wytze
19-09-05, 14:46
The War for Latinos
by ROBERTO LOVATO
[from the October 3, 2005 issue]
Jessica Sanchez poses an urgent threat to the US military. For a
Pentagon stretched by stagnating enlistments and an
Administration bent on waging a "global war on terror," the question
of whether this four-foot-eleven Mexican-born legal resident and
others like her will decide to join the military has enormous
geopolitical implications.
The Pentagon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to find out
whatever it can about Sanchez and other young Latinos: what they
wear, where they hang out, what kinds of groups they form, what
they read, what they watch on TV, their grades, their dreams.
Members of the military's numerous and well-funded recruiting
commands use sophisticated Geographic Information Systems
maps, souped-up recruiting Hummers and other resources to
establish strategic positions in the minds, pocketbooks and
neighborhoods of young Latinos like Sanchez.
Recruiters are devising new and often unexpected ways to
penetrate daily Latino life. "I went to a birthday celebration at
Chuck E. Cheese's," says Sanchez, a 25-year-old single mom
from San Marcos, California, just outside San Diego. "We were
watching a puppet show when all of a sudden a military song is
playing in the background. I thought that was weird but kept
watching. A couple of minutes later, all of us were looking at
pictures on a TV screen of people in the Army giving food and
supplies to kids in Iraq. My friends and I thought that was really
weird--and got out."
The bad news for Pentagon planners is not just Sanchez's negative
reaction to the puppet show, or even her eventual decision not to
join the Navy. It's that she and other Latinos who are rejecting the
military's overtures are turning around and organizing a grassroots
movement against recruitment in their community.
From the northernmost corner of Washington State to the
southernmost beaches of south Florida, veteran Latino
counterrecruiters and younger activistas are facing off against
thousands of military recruiters in a battle that will determine
whether Latino youth continue echoing the "Yo soy el Army"
and other Pentagon PR slogans or instead adopt the "Yo estoy en
contra del Army" slogan taken up by Sanchez. The
counterrecruitment movement, spearheaded by scores of Latinos in
Chicago, El Paso, Tucson and other cities, suburbs and rural
communities, is largely occurring beneath the radar of the mostly
white antiwar movement, despite its potential to alter the course of
Iraq and future US wars.
"Latinos are very important to the national security of the United
States," says Larry Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics in the
Reagan Administration Defense Department, where he
administered about 70 percent of the largest line items in the
federal budget. "A decrease in Latino enlistment numbers would
make things very difficult for the armed forces, because they are
the fastest-growing [minority] group in the country and they have a
very distinguished record of service in the military. If I
were Donald Rumsfeld, I would be very worried about the possibility
of decreasing Latino numbers. I'd be thinking about how to make
do with smaller numbers of troops or with further lowering
standards for aptitude, age, education and other factors."
The centrality of Latinos to the military enterprise can be seen in
statements by Pentagon officials like John McLaurin, Deputy
Assistant Secretary of the Army for Human Resources, who stated
that in order to meet recruitment goals, Latino enlistments must
grow to 22 percent by the year 2025, when one in four Americans
will be Latino. Two factors add to the urgency. One is that while
Latinos make up only 13 percent of the active-duty forces, they
also make up a fast-growing 16 percent of the 17- to 21-year-old
population. In the eyes of Pentagon planners, this rapidly
growing, relatively poor population is prime recruiting material.
Latinos already in the military are concentrated in the low ranks of
the Marines and the Army, serving in the high-casualty, high-risk
jobs of front-line troops urgently needed in Iraq. The second factor
driving the Latinization of the Pentagon's recruitment strategy is the
decrease in African-American and women recruits. Since 2000 the
percentage of African-American recruits has dropped from 23.5
percent to less than 14 percent, thanks to the widespread
disaffection with the Iraq War--and good organizing--among
parents and students in the black community.
And some preliminary indicators show that the Pentagon's efforts
are paying off. Latino enlistment increased from 10.4 percent of
new recruits in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. According to University
of Maryland military sociologist David Segal, however, the jury is
still out on whether the Latino enlistment campaign will solve the
Defense Department's recruitment problem in the mid to long term.
