Racism and Assimilation in “Ricardo’s War”
Part II ofSex and War in the Steel Mill Barrio School Stories of Hugo Martínez-Serros
As indicated in the first installment of this article,what is presented hereindraws on three papers drafted by the co-authors specified, as students in MZ’s seminar on Chicago Latino writing, assigned to extend, complement and question the modes of analysis developed by MZ and presented in previous issues of El BeiSMan. In this shortened version, we have eliminated most bibliographical referencesand notes.
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“This ain’t your country. Look what’s happening all around you. The Japs have sewed up the Pacific. Rommel is kicking ass in Egypt but the Mayor of L.A. has declared all-out war on Chicanos. On you! ¿Te curas?” (Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit. 1992: 30)
According to the Wikipedia entry on the subject,
Millions of Tijuana bibles were printed and sold in the 1930s, the heyday of the bibles. But the number of new Tijuana bible titles being produced took a nosedive at the beginning of World War II, … with wartime shortages of paper and printing supplies.
This decline of these eight-page bibles or octavos during the war may well account for the implicit transition marked in Martínez-Serros’ “Ricardo’s War”, a story which reaches its climax in relation the question of wartime paper shortages. If “Octavo” can be seen as a story of Chicago Mexican “Assimilation Aborted,” as proposed in Louise Año Kerr’s dissertation, “Ricardo’s War” presents an extreme example of the assimilation effort and its failure—this in the context of the home war effort as lived out in the same Steel Mill Chicago school central to previous stories analyzed in this study. Here, we confront the relation of a Chicago Chicano fiction to what we might term normative Southwest Chicano narratives.
In the literature’s usual version, military service, most keenly represented in stories taking place during times of war, represents a complex and ambivalent choice for Chicanos. The ultimate demonstration of one’s patriotism and loyalty, fighting in a war for the U.S. seems to assure one’s place as a faithful American citizen. This is frequently the case in Midwest and specifically Chicago Chicano narratives as well. Yet, what happens when it’s a question of war on American soil? How do Chicanos or Mexicanos working in the U.S. prove their loyalty when a war is being waged against their very cultural identity, as in Luis Valdez’s famous play Zoot Suit? And what might be a Chicago Mexican take on this question?
“Ricardo’s War” presents the experiences and feelings of an eleven-year-old boy of Mexican immigrants and his sense of place in his city during the onset of World War II. It is through the lens of war that the reader learns about Ricardo and his fellow students, as well as the dominant Anglo society as they confront the uncertainties and fears of an imminent war immediately following the bombing of Pear Harbor by Japanese forces. This historic moment marks a turning point in Ricardo’s life since he must not only face his fears, but must also reconcile his national and ethnic identity at a time when patriotism and nativism are exacerbated through the war effort.
Martínez-Serros’ story explores competing ideas of both external and internal war throughout the narrative. This exploration involves a nativist discourse used to racialize the Mexican as the enemy, thus revealing a social desire aimed at containing rather than assimilating the Mexican immigrant. The story represents a war that affects all aspects of one’s life and causes immediate disruption; and in this regard, the narrative centers initially on the incorporation of the role of movies and a concomitant, if gradual, concern with the theme of surveillance.
Indeed Ricardo’s introduction to war begins as he and others exit a local movie theater to be greeted by the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The text then follows Ricardo as he moves through the streets without any clear sense of direction, living a waking dream turned nightmare. Alarm grips him, and he feels “a deep instantaneous chill” changing and destroying “everything in a flash” (108). His movements through the city are not like Walter Benjamin’s description of a flâneur. While his journey shows that he is not confined to a specific barrio, this apparent freedom gives him no sense of liberation; afraid and worried, he seeks sanctuary at home. “Two transfers and a long time afterward, he finally spied his house. Before the streetcar came to a full stop, its doors swung open and he jumped from it” (109).
Ricardo´s movement out of the movie theater into the home front theater of war marks the first stage in a process by which he comes to experience as a war-induced sequence of events in relation to his own personal and ethnic identity. Over time, he grows aware of propaganda films produced to showcase America’s inevitable win due to its superior weapons and patriotic soldiers who give up their lives for the country’s good. Although Ricardo attempts to avoid the influence of these movies, their effect is inescapable. The newsreels presented before each feature film are his only sources of information, aside from the static newspaper photos and the radio reports. Although the theme of surveillance is not fully or explicitly developed, the text seems to question the problem of watching and being watched. In turn, Ricardo reacts to war–related footage by surveying the field around neighborhood and school in search of the enemy.
