Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and colleagues were puzzled to learn of a major World War II documentary to air without the voices of Latino veterans. And then the campaign began.
For nearly a decade, Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and a small army of students and volunteer colleagues around the country have been aggressively chasing and documenting a rapidly vanishing chapter of American history — the American Latino and Latina experience during World War II.
Along the way, they recorded nearly 600 interviews of about two hours each. They found thousands of pictures of Latinos in uniform, assigned to segregated units by language and, more often than not, treated with much the same disdain as their Black and Asian brothers and sisters. They found families who had as many as five sons in the war at one time and even an American of Mexican descent who had been repatriated to Mexico during the Depression only to be called to duty during the war. He gladly reported to serve.
