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Alexander Mendoza ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1918, Pvt. Marcelino Serna, part of the 89th Division, IV Corps, First Army, received orders to move toward the German Army’s lines at a salient near St. Mihiel. The main assault focused on the German 1st Division and was to attack the small town of Vigneulles, about twelve miles behind the enemy’s position. Serna’s division stood on the corps’ right as they made their way against the southern face of the St. Mihiel salient. The Americans surpassed the goals of the offensive ’s first day by midafternoon. Serna’s unit came across a German machine-gun nest that had already killed twelve in the Argonne Forest. Serna, the scout for his company , received permission to probe the enemy position. He soon came under fire, bullets piercing his helmet. Yet he was not deterred, continuing to move along the enemy’s left flank. “When I got close enough,” Serna recollected, “I threw four grenades into the nest. Eight Germans came out with their hands up. Another six were in the nest dead. I held my prisoners until help arrived.” The private was not done. In the MeuseArgonne offensive two weeks later, Serna followed a German sniper to an enemy bunker . He then single-handedly captured twenty-four soldiers and killed twenty-six others with his rifle, handguns, and an assortment of grenades. The American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) offensive ultimately led to the Armistice on November 11. But four days before the ceasefire, Serna was wounded by a German sniper. As Serna recovered in a French army hospital, Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of the AEF, awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest American combat award. A few days later Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, supreme commander of the Allied armies, awarded him the French Croix de Guerre for bravery.1 In 1919 Serna received his discharge papers and returned to his adopted home in El Paso, becoming one of Texas’ most highly decorated soldiers of the First World 2 TEJANOS AT WAR A HISTORY OF MEXICAN TEXANS IN AMERICAN WARS TEJANOS AT WAR 39 War. But Serna was not a US citizen. Born in Chihuahua City, Chihuahua, Mexico, on April 26, 1896, he crossed the Rio Grande at the age of twenty and came to El Paso in search of a better life. He found work in the railroads and agricultural fields of the American Southwest. A year after Serna arrived in El Paso, however, the United States entered World War I. At about the same time that Congress declared war on Germany, federal officials detained Serna and a group of men in Colorado. Risking deportment, he volunteered to enlist in the US Army. After three weeks of training, the young Serna traveled to England as part of the army’s “Middle Wests” Division (most of its soldiers came from the region between the Canadian border and the Rio Grande) before participating in the bloody offensives of 1918. Yet for all his bravery, Serna apparently had no chance to receive the Medal of Honor, much less a promotion. An army officer, according to Serna, told him that the Medal of Honor was not awarded to “buck” privates . Adding insult to injury, the officer also told him that because of his difficulty with English, he would not be promoted. Nevertheless, Serna became a US citizen in 1924 and lived a long life on the Texas-Mexico border before his death on February 29, 1992, at the age of ninety-five. Attempts to have the Medal of Honor posthumously awarded to him failed.2 The exploits of Serna symbolize how Texans of Mexican descent have labored to receive recognition for their service on the battlefield. These Tejanos struggled to overcome the discrimination and attitudes of Anglo-Americans following the Texas Revolution.3 Accordingly, they straddled their loyalties in the various American wars of the nineteenth century, uncertain what side to take while at the same time remaining loyal to their native Mexico. By the turn of the twentieth century, additional Mexican immigrants kept the accommodation of Tejanos somewhat limited as the burgeoning middle class still retained cultural markers with the land of their birth. Yet by the 1930s, Tejanos related to American ideology more clearly than ever. By extension, many saw their participation in the various wars of the United States as a way to demonstrate their form of patriotism, which focused on the Mexican cultural emphasis of the warrior...

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