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"Kristian
Wasn't Afraid of War, But This War Was Not Worth Dying For"
Mexican-Americans,
Iraq and the Politics of Immigrant Bashing
By JORGE MARISCAL
At the southern tip of Texas on the
Mexican border across from Matamoros lies the city of Brownsville.
According to the official visitors' bureau website: "Brownsville,
Texas is a truly international city located in a semi-tropical
paradise where two cultures meet to create a unique land of exotic
sounds, flavors, history and natural beauty found nowhere else
in the U.S."
Kristian Menchaca was born
in Houston but grew up and attended schools in Brownsville. The
son of immigrants, he often visited his many cousins on the Mexican
side. In Brownsville there are no walls that separate families
and cultures. This week family members from both sides of the
border will gather to bury Kristian's remains.
A typical working-class youth,
Menchaca had dropped out of high school and obtained a GED.
He loved to play basketball, rooted for the Houston Rockets,
and worked at a gas station and a Wendy's before enlisting.
But hamburgers were not his favorite food. According to friends,
he preferred taquitos de trompo con cilantro y cebolla.
On June 16 insurgents in Iraq
abducted Pfc. Menchaca, 23, and fellow soldier Tommy Tucker,
25, at a checkpoint somewhere along the Euphrates ten miles south
of Baghdad. Their bodies were found a few days later. A third
soldier, David Babineau, 25, died in the initial attack.
On MSNBC's "Hardball,"
Norah O'Donnell introduced Kristian's uncle Mario Vásquez
("Vaskwez" she said repeatedly) and tried to spin the
story: "You know, there's this debate raging in this country
about the troops coming home, but a lot people who have family
members over there say we need more troops to make sure we keep
the guys safe. I assume that's what your family believes."
Tío Mario agreed: "Yes,
we believe very strongly that, if we're going to have our soldiers
over there, we should have more soldiers protecting our soldiers
of our own country."
But what O'Donnell failed to
report and what was not widely covered in the English-language
media was that days earlier Menchaca's mother, Maria Guadalupe
Vásquez, had issued a statement in Spanish: "Estoy
en contra de la guerra y me duele mucho lo que pasó a
mi hijo" ("I am against the war, and I feel very hurt
by what happened to my son").
The statement was mentioned
briefly on June 20 in the Houston Chronicle and quickly disappeared.
Several relatives reported that both Vásquez and Julio
César, Menchaca's brother and an Iraq veteran, did not
agree with her son's decision to join the military.
In a mixture of bravado and
clarity, Julio César told a local Spanish-language newspaper:
"Kristian nunca tuvo miedo de ir a la guerra, aún
cuando esta guerra en Irak no es una guerra por la que vale la
pena morir" ("Kristian was never afraid to go to war
even though this war in Iraq is not a war worth dying for").
On Monday, Menchaca returned
to Brownsville. As poet María Herrera Sobek wrote about
the U.S. war in Southeast Asia: "Another Mexican American
hero brought home under the Stars and Stripes/Long gone the need
to prove his manhood/Long gone the need to prove his red-blooded
American genealogy/And only the stars twinkle at our foolish
pride."
While America once again kills
its young in a needless war, senators and congressmen in Washington
play politics with the issue of immigration and nativists harass
Mexican workers on street corners across the country. It is
a crushing irony characteristic of Mexican American communities
that Kristian Menchaca had joined the Army in hopes of someday
becoming a Border Patrol agent.
Later this week in Los Angeles,
the Latino youth organization Coordinadora estudiantil de la
Raza (Student Coordinating Committee of the People) will attack
that irony head on by holding a protest downtown. Building upon
an earlier action in which Chicano high school students resigned
from their JROTC units, the group brings together two of the
most pressing issues in their community--the unchecked stream
of Latinos and Latinas into the lowest ranks of the military
and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In their literature they ask
the question that might have saved Kristian Menchaca's life:
"If you are thinking about joining the (J)ROTC or the MILITARY
consider this: DO YOU WANT TO BE SENT TO IRAQ OR THE BORDER?"
Jorge Mariscal is a Vietnam veteran and director
of the Chicano-Latino Arts and Humanities Program at the University
of California, San Diego. He is a member of Project YANO (San
Diego). Visit his blog at: jorgemariscal.blogspot.com/He can be reached at: gmariscal@ucsd.edu
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