, but he wasn’t aware of the historical forces that had shaped his family’s station in life. Disadvantaged non-white children who lack such an understanding of history are ill-equipped to protect themselves against the inescapable arguments of natural selection—that one race enjoyed a better position in society simply because that race was naturally superior. In reality, the racial order that Roy observed in the 1940s was the result of a carefully constructed system of racial advantages set in motion a century before Roy was born. Of course, he didn’t know that. All he knew at the time was that his people were on the lowest rung of society.23
Schooled as Roy may have been by his elders, he was unprepared to deal with the emotional pain of daily racism. Uncle Nicholas promised, “If we got an education, worked hard, and led a clean life of discipline we would earn the Anglos’ respect.” But such a long-term outlook provided little solace to an adolescent boy experiencing daily racism. The humiliating insults came from all angles—peers, adults, even signs in windows. Many people today can understand the structural disadvantages of racial discrimination, but fewer can truly appreciate the deep psychological pain of those who lived through it. The most traumatic episodes were not necessarily singular events but rather the drumbeat of recurring incidents that bang into one’s soul so regularly as to affect their personality.24
Like most youths, Roy did not have the constitution to meet every single slight with grace. He was angry in the moment. When Nicholas insisted, “Someday, someone will open a door to you,” all Roy could think was, “I can’t even go in the front door of the restaurant where I work.” The orphaned youth was already severely wounded when he arrived to live with Nicholas and Alexandria, and his experiences in El Campo cut him even deeper.25
Roy’s frustrations boiled over into violence. Fighting for him became an organic mechanism for coping with the psychological toll of living in a deeply racist society. It was the only way he could level an otherwise uneven playing field. He and his siblings tried to avoid fights in school because teachers might report such scuffles to Uncle Nicholas and Aunt Alexandria, but “the streets are a different matter,” explained Roy. Any social slight could have sparked fisticuffs. Roy and his adopted siblings looked after one another. When a white kid picked on one of the siblings, the older boys would track down and confront the offender. Public insults didn’t always result in a fight, but Roy was among the quickest to escalate to violence. One of the kids he grew up with later called him “the meanest Mexican in school and [he] would fight at the drop of a hat.”26
Roy fought kids older and younger, taking any affront as cause to raise his fists. “By the time I was ten years old,” he remembered, “I fought anybody who looked at me wrong.” Fighting, he later wrote, became a “habit,” his only recourse to the name-calling white kids “who had new shoes or who had money to buy whatever they wanted,” he explained. The realities of race and class clashed to produce a deeply frustrated and ornery adolescent. “Some of my experiences just made me mean,” Roy remembered, “meaner than I had been as a street child in Cuero.”27
Uncle Nicholas tried to help Roy channel his energy into something more productive. He arranged for his adopted sons, Roy and Rogelio, to join a boxing gym. It seemed like an obvious outlet for Roy. Violence had become a significant part of his life. He was fighting all the time anyway, averaging by his count “about one fight per day.” “I turned out to be a pretty good fighter,” Roy wrote of boxing, “but I had a hard time staying within the rules.” He was an experienced yet undisciplined brawler who was “wild” on offense but also extremely tough and capable of absorbing extensive punishment.28
Roy and Rogelio’s coach once drove them to Fort Worth to compete in the Texas Golden Gloves State Championship, a statewide boxing exhibition for middle- and high-school-age amateur boxers. Held at the famous Will Rogers Coliseum, these tournaments featured dozens of fights over three nights, drawing more than 3,500 spectators. Roy remembered having “never seen so many people in one place in all my life.” The crowd made him feel good, as if his energies were finally being poured into something that people valued. But Roy lost his match at the tournament, and then he further embarrassed himself afterward by grabbing his opponent in the locker room. After the post-fight scuffle was broken up, he quickly realized that he had “disgraced the Benavidez name,” a cardinal sin in the eyes of his stepfather and grandfather. He never made it back to another Golden Gloves tournament.29
When Roy was twelve years old, his family experienced a change that seemed to confirm Uncle Nicholas’s mantra about good behavior and social uplift. That year, Nicholas was appointed a deputy sheriff by Wharton County Sheriff T. W. “Buckshot” Lane. Buckshot Lane was a fascinating character. Born in 1903, he was the grandson of a wealthy slaveowner whose family remained prominent in Wharton County. Buckshot had lived in the area his entire life. Having begun his career in law enforcement as a constable in 1933, in 1940 he was elected sheriff of Wharton County. During his time as sheriff, he emerged as one of the most colorful lawmen in Texas. He wrote a regular column in the Houston Post, taught himself how to fly a plane, and hosted a radio show where he announced the names of suspected criminals over the air while promising to apprehend them. Lane was also involved in several shootouts, one of which reportedly left more than fifty bullet holes in his automobile. He later served in the Texas Legislature. His personal style drew attention from the national media, including features in magazines such as Reader’s Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, and LIFE.30
Lane appears to have been somewhat sympathetic toward Hispanics. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was a regular correspondent with John J. Herrera, a Houston-based Latino attorney and major figure in LULAC, who later helped lead legal fights for civil rights. Herrera exchanged letters with Lane about all types of issues related to Latinos. In the late 1940s, Lane wrote to Herrera about the lack of Hispanic doctors in Wharton County, asking for help to recruit a physician for the growing number of “Latin people.” He even promised to help the prospective doctor connect with a local druggist to set up an office. At some point, Lane decided to name Nicholas Benavidez the first Latino to ever serve as a deputy sheriff in Wharton County.31
Roy recognized the importance of Nicholas’s appointment as deputy sheriff. Nicholas was a “peacemaker,” Roy wrote, who had a knack for solving disputes between members of the white and Latino communities. The children were sometimes teased by their classmates about Nicholas becoming a lawman, but the mild ribbing paled in comparison with the sense of respect Nicholas gained in the community.32
But Nicholas’s appointment did not dramatically alter Roy’s trajectory. Still an angry fighter, Roy in his teen years found new allies among other similarly disaffected youths. These new allegiances came with informal pacts of common defense. He fought not only those who angered him personally but also anyone who irritated his friends. Roy was a leader among a rough group of kids. For a tough, macho kid like Roy, his peer alliances often trumped the importance of protecting the family name.33
On one occasion, Roy and Rogelio were pulled into “a sizeable brawl” that attracted the attention of local law enforcement. Uncle Nicholas, recently deputized, arrived on the scene. He sent the other fighters home, but he took Roy and Rogelio to the city jail and locked them in a cell for three hours. As the boys waited behind bars, Nicholas walked past them scolding and shaming, “Oh, you Benavidez brothers sure look nice in there.”34
Roy’s behavior increasingly began to worry Uncle Nicholas. He was in trouble all the time, and at one point Roy was nearly sent to the Gatesville State School for Boys, a juvenile corrections facility near Waco. Roy continued fighting, and he was caught drinking. His friends were becoming a big problem. “Booze and bad friends will get you in trouble,” Nicholas told him. Roy remembered Nicholas repeating, “Dime con quien andas, y te dije quien eres,” meaning “Tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are.” “I’ll bet Uncle Nicholas said that to me a thousand times,” Roy recalled. Nicholas and Alexandria must have become very concerned about the diverging path of their adopted son. Roy worked hard and respected his family, but he was also becoming increasingly wild and unpredictable.35
In the spring of 1950, when Roy was only fourteen years old, he dropped out of school. The move coincided with the family’s annual trip to Colorado. He was tired of being left so far behind the other kids academically. The frustrated boy felt as if he didn’t have a real chance for an education, so he decided to quit. That April, when Roy returned his textbook, he remembered his English teacher saying, “I’ll see you in the fall.” “No, miss,” Roy answered, “I’m not gonna come next year.” Concerned, the teacher replied, “I want you to come back.… Please come back. You’re smart. You’ll do all right if you’ll keep your mouth shut and stop fighting.” Roy wanted to stay but concluded that he just could not. Another of Roy’s teachers remembered them both crying “tears of sadness when he came to me and said he had to leave.” But that was it. Roy was done with public school.36
After dropping out of school, Roy spent his time in El Campo working a series of odd jobs, including gas station attendant. He was living at home and contributing to the household expenses but also still engaging in risky behaviors. “If you could have bet on me back then,” Roy later wrote, “the odds were about even that in ten years I’d either be pumping gas or be in prison.”37
Roy eventually took a job working at the local Firestone Tire store, a position that placed him in contact with a man named Art Haddock. The bookkeeper at the Firestone shop, Haddock was an ordained Methodist minister. He was about twenty years older than Roy and made an impression on the troubled youth with his kindness and patience. “Art was different from any Anglo I had ever met at that time,” Roy remembered. He was kind and careful, soft with the young man but firm in his expectations, and their interactions carried none of the poison that infected so many of Roy’s other exchanges with white people. Haddock read Bible passages with Roy, and he gently reprimanded Roy whenever he heard the boy swearing. Through careful and methodical patience, Haddock began to become an important figure in Roy’s life, a man that the troubled youth wanted to impress.38
After they’d been working together for several months, Haddock began to give Roy increased responsibilities. He let him run the store at times and allowed Roy to keep the company truck overnight so that the teenager could handle emergency calls. Roy still had his temptations, but he was less enticed to drink with friends when he was left responsible for responding to service calls. By staying busy with work, he managed to reduce his “fight-per-day average,” he explained, “to just one or two bouts on weekends when I was not on call.”39
Roy’s behavior was also affected by a new romantic interest. During the time that Roy worked for Art Haddock, he began to pay attention to a young woman named Hilaria Coy. Hilaria, who went by Lala, was a couple years older than Roy. She had been born in 1933 near Corpus Christi and come to El Campo in the 1940s with her parents and nine siblings. Like many Hispanics in their community, her parents were working-class farm laborers. Roy had known Lala since he was “about twelve years old,” he wrote, but it was not until he was a mid-teen that he began to really focus on her romantically.40
Roy would see Lala at church and various social events in their community. He thought she was “by far the prettiest girl in town.” She was about his same height, with green eyes and fair skin. Her hair was a bit lighter than that of most Latinos. “If you didn’t look twice,” Roy wrote, “you’d think she was Anglo.” According to Roy, Lala had been able to pass for white when they were young, remaining in the front of the local movie theater while Roy and other darker-skinned children were ordered to the back. Unlike Roy, Lala was still in school.41
Roy felt that he couldn’t just approach Hilaria and ask for a date; her family was far too conservative for that. So he flirted by trying to attract her attention in other ways. He showed off during community events, especially baseball games, where he added a bit of flair to his game to stand out from the other players. He waited for opportune moments to steal a brief look or exchange a nod, and he took every chance possible to speak with her. There wasn’t much opportunity for one-on-one interactions, but he was nevertheless smitten with the beautiful young woman.42
At sixteen years old, Roy recognized that he had little to offer Lala. Her parents were conservative about their daughter dating. For Roy to approach Lala at such an age would have invited serious questions about his direction and intentions in life, and Roy had no real plans for his future. The teenage dropout contemplated what he might be able to offer a girlfriend or future wife. He had a stable job at Firestone, but he realized that it offered little room for advancement. Roy had no great passions or well-developed skills other than farm labor and street fighting. For a while, he thought he might want to become a truck driver. He also considered a career in law enforcement like Uncle Nicholas, perhaps even becoming a Texas Ranger. But Roy never seriously pursued either option. The young man was a bit unmoored in the world as he grew into adulthood, trying to imagine a future that might allow him to provide for a family.43
During this time, Roy began having serious conversations with his family about the possibility of joining the military. The move made sense for a number of reasons. The most obvious was that Roy had very limited prospects, and military service offered opportunities for a career where advancement was possible. The military also provided Hispanic youths like Roy with a chance to belong. For hundreds of thousands of Latinos who grew up during World War II, military service offered the best possible way to assert patriotism and claim their status as American citizens. If the strategy of the Mexican American Generation was sound, then what could offer a better path toward assimilation than joining the United States armed forces?