A drop in Latino numbers could, Segal says, "plunge the military
into an even deeper crisis. They will have to learn how to better
recruit whites." He adds that "when antiwar efforts focus on
recruitment, they're denying recruiters major access they
desperately need."
The Bush adventure in Iraq has done much to foster anti-
recruitment sentiment and create the "Latino unity" activists have
dreamed of for decades. Beyond the anonymous, individualistic
rejection of the war measured in recent polls of Latinos, a more
vocal and active rejection of war and recruitment is taking hold on
the ground, tapping into several currents of Latino political tradition.
Vietnam veteran and University of San Diego professor Jorge
Mariscal is among those working feverishly to cut Pentagon strings
they feel yank young Latinos further and further into
imperial entanglements. "We are trying to show the historical
continuity of Latino protest against the exploitation of other Latinos
in US wars of aggression," says Mariscal, considered by many to
be the dean of Latino counterrecruitment efforts.
On this past August 29, Mariscal's organization, the Project on
Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (YANO), and dozens of other
Latino groups launched a campaign to educate Latino parents and
students about military recruitment in schools. A main focus was
simply informing people that the No Child Left Behind Act, which
allows recruiters access to student contact information, also
contains an opt-out provision. The organizers chose to launch the
campaign on August 29 because it was the anniversary of the
Chicano Moratorium of 1970--the largest, most radical Latino
antiwar, antirecruitment mobilization in US history. The campaign
draws strength from the antimilitaristic traditions of US-born Latinos
(especially Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans) as well as from
the anti-militarismo traditions of more recent Latin American
immigrants from such countries as El Salvador and the Dominican
Republic.
While the war for young Latino hearts rages in all corners of the
country, the strategic theater of battle for Latino bodies remains the
Southwest, especially Southern California. A 2001 study by the US
Army Recruiting Command (USAREC), for example, defined Los
Angeles, the rest of Southern California, Phoenix and Sacramento
as its top markets for Latino recruits. But California has also
become the de facto heart of the nascent movement among US
Latinos. Animating it is Fernando Suarez del Solar, a former
student activist in Mexico who now lives in Escondido, California.
Del Solar traces his struggle against the military to the moment he
witnessed Mexican military personnel "push their bayonets into
young men--and women" during a 1972 protest in the Zocalo, the
central square of Mexico City. "That was my first encounter with
militarismo."
Three decades later Del Solar took another, sharper turn against
militarismo after his son, Jesus, a marine, died in Iraq in 2003.
Since then, his denunciation of the "lies and half-truths" recruiters
use on kids like Jesus has been unceasing. Because he can't
shake images of how his then-13-year-old boy was first "seduced"
by the trinkets, posters and ideas given to him by recruiters at a
mall in National City, Del Solar works to educate other parents and
students about recruitment and war.
Bemoaning the "lack of leadership among Latinos at the national
level," Del Solar and others in the Latino counterrecruitment
movement complain that national advocacy groups like the League
of United Latin American Citizens and the National Council of La
Raza are not only silent but complicit in finding fresh Latino bodies
to feed the war machine. LULAC and NCLR do accept
sponsorships from and provide forums for Pentagon promotion at
some of their national conferences and local events. In their
determination to meet what recruiting handbooks call "influencers,"
Marine, Army and other Defense Department personnel can be
seen at LULAC and NCLR events either glad-handing or manning
the recruitment Hummers, chin-up challenges, inflatable obstacle
courses and other props in front of their trinket-stuffed information
booths. To fill the void, Del Solar's organization, Guerrero Azteca,
and Mariscal's group, YANO, have joined forces. They plan to
convene a national meeting of Latino counterrecruitment
organizations and leaders to connect the numerous efforts
springing up across the country.
But the forces of counterrecruitment face an armada of military
recruitment organizations backed by the best civilian, corporate
and community alliances our tax dollars can buy. Continuing the
Latino recruitment focus that started with the Clinton
Administration's Hispanic Access Initiative, the Pentagon has
invested hundreds of millions of dollars to turn poor Latino
neighborhoods and decrepit, Latino-heavy schools into soldier
factories. Last year alone USAREC deployed five brigades, forty-
one battalions, 5,648 recruiters and 1,690 recruiting
stations. The military won't reveal what share of its recruitment
resources is being targeted at Latinos, but it's clearly substantial.