His relation to the war is unlike that of his Anglo-American counterparts. Triggered by filmed scenes of battle, his perspective involves a collective memory of war from before his time—a memory that becomes his through his internalization of his parents’ Mexican experience. For him, war itself is internal as well as external. Yet he knows that not all around him share his point of view; and the difference he feels highlights a deep separation between him and the dominant Anglo society. However, the cause of Ricardo’s isolation represents more than simply a difference in perspective. The degree to which Ricardo internalizes the struggle of war signifies a process that reaches into his very identity.
At first, Ricardo expects the bombers to attack Chicago; he expects the war to affect him in the same way he has seen things in the movie footage, with bombs destroying homes, neighborhoods and whole cities. However none of this happens, and it only adds to his confusion in ways that provide the Chicago accent so important to our study. “From the streetcar everything looked unchanged. Familiar buildings stood where they always had and there were no signs of rubble” (109). But as Ricardo waits, the terror of war completely takes hold of him and even seeps into his dreams:
What if he never saw his family again? It had happened to his mother and father—in Mexico, the Revolution. Without warning, the machineguns started. Children running in the streets, dropping books, caught in crossfire (110).
Unlike those Chicanos with deep historical Southwest roots (but yes like Zoot Suit and many other Mexican -inflected Chicano narratives), Ricardo’s point of reference in all this will be the stories his parents have told him of having to leave family and country behind with the onset of the Mexican Revolution. Furthermore, he grows aware that Chicago is important to the Axis powers since this is where considerable stockpiles of U.S. weapons and supplies are being produced. Gradually he sees how the war changes the city and his own life in ways he has not been able to anticipate. In this context, Ricardo’s school best represents the narrative’s perspective on war held by the dominant Anglo society. As in other stories, the author uses this setting to question the role of institutions in shaping identities that alienate and segregate the Mexican students. The school under the mandate of the principal and teachers enters into a chauvinistic frenzy accompanied by ritualistic demonstrations of patriotism through its daily school assemblies, which included much flag waving and the singing of national songs such as America the beautiful. At first it seems as if everyone is included within this supposedly cohesive all inclusive patriotic gambit. And Ricardo internalizes this nationalism by recognizing the importance of the steel mills within his family and ethnic community.
As the war heats up overseas, the school views the war as distant. The fact that the teachers utilize large maps to track the war (111) speaks to the battlefront’s physical distance from U.S. society. For Ricardo’s classmates war is about singing songs, telling stories of American heroism, and watching Hollywood war movies (111, 114). For these Chicago kids, this war remains external to Anglo America; in spite of warnings from school officials, they fear no bombs, no battles, and no bloodshed on the city streets; there is no generalized fear of an imminent coastal landing, of enemies stomping into one’s bedroom. Unlike Ricardo’s perception of the war, the school’s “war effort” and “patriotism” are vague and disconnected concepts. His classmates do not seem to have his same reactions:
It baffled Ricardo that they were not afraid, wounded him that they were so unfeeling, so different from him. More than anything, it shamed him … to speechlessness, separated him from them, casting him deeper into fear and shame (110).
In school Ricardo’s teachers tell him that the Chinese are just like the Japanese, only darker and shorter. This causes Ricardo to observe the Chinese merchants near his home, in an attempt to see if they are like the enemy. “Now, whenever he could, he would look through the window of the Chinese laundry a half a block form the YMCA and feel that he was looking at the enemies of freedom¨ (114). For a short moment Ricardo feels like the one who watches, the one who is in control. The U.S. has a new enemy, and however briefly, Ricardo feels himself now as an American and not the foreign son of an immigrant.
Although Ricardo and dominant Anglo society may have differing perceptions of WWII, both perspectives identify the enemy as the Japanese and the Germans. However, Ricardo recognizes weak spots in the arguments of his classmates and teachers regarding the Japanese. Japs Potato Chips have to become Jays. But no names of German products are changed; and no one protests when students goose-step past a Jewish shopkeeper’s place shouting “Heil Hitler!” The two enemy groups are not judged equally and Ricardo contemplates the inequality involved:
The Germans were different. Not like the Japanese. Nobody said the Germans were sneaky. They were big, blond, blue-eyed, like many Americans; but they looked tougher (116).
The similarity in physical traits between the Germans and the “Americans” allows for similarities in character traits as well. Ricardo recognizes that those around him at his school view the Germans as intelligent and almost admirable. But the Japanese do not share physical traits with Americans, and are therefore in no way like Americans. Ricardo’s teacher, Mrs. Gleason, probably Irish, is quick to underline the disloyal and savage-like qualities of the Japanese “The lesson of Pearl Harbor is that those little animals can’t be trusted,” she explains. “That’s what we mean when we say, ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!’ We can’t trust little animals anywhere in the world!” (115). Then Mrs. Gleason makes a startling comparison, saying “It’s like ‘Remember the Alamo!’” (115)—a comment that of course deepens Ricardo’s discomfort.
