Ken Burns captured so much of World War II in his TV documentary, “The War.” He reminded Americans of why Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion. He portrayed the incredible life of Japanese American soldiers visiting their parents, relatives and friends imprisoned in concentration camps by their U.S. government. Then going off to fight for that same government.
World War II is my passion. Specifically the 8th Air Force — the young men who bombed Hitler’s Fortress Europe from bases in England. I still cry at the sight of a B-17, the most beloved of the heavy bombers because, even in tatters, it unfailingly would bring an airman home.
I watched “The War” nightly. The program aired over 10 days and is now appearing in reruns. I’m amazed at how personal he made this war to the warriors who literally saved the world. That’s why it’s so tragic that his great story is incomplete and therefore inaccurate.
In 15 hours of these intensely personal stories of the battlefield and the home front, Burns forgot Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Americans and Cuban Americans who fought and died for this country along side Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans and Black Americans.
The lesson for us journalists —- you can write a great story but if it’s incomplete, it’s not accurate.
Burns is one of the few white folks who seems to understand and accept that race is at the core of American history. He isn’t afraid of race. Every program he has done, except one, has a subtext of how blacks and whites do and do not relate to each other — the Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson. He explains his exclusion of Latinos in The War by saying The War is his vision of World War II.
We’ve seen this vision of American history before. Generations of young Americans, including ours, learned from our school history books that American history, as taught, was not really history, but, as some have said, his story—the white man’s story. Blacks were in the section about slavery and the Civil War. Asians might be covered in the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882 — the first time the U.S. barred a nationality from coming here. You learned that Mexicans only fought at the Alamo — for Mexico.
Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement the millennial generation, our children, is the first generation of young Americans to learn from history books that tell the American story in all its colors.
The story of Mexican Americans and World War II is gripping. Your Latino friends will tell you that Texas (and the Southwest) held for Mexicans, what Mississippi and the South held for black folks — discrimination, degradation, disrespect and, even, death.
But in World War II, Mexican Americans were put into U. S. Army, Navy, Marine and Army Corps units with Anglos. Black soldiers and airmen served in segregated units. In the Navy, blacks were the cooks and the stewards. Japanese Americans were allowed to serve in a segregated front-line unit in Italy.
Mexicans had never been treated equal to whites, although they were considered white by the treaty that ended the Mexican American War in 1848.
World War II Latino veterans came home and organized Latino civil rights organizations such as the American GI Forum, and put new life into existing organizations, like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). They asked the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (The called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund) to help them organize a Mexican legal defense fund, which became MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Many no longer taught their children Spanish because they recalled being punished in school for speaking it, and how a Spanish accent doomed them to more discrimination.
After much pressure, Burns relented slightly and opened a small slit in his vision of The War. You saw a Latino veteran the first night talking about his unit, Carlson’s Raiders. They fought behind Japanese lines in the cesspool of hell known as Guadalcanal.
He reportedly added a little over 20 minutes of additional interviews with Latinos and Native Americans.
“Unfortunately, the new material isn’t incorporated seamlessly, as Burns said he would do back in April -– instead, it’s obvious that it was added on,” said Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the fight to get Latinos included.
“And it’s clear he (Burns) still doesn’t get it; in one interview, with Time magazine, he still thinks he’s dealing with an immigrant population -– and he notes that in 30 more years, it will be Martians who will feel excluded. In another interview, he compares Latinos to mangoes, as in if he painted a still life of fruit and left out the mangoes, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t like mangoes. It adds insult to injury,” said Riva-Rodriguez, a former Dallas Morning News reporter.
Incomplete history is like an incomplete story. It lacks accuracy. A song from the movie Pocahontas has the lesson for Ken Burns and us: When you write the history of America, you have to paint with all the colors of the wind.
