To the Line of Fire!: Mexican Texans and World War I

Introduction

xiii Introduction During the summer of 1917, less than two months after Pres. Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, José de la Luz Saenz, a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher and father of three from Dittlinger, Texas, a small company town in southeastern Comal County, joined ten million other Americans in registering for the first military draft in the United States since the Civil War. Passionate and idealistic, with dark skin and Indian features, Saenz had spent the last several years campaigning against school segregation in Central and South Texas, inculcating cultural pride into his Mexican and Mexican American students at every opportunity. When he was later inducted into the army, he eschewed the military deferment that his wife and young family might have secured for him, regarding military service as a chance to prove his loyalty to his country. Besides, he reasoned, the military contributions of Tejanos to the Great War (as World War I was more commonly known initially) would provide them with leverage for a future civil rights campaign at home. “Let us demonstrate once and for all that we are worthy of fighting for [human] rights,” he wrote to his ethnic counterparts , glorifying the overseas mission of the American military in much the same manner as President Wilson, “so that in the future we may be accorded those same rights.”1 Saenz was one of thousands of men from the Tejano community inducted into the American military during World War I. But not all of these inductees were as upfront about their ancestry as the Dittlinger resident. One such individual was David Cantú Barkley. Born in Laredo, Texas, in 1899 to Josef Barkley, a career army man, and Antonia Cantú, a South Texan of Mexican descent, Barkley acknowledged only his Anglo roots when he enlisted as a private in the army. Fearful that the military might treat him and other soldiers of Mexican ancestry like African American servicemen, whom most officials considered inferior and often assigned to labor battalions instead of combat units, the light-skinned Tejano took every precaution to conceal his heritage in order to serve on the front lines—which he eventually did. Ever distrustful of his superiors, he even warned his mother about using her Spanish surname in their correspondence. “Please don’t use the name,” he reportedly asked her in one letter. introduction xiv “Just tell them it’s Barkley.” With such careful measures, he succeeded in keeping his secret from the military even beyond his dying day, which came on November 9, 1918, a mere forty-eight hours before the signing of the armistice that signaled the end of the war.2 I The wartime experiences of Saenz and Barkley, as well as those of other servicemen of Mexican descent, remain neglected subjects of investigation. That this is so ninety-one years after the close of the war merits consideration. After all, few other topics in the field of American history have generated as large a body of literature as World War I. In fact, the sheer number of books on diplomacy, the military, domestic dissent, aftermath, and other aspects of the war makes it almost impossible to write a comprehensive essay on its historiography. This task has become even less enviable with the recent outpouring of works on the significant but previously ignored roles of minorities and women in the war.3 Why, then, have historians ignored the World War I experiences of Mexican-origin individuals? On the one hand, one reason is that most Chicano historians, many of whom objected to the Vietnam War and its disproportionately high Mexican American casualties , have seemingly avoided military topics on the whole.4 (That said, Chicano history is a relatively young field of study, and there is, of course, the possibility that its few practitioners have simply devoted themselves to other subjects.) Military historians, on the other hand, have probably neglected the topic because of the nature of the sources on Mexican Americans in World War I. The American government did not recognize Mexican Americans as a distinct ethnic or racial group before, during, or immediately after the war. Consequently, the military kept no records of Mexican Americans— whom it categorized as “white”—similar to the documents on African Americans and American Indians. The lack of readily available information on, among other things, the total number of Mexican American servicemen, draft registrants, and casualties has likely kept scholars from attempting any in-depth studies on Mexican...