The text has jumped from defining an enemy that lives on foreign soil, to one that now lives on American streets: the Mexican immigrant. The narrative communicates this connection between Ricardo and the enemy through his feeling of uneasiness. Yet, this is not the first time that Martínez-Serros’ short story aligns the Mexican immigrant with the foreign enemy. Upon contemplating his isolation, Ricardo reflects on how painful it is to be called a coward. Ricardo contemplates, “¡Cobarde! It was the worst thing his father could say of anyone. ¡Cobarde! What his mother called him when he struck his younger sister. ¡Cobarde!” (110). Utilizing this same description when portraying the Japanese, the narration notes that “Ricardo learned that the Japs were doubly yellow-they had yellow skins and they were cowards. ¡Cobardes!” (114). Cowardice but also physical traits serve to align Ricardo with the Japanese. And this identification with the racialized enemy comes forth most fully when the students on the playground want to play war, and they argue over who will play the role of the Japanese. One student comments, “Well I can’t be no damn Jap … ! My eyes ain’t slanted or swolled up” (115). And then suddenly the boys see Ricardo not as Mexican or Chinese, but they immediately racialize him assigning his dark complexion and features to those of the evil Japanese. So it is that the young Mexican inevitably internalizes the designation and once again becomes the enemy.
When he was alone, Ricardo searched his face in the mirror. And he studied the Japanese faces whenever he saw them. In the end he saw that … his eyes … were tipped and slightly puffy. And he was dark like some of them, had their dark eyes and black hair (115).
Ricardo’s isolation and feelings of separation from the larger society around him show that these feelings do not just stem from differing notions about war. Martínez-Serros utilizes this isolation to construct the idea of Ricardo as foreign and different in his very being. This difference establishes a clear and racialized association with the enemy. Ricardo accepts his new identity and subordinate position within U.S. society. If the Mexican immigrant is the enemy, then the narrative not only depicts a foreign war, but also a new perspective of war on U.S. soil after all. As Luis Valdez’s Pachuco declares, “Forget the war overseas, carnal. Your war is on the home front… The barrio needs you, carnal. Fight back!” (Valdez 30). In this sense, Ricardo’s initial patriotic drive fomented by school and the media is ultimately redefined and now he symbolically initiates a ¨war¨ not only against the Germans and the Japanese but also his own private Mexican war against the “American” güeros while also affirming his own Mexican and foreign being.
The narrative sets up a discourse in which the concepts of native and foreign are especially significant. And in this context, Nicholas De Genova’s insights into the role nativism in his analysis of Mexican illegality (in his Working the Boundaries [2005]) prove to be quite useful in framing the native/foreign binary established in Martínez-Serros’ text. For De Genova,
Nativism must always privilege one or another notion of ‘identity’ against the rest. Indeed, this is precisely what nativism serves to do for nationalism—it produces an identitarian we that can appear to resolve a fundamental problem of all nationalisms, namely, that there is nothing natural or objective or intrinsically necessary about any “nation” (De Genova 61).
De Genova’s book describes the arbitrary nature of privileging one notion of identity over others, and subsequently calling that particular notion native. Ricardo experiences both this imposed idea of nativeness as well as the nationalism that tends to accompany it. When the teachers in Ricardo’s school require all students to buy defense stamps and bonds, the narrative highlights the sharp division between Ricardo and his friends, with respect to the other classmates:
The teachers said everyone had to buy them. Anyone who didn’t wasn’t patriotic and wouldn’t pass at the end of the semester. But few had money to help in this way and, in any case, they were not Ricardo and his friends. Mostly they were the güeros, those who looked like their teachers and had always boasted that they were the real Americans” (117).
How does this war between the foreign immigrant and the native resolve itself? According to De Genova, assimilation is a myth allowing for the immigrant to exist in the non-native soil as a more palatable denizon:
From U.S. nationalism’s melting pot, there emerges ‘new man’; from the immigrant, arises ‘the American’…such a consummated assimilation means nothing less than an eradication of that difference…the obliteration of the immigrant as such (De Genova 80, 82).