For Hispanic Heritage month, the Army is highlighting Hispanic
soldiers in a massive ad campaign and a Congressional Medal of
Honor tour of high schools across the country.
In Puerto Rico counterrecruiters have fanned out to all 200 of the
island's high schools to deliver the antimilitaristic and opt-out
messages to thousands of students there. "We are picketing
recruitment offices and asking Puerto Rico's Department of
Education to give us 'equal time' or 'equal access' so that we can
go to the schools to talk to the students against military
recruitment," says Jorge Colon, spokesperson for the Coalición
Ciudadana en Contra del Militarismo (Citizen's Coalition Against
Militarism), a broad-based network of labor, parent, teacher,
student and other groups. Like Mariscal, Colon and other Puerto
Ricans link current counterrecruitment efforts to antimilitaristic
traditions; much of the energy and momentum of the successful
movement to rid the island of Vieques of bombing and other military
exercises has been transferred to the counterrecruitment effort.
In the northernmost corner of Washington State, Rosalinda Guillen
is also drawing on tradition to combat what she sees as deception
in the farmlands of Skagit and Whatcom counties, where recruiters
are seeking to harvest new recruits among the Oaxacan and
Chiapanecan Indians and Mexican, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan
immigrants working the fields. Guillen, a former leader in the United
Farm Workers, returned to her hometown to fight for Latino rights,
including the right of youth to decline military service. "Recruiters
are going into high schools. They're going after our young
people and new immigrants," says Guillen, whose organization
translates opt-out materials, does educational work and plans
larger strategy to fight Latino recruitment.
Like many Latinos I spoke with, Guillen has one message for the
larger progressive community, especially those fighting the war and
recruitment: "White-led social justice programs and organizations
need to do something. They need to make broader strokes to
make sure they include Latinos, and they're not right now. All they
need to do is help bring the resources and we can do the work like
we always have."
by ROBERTO LOVATO
[from the October 3, 2005 issue]
Jessica Sanchez poses an urgent threat to the US military. For a
Pentagon stretched by stagnating enlistments and an
Administration bent on waging a "global war on terror," the question
of whether this four-foot-eleven Mexican-born legal resident and
others like her will decide to join the military has enormous
geopolitical implications.
The Pentagon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to find out
whatever it can about Sanchez and other young Latinos: what they
wear, where they hang out, what kinds of groups they form, what
they read, what they watch on TV, their grades, their dreams.
Members of the military's numerous and well-funded recruiting
commands use sophisticated Geographic Information Systems
maps, souped-up recruiting Hummers and other resources to
establish strategic positions in the minds, pocketbooks and
neighborhoods of young Latinos like Sanchez.
Recruiters are devising new and often unexpected ways to
penetrate daily Latino life. "I went to a birthday celebration at
Chuck E. Cheese's," says Sanchez, a 25-year-old single mom
from San Marcos, California, just outside San Diego. "We were
watching a puppet show when all of a sudden a military song is
playing in the background. I thought that was weird but kept
watching. A couple of minutes later, all of us were looking at
pictures on a TV screen of people in the Army giving food and
supplies to kids in Iraq. My friends and I thought that was really
weird--and got out."
The bad news for Pentagon planners is not just Sanchez's negative
reaction to the puppet show, or even her eventual decision not to
join the Navy. It's that she and other Latinos who are rejecting the
military's overtures are turning around and organizing a grassroots
movement against recruitment in their community.
From the northernmost corner of Washington State to the
southernmost beaches of south Florida, veteran Latino
counterrecruiters and younger activistas are facing off against
thousands of military recruiters in a battle that will determine
whether Latino youth continue echoing the "Yo soy el Army"
and other Pentagon PR slogans or instead adopt the "Yo estoy en
contra del Army" slogan taken up by Sanchez. The
counterrecruitment movement, spearheaded by scores of Latinos in
Chicago, El Paso, Tucson and other cities, suburbs and rural
communities, is largely occurring beneath the radar of the mostly
white antiwar movement, despite its potential to alter the course of
Iraq and future US wars.