During World War II, roughly five hundred thousand Latinos served in the United States military, the highest rate of any ethnicity in the country. Seventeen Latino World War II servicemen were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, also the highest rate of any ethnic group. Unlike Black troops who operated in segregated units, Latino soldiers served alongside white troops in every theater of the war. They were among those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and Okinawa, who perished in the Bataan Death March, and who helped liberate the Philippines. Mexican American women also joined the military, working in women’s auxiliary units and as nurses.44
Hispanics were proud to serve and desperate to belong. As one historian has argued, “For Mexican Americans, World War II involved a leap of faith: claiming the United States as your country even when it did not claim you.” During the war, Mexican American organizations encouraged military service at a time of need, hoping for a boost to their status based on wartime contributions. “We are also children of the United States,” insisted an organization named the Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española. “We will defend her.” Another group, named the Mexican American Movement, stated, “[The war] has shown them what the Mexican American will do, what responsibility he will take and what leadership qualities he will demonstrate. After this struggle, the status of the Mexican American will be different.”45
“All we wanted,” one Latino soldier claimed, “was a chance to prove how loyal and American we were.” Another Mexican American veteran of the European theater remembered, “Most of us were more than glad to be given the opportunity to serve in the war. It did not matter whether we were looked upon as Mexicans; the war soon made us all genuine Americans.” “We wanted to prove,” explained another, “that while our cultural ties were deeply rooted in Mexico, our home was here in this country.”46
Despite their service, Mexican Americans, even veterans, continued to face discrimination during and after the war. They didn’t receive the same jobs in wartime industries or opportunities for advancement in the military. The war also exacerbated existing prejudices. In 1943 Los Angeles, roving gangs of white soldiers attacked groups of Mexican Americans as part of an anti–Mexican American hysteria that gripped the city. During the war, anti-Hispanic discrimination in Texas became a source of national embarrassment. The Mexican Foreign Office wrote to the United States government to express concerns about “humiliations, as unjust as they are cruel,” that Mexican officials experienced when visiting Texas. The pervasive nature of these prejudices led the Mexican government to temporarily ban Texas from receiving laborers through the Bracero Program that contracted Mexican citizens for labor in the United States. Numerous Texas legislators introduced anti-discrimination bills in the state legislature, but none passed during the war. A Mexican American citizen could storm the beaches of Normandy only to be denied the right to eat in a public restaurant back in the United States.47
Perhaps the most striking example of anti-Mexican American discrimination was the treatment of the war hero Macario García. A native of Mexico, García moved to the United States with his parents at the age of three. He was drafted in 1942 and injured during the invasion of Normandy in 1944. After recovering, he rejoined the action in Germany where he “single-handedly assaulted 2 enemy machine gun emplacements,” read his medal citation, killing at least six German soldiers and capturing two more. For these heroics, García was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor at the White House by President Harry Truman on August 23, 1945. Eighteen days later, García was denied service because of his race at the Oasis Café in Richmond, Texas. The Medal of Honor recipient protested, and a conflict ensued between the war hero and the waitstaff. García was attacked and beaten with a baseball bat before being arrested on charges of aggravated assault. The case attracted widespread publicity, and the charges were later dropped.48
In 1948, a Mexican American World War II veteran named Dr. Héctor Garcia founded the American GI Forum in Corpus Christi. A highly decorated combat veteran of the European theater, Garcia upon his return home was struck by the devastating poverty and lack of opportunities available to Mexican Americans. He joined LULAC and began an impressive career of advocacy for Texas Latinos that would later earn him the nickname the “Mexican-American Martin Luther King.”49
Dr. Garcia started the American GI Forum to advocate for Hispanic veterans. He found that his fellow Latino servicemen lacked hospital beds and access to Veterans Administration (VA) care. In addition, they were having a difficult time securing overdue compensation and disability checks, facing the threat of declining pensions, and had virtually no representation on local draft boards. The families of some veterans also experienced burial discrimination, as many white Texans didn’t want Hispanics buried next to their loved ones, even if those Latinos had died fighting for America. Furthermore, Mexican American veterans were often unwelcomed in branches of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).50
The American GI Forum started with seven hundred members who came together at a meeting in Corpus Christi on March 26, 1948. From there, the grassroots association spread across Texas. Individual branches needed only ten members to start a chapter, and at the end of the year, there were forty chapters. By 1950, there were one hundred chapters and roughly ten thousand members. The American GI Forum emerged alongside LULAC as the two most active and influential Mexican American civil rights organizations in the United States.51
Along with LULAC, the American GI Forum organized “Poll Tax” drives to register Latino voters and fought to desegregate public schools and juries. The chapters also organized youth and women’s auxiliaries to promote education. Their motto, “Education is our Freedom and Freedom Should Be Everybody’s Business,” reflected a commitment to fighting for equal educational opportunities for Hispanic students. One youth member, who later went on to become a major civil rights leader, remembered of the American GI Forum, “It gave us—sometimes for the first time—pride in our history and our contributions to American society and culture.”52
Roy Benavidez was six years old when the United States entered World War II and ten when it ended. He remembered listening to news about the war on his radio, and he later claimed one of his boyhood idols to be Audie Murphy, the legendary Medal of Honor recipient from Texas. He came of age amid America’s “Good War,” as it’s often called, the fight against fascism that defined the “Greatest Generation” and provided the backdrop of a surge of patriotism that touched every American citizen in the 1940s and 1950s. The United States had defeated the Axis powers and made the world safe for democracy. World War II was a point of pride for nearly every American, no matter where they stood on the social ladder. And Texas Latinos had played a major role.53
Roy never talked much about the American GI Forum of his youth, but by the time he entered his teen years, the organization had emerged as one of the leading Latino civil rights groups in the country. World War II veterans were the big heroes of Mexican American communities across Texas. For a young man who had faced so much exclusion, Roy recognized that military service could offer a pathway toward full citizenship and a potential vehicle to escape the plague of race and poverty that contaminated his youth. He also understood that he had few desirable skills. Uncle Nicholas advised his children, “You have to prepare yourself to sell your talents to the highest bidder in the large market that will eventually become available to you.” All teenage Roy really knew how to do was work and fight.54
Meanwhile, the Texas National Guard was recruiting. A storied institution with roots dating back to the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, the state guard was looking to bolster its membership during the early stages of the Cold War. Federal allotments paid for new airfields, training bases, and armories as the Texas National Guard expanded throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. Local organizations also mobilized to help. In El Campo, the Chamber of Commerce helped raise money to purchase twenty acres of land to turn into a National Guard armory. By 1950, the Texas National Guard counted a troop strength of nearly twenty thousand men supported by over $11.6 million in state and federal funding.55
That year, the Texas National Guard was so desperate for enlistees that they wouldn’t let people leave, sometimes even after their agreed terms of service lapsed. In 1950, the Texas adjutant general signed an order suspending all discharges and resignations from the Texas National Guard for one year. The following year, the governor signed an executive order issuing the same edict. The only exception came in cases where a Texas National Guardsman left to join a branch of the federal armed forces.56
The Texas National Guard recruited through newspaper ads, radio programs, and in-person recruiters who made personal appeals to young men. Some members joined explicitly to avoid the draft. In 1950, Audie Murphy, the famed World War II hero and actor, signed up for the Texas National Guard, despite a lucrative film career. The Texas National Guard used Murphy’s enlistment as propaganda, publishing a recruiting poster of his likeness and heroic acts alongside the phrase, “I’m proud to be a NATIONAL GUARDSMAN.”57
Roy joined the Texas National Guard on June 27, 1952, signing up for a three-year commitment. He was only sixteen years old. Because he was so young, Uncle Nicholas had to submit a signed notarized form authorizing his legal consent as guardian. Roy was drawn to the Guard because it promised to “give me some education, an additional income, and could be worked around my steady job,” he wrote. “It seemed to be the perfect solution for someone in my position.” In enlisting in the Guard, the young man joined the hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the 1940s and 1950s who believed that military service could offer a pathway toward a better life. The decision to enlist also made Roy the first member of his family to fight for a Texas militia since his legendary ancestor Plácido Benavides, who more than a century before had helped win Texas its freedom from Mexico.58