Through a process of “Americanization,” the immigrant can supposedly become “American,” and thus acceptable to the native society. Ricardo and his friends try to participate in some of the patriotic actions of their classmates. So with the effort to have the students contribute through war bond purchases buying, or not buying thee bonds stages a battle for American identity on American soil: Who is more American? Clearly Ricardo and his friends are aware of the fact that they do not look like the white kids, and are therefore relegated to a non-native and unpatriotic status—a status Mrs. Gleason registers as she assigns several of them to a cleanup activity after the assemblies. “It was a job for the boys who had learned all they ever would in class, those who didn’t mind staining their backs or getting dirty and would do more good in the auditorium” (112)—a job for minorities who according to Mrs. Gleason are not very bright and will not achieve much academically, yet they have the role of serving and doing the jobs no one wants. The teacher selects Freddie or, more fully, Frederick Douglass Sneed, obviously an African American student, as a group leader—a fact of special interest, since it marks the shifting power and status hierarchies which in this case lead Freddie to choose Ricardo and his Mexican friends, Manny, Lalo and Mario, for his auditorium assembly team.
However, soon there becomes a way for the minority kids to make a difference, as the principal urges all students to participate in a paper collection drive during the second year of the war effort. As the students scramble to collect papers, Freddie and the Mexican kids now form “a team [that] brought more paper than anyone else” (119)—an achievement that becomes a regular pattern as Ricardo asserts himself and becomes the leader of the paper collection campaign. At this point, instead of being pleased and proud of the minority student’ success, Mrs. Gleason is puzzled:
She had expected the most American of her pupils to collect the largest quantities of paper, the pupils who got the best grades and bought most of the defense stamps and bonds. Something was wrong in all this, she knew it (121).
Mrs. Gleason’s uneasiness registers Anglo American discomfort when her “less American” students attempt to integrate into the society. That feeling begins to grow with the success of what has become a predominantly Mexican collection drive. “War turns everything upside down,” she says (122); and this “upside-down” feeling intensifies as the narrative reveals that the war actually makes life better for Mexicans in Chicago. With a surplus of jobs, and a shortage of native men to perform them, braceros, and Mexican workers already present in Chicago, benefit. The war and the demand for steel provide the opportunity for them to increase their level of integration into the dominant society, as many previously unemployed, underemployed or partially employed Mexicans (members of the reserve army of un-unionized, sometimes scab workers used to quell strikes and keep Blacks down and out) are able to find jobs. Now “Ricardo’s father sometimes worked seven days a week and his older brothers found jobs. Debts of many years standing were finally paid off and, for the first time, worry lines disappeared from his mother’s face” (114). However, at the same time, in Ricardo’s classroom, Mexican success, the fear of their partial integration, even if seen as temporary, threatens to fragment the dynamic of national cohesion that replicates and reinforces various hierarchies of power in which the Mexicano workers have little respect or status. It is in this context that Mrs. Gleason, who is probably not an Anglo, asserts her role as a key agent of Anglo American domination, as she takes measures to turn the world “right-side up” again.
Rejecting Ricardo and his friends’ efforts to become part of the patriotic war effort, Mrs. Gleason separates the boys. She worries that Ricardo and his squad’s success are negatively affecting her best students. “Now, all of you know that there’s back work and there’s headwork,” she explains. “Let’s put things in proper perspective. Those of you who do back work well should go on doing it, and those of us who do headwork well should get on with it” (122). The narrative rejects the boys’ assimilation into the war effort and employs a strategy of containment. Assimilation and Americanization are not what the dominant society of the narrative accepts. The narrative reveals a desire to contain and separate. Ricardo and his friends, and thus the Mexican immigrant overall, are still foreign. De Genova reiterates this notion that Chicago Mexican immigrants will never achieve a native status:
Nativism’s identity politics poses a problem about the foreign, not necessarily because of any specific difference pertaining to the ‘race’ or ‘culture’ of the immigrant, but rather, more fundamentally, because the immigrant is simply not ‘native.’ (De Genova 76)
The strategy of containment reaches its climax when Mrs. Gleason coins an acronym to refer to the boys: “the CRETINS” (122), thereby utilizing a word that signifies mental retardation, deficiency, and stupidity to profile the Ricardo’s team. Meanwhile, Ricardo and his team unknowingly take pride in the words that make up the acronym (Commando Reserves Enlisted To Increase National Strength)—a matter that speaks to the limited education of the team members as well as the systemic need to dominate and manipulate the immigrant. Mrs. Gleason’s words signify a desire to maintain separation from the foreign immigrant, and prevent total incorporation. Ricardo and his team experience what amounts to an extreme form of exploitation through their “military service” of collecting paper. As Juan Bruce-Novoa, a foundational critic of Chicano literature, notes:
Traditionally, Chicanos disillusioned by education are offered the alternative of military service as a way of bettering themselves…[Yet] with few exceptions, in Chicano literature military service signifies being duped and exploited” (Bruce Novoa 119-120).
Of course collecting paper is also a way of characterizing the work of Chicano writers, so in this sense there is the added danger that what is on the one hand Martínez-Serros’ resistance writing may in the last analysis not defy but conform to the very system he attempts to challenge. However, his narrative overcomes this danger by exposing the anti-assimilationist and nativist discourse that seeks to contain the Mexican immigrant. The narrative achieves its oppositional force through overlapping, and sometimes-competing perspectives on war. It is above all the war on the home front, the war in the barrio, that is the most significant for Ricardo and other non-native Mexican immigrants. Although the narrative may reveal a desire to separate the foreign from the native, it is important to note that this desire is not only expressed by the Anglo dominant society, but also by Ricardo and his team. They take pride in forming their team to gather paper. This desire to succeed and “whip güero ass” (120) signifies what Raúl Homero Villa, citing Tomás Ybarra Frausto, characterizes as a willed separation and rejection of Anglo-defined “‘American identity’ and the beginning of … Chicano identity” (Villa 2000, 8). This separation may have a culturally-affirming or, as Villa’s has it, a “barriological” effect. Ricardo and his team may be setting the scene to fight against the barrioization or the “dominating social processes originating outside of the barrios…” (Villa 5). Perhaps, the internal identity war of native vs. foreign serves as a catalyst for a community-enabling “barriology” (Villa 6).
By confronting this matter, Martínez-Serros shows the fragmented American identity of us versus them. For Ricardo and Lalo, their white classmates are situated with the German and Japanese enemies; and the real Americans are the ones who fight and contribute to the war as they have been doing with their paper collection. Once again Martínez-Serros underlines mexicano involvement in the war. Mexicans and many other Latinos were enlisted and fought during WWII, yet they still were seen as second-class citizens. They contributed to the U.S. triumph, but they remained on the bottom of the social pyramid. The war goes on.
Some Conclusions
To conclude, Martínez-Serros’ “Ricardo´s War” may not present the most polished and elaborate short story ever written. But the story is nevertheless a very valuable work of Chicano and Latino literature. Its value rests on its ability to portray a realistic picture of Mexicans in Chicago during World War II. Many of the historical and social realities of southside Chicago Mexicans can be corroborated with the work of the early Mexican Chicago historians. But the exact role of schooling and schools, of education and training, in the public educational system to which the Mexicans are assigned has been limited; and only the last overly truncated chapter of Michael Rios’ recent dissertation gives more background and specificity to the generalized views of the schooling process as set forth in Martínez-Serros’ stories.
Martínez-Serros paints Chicago Mexicans in the period of transition from the early colonias to the barrios which would emerge in the years after the war—a period that is also prior to the arrival of the massive wave of Puerto Rican immigration. The Chicago Mexicans in “Ricardo´s War” do not seem as highly segregated and isolated as they did in first stories we discussed in our Martínez-Serros studies. In the schoolroom especially, we see that Ricardo´s school is composed of students from several ethnic and racial backgrounds. In his class we are introduced to a German American whose parents are pro-Germany, an African American who relates rather fluidly to several Latino students almost if not all of whom are Mexican. What the story emphasizes, however, in the persistent and indeed growing internal isolation of the Ricardo and his Mexican friends as things develop in the early 40s, according to processes which Louise Año Nuevo Kerr (1979) had identified as “assimilation aborted.”
If we then consider this story in relation to “Octavo” and the two other school stories Martínez-Serros provides, we are confronted with much of what the historians have sought to explain about Chicago Mexican immigration and settlement. Much of the early published work centers on assimilation and acculturation with relation to dominant and also other dominated groups (the cross acculturation processes involving Irish, Italian, Polish, and African Americans, not to mention processes with other Latinos); however, Michael Jiménez-Innis adds a key dimension with respect to what he has called a “third space “of resistance and creativity, even as many are caught up in efforts at accommodation and conformity. Only with Ríos’ dissertation do we begin to get a historicized explanation of what Martínez-Serros, has already shown us: the role of school and schooling in the overall process by which Mexicans became Chicago far Southside Mexicans. And nowhere does Martínez-Serros show that process more deeply than in the stories discussed here.
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Lillian Gorman, Martin Ponti, and Octavian Stinga are recent graduates of UIC’s Hispanic Studies Graduate Program. Gorman is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Arizona; Ponti and Stinga have taught in various Chicago Spanish programs, including UIC, Truman College, Dominican College, Loyola, etc.
Marc Zimmerman. Professor Emeritus of the U