"Latinos are very important to the national security of the United
States," says Larry Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics in the
Reagan Administration Defense Department, where he
administered about 70 percent of the largest line items in the
federal budget. "A decrease in Latino enlistment numbers would
make things very difficult for the armed forces, because they are
the fastest-growing [minority] group in the country and they have a
very distinguished record of service in the military. If I
were Donald Rumsfeld, I would be very worried about the possibility
of decreasing Latino numbers. I'd be thinking about how to make
do with smaller numbers of troops or with further lowering
standards for aptitude, age, education and other factors."
The centrality of Latinos to the military enterprise can be seen in
statements by Pentagon officials like John McLaurin, Deputy
Assistant Secretary of the Army for Human Resources, who stated
that in order to meet recruitment goals, Latino enlistments must
grow to 22 percent by the year 2025, when one in four Americans
will be Latino. Two factors add to the urgency. One is that while
Latinos make up only 13 percent of the active-duty forces, they
also make up a fast-growing 16 percent of the 17- to 21-year-old
population. In the eyes of Pentagon planners, this rapidly
growing, relatively poor population is prime recruiting material.
Latinos already in the military are concentrated in the low ranks of
the Marines and the Army, serving in the high-casualty, high-risk
jobs of front-line troops urgently needed in Iraq. The second factor
driving the Latinization of the Pentagon's recruitment strategy is the
decrease in African-American and women recruits. Since 2000 the
percentage of African-American recruits has dropped from 23.5
percent to less than 14 percent, thanks to the widespread
disaffection with the Iraq War--and good organizing--among
parents and students in the black community.
And some preliminary indicators show that the Pentagon's efforts
are paying off. Latino enlistment increased from 10.4 percent of
new recruits in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. According to University
of Maryland military sociologist David Segal, however, the jury is
still out on whether the Latino enlistment campaign will solve the
Defense Department's recruitment problem in the mid to long term.
A drop in Latino numbers could, Segal says, "plunge the military
into an even deeper crisis. They will have to learn how to better
recruit whites." He adds that "when antiwar efforts focus on
recruitment, they're denying recruiters major access they
desperately need."
The Bush adventure in Iraq has done much to foster anti-
recruitment sentiment and create the "Latino unity" activists have
dreamed of for decades. Beyond the anonymous, individualistic
rejection of the war measured in recent polls of Latinos, a more
vocal and active rejection of war and recruitment is taking hold on
the ground, tapping into several currents of Latino political tradition.
Vietnam veteran and University of San Diego professor Jorge
Mariscal is among those working feverishly to cut Pentagon strings
they feel yank young Latinos further and further into
imperial entanglements. "We are trying to show the historical
continuity of Latino protest against the exploitation of other Latinos
in US wars of aggression," says Mariscal, considered by many to
be the dean of Latino counterrecruitment efforts.
On this past August 29, Mariscal's organization, the Project on
Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (YANO), and dozens of other
Latino groups launched a campaign to educate Latino parents and
students about military recruitment in schools. A main focus was
simply informing people that the No Child Left Behind Act, which
allows recruiters access to student contact information, also
contains an opt-out provision. The organizers chose to launch the
campaign on August 29 because it was the anniversary of the
Chicano Moratorium of 1970--the largest, most radical Latino
antiwar, antirecruitment mobilization in US history. The campaign
draws strength from the antimilitaristic traditions of US-born Latinos
(especially Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans) as well as from
the anti-militarismo traditions of more recent Latin American
immigrants from such countries as El Salvador and the Dominican
Republic.
While the war for young Latino hearts rages in all corners of the
country, the strategic theater of battle for Latino bodies remains the
Southwest, especially Southern California. A 2001 study by the US
Army Recruiting Command (USAREC), for example, defined Los
Angeles, the rest of Southern California, Phoenix and Sacramento
as its top markets for Latino recruits. But California has also
become the de facto heart of the nascent movement among US
Latinos. Animating it is Fernando Suarez del Solar, a former
student activist in Mexico who now lives in Escondido, California.
