After the War, A Struggle For Equality

A general pinned a Bronze Star on Riojas's chest in Italy. Then he was refused service in a restaurant in his own home town. At technical school, on the GI Bill, he learned refrigeration repair and got a job with Montgomery Ward. After a stint at a Kansas City store, he was transferred to one near San Antonio. There, he tried to check into a hotel and was told, "We don't rent rooms to Mexicans." On one of his first assignments, he knocked at the back door of a customer's house, and the woman inside told him, "I don't allow Mexicans in my house." Riojas quit and went on to a career with the railroad in Kansas and Missouri.

He says he coped with injustice through his faith in God, looked past the slights and kept marching on to his American dream. Three years ago, at the dedication of the National World War II Memorial, he shook President Bush's hand.

Other young WWII veterans, having proved themselves alongside Anglos in battle, refused to accept the pre-war social contract that made them second-class citizens. They played prominent roles in voter registration drives and lawsuits against the unequal treatment of Latinos.

"We fought it in battle and we got to fight it at home . . . the fact that there's no super-race," Louis Tellez, 84, recalls from Albuquerque. "It's a hell of a feeling. There's nothing you can do except prepare yourself and continue fighting."

After serving in the Army in the Pacific, Tellez returned to Albuquerque, got a solid federal job, and was turned down for a $300 bank loan. People he knew weren't allowed to buy houses in certain neighborhoods. The police treated Latino suspects harshly.

Tellez became an early member of American GI Forum, a veterans organization for Latinos that functioned as a civil rights outfit. It was founded by another Army veteran, a doctor named Hector Garcia, who saw his comrades facing similar obstacles on returning home. "Dr. Garcia liked the word 'American' " -- as opposed to say, Hispanic GI Forum -- "because we always had to prove we were Americans," says Antonio Gil Morales, national commander of the forum, which this year helped lead the charge against Burns and PBS.

C¿sar Ch¿vez served in the Navy in the Pacific before he became a farm labor organizer. Pete Tijerina, who studied law on the GI Bill, told oral historian Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez that his war experience "taught me that I was a first-class citizen, that I was an American," and he went on to found the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The treatment of Latino veterans appalled many Anglos on the home front. Some of the cases became notorious -- none more so than a small-town Texas funeral home's refusal to handle the remains of Felix Longoria, because "the whites might object." Longoria had been killed in the Philippines. His family had the remains exhumed for reburial back in Three Rivers in 1949. Garcia and the GI Forum promoted the case, and then-Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson commanded a national spotlight when he intervened to have the remains buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The change in attitude forged on the battlefield began to work its way slowly through society.

Then came "The War." Burns has said no Latinos stepped forward to participate in the six-year project when he was seeking people to interview.