Del Solar traces his struggle against the military to the moment he
witnessed Mexican military personnel "push their bayonets into
young men--and women" during a 1972 protest in the Zocalo, the
central square of Mexico City. "That was my first encounter with
militarismo."
Three decades later Del Solar took another, sharper turn against
militarismo after his son, Jesus, a marine, died in Iraq in 2003.
Since then, his denunciation of the "lies and half-truths" recruiters
use on kids like Jesus has been unceasing. Because he can't
shake images of how his then-13-year-old boy was first "seduced"
by the trinkets, posters and ideas given to him by recruiters at a
mall in National City, Del Solar works to educate other parents and
students about recruitment and war.
Bemoaning the "lack of leadership among Latinos at the national
level," Del Solar and others in the Latino counterrecruitment
movement complain that national advocacy groups like the League
of United Latin American Citizens and the National Council of La
Raza are not only silent but complicit in finding fresh Latino bodies
to feed the war machine. LULAC and NCLR do accept
sponsorships from and provide forums for Pentagon promotion at
some of their national conferences and local events. In their
determination to meet what recruiting handbooks call "influencers,"
Marine, Army and other Defense Department personnel can be
seen at LULAC and NCLR events either glad-handing or manning
the recruitment Hummers, chin-up challenges, inflatable obstacle
courses and other props in front of their trinket-stuffed information
booths. To fill the void, Del Solar's organization, Guerrero Azteca,
and Mariscal's group, YANO, have joined forces. They plan to
convene a national meeting of Latino counterrecruitment
organizations and leaders to connect the numerous efforts
springing up across the country.
But the forces of counterrecruitment face an armada of military
recruitment organizations backed by the best civilian, corporate
and community alliances our tax dollars can buy. Continuing the
Latino recruitment focus that started with the Clinton
Administration's Hispanic Access Initiative, the Pentagon has
invested hundreds of millions of dollars to turn poor Latino
neighborhoods and decrepit, Latino-heavy schools into soldier
factories. Last year alone USAREC deployed five brigades, forty-
one battalions, 5,648 recruiters and 1,690 recruiting
stations. The military won't reveal what share of its recruitment
resources is being targeted at Latinos, but it's clearly substantial.
For Hispanic Heritage month, the Army is highlighting Hispanic
soldiers in a massive ad campaign and a Congressional Medal of
Honor tour of high schools across the country.
In Puerto Rico counterrecruiters have fanned out to all 200 of the
island's high schools to deliver the antimilitaristic and opt-out
messages to thousands of students there. "We are picketing
recruitment offices and asking Puerto Rico's Department of
Education to give us 'equal time' or 'equal access' so that we can
go to the schools to talk to the students against military
recruitment," says Jorge Colon, spokesperson for the Coalición
Ciudadana en Contra del Militarismo (Citizen's Coalition Against
Militarism), a broad-based network of labor, parent, teacher,
student and other groups. Like Mariscal, Colon and other Puerto
Ricans link current counterrecruitment efforts to antimilitaristic
traditions; much of the energy and momentum of the successful
movement to rid the island of Vieques of bombing and other military
exercises has been transferred to the counterrecruitment effort.
In the northernmost corner of Washington State, Rosalinda Guillen
is also drawing on tradition to combat what she sees as deception
in the farmlands of Skagit and Whatcom counties, where recruiters
are seeking to harvest new recruits among the Oaxacan and
Chiapanecan Indians and Mexican, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan
immigrants working the fields. Guillen, a former leader in the United
Farm Workers, returned to her hometown to fight for Latino rights,
including the right of youth to decline military service. "Recruiters
are going into high schools. They're going after our young
people and new immigrants," says Guillen, whose organization
translates opt-out materials, does educational work and plans
larger strategy to fight Latino recruitment.
Like many Latinos I spoke with, Guillen has one message for the
larger progressive community, especially those fighting the war and
recruitment: "White-led social justice programs and organizations
need to do something. They need to make broader strokes to
make sure they include Latinos, and they're not right now. All they
need to do is help bring the resources and we can do the work like
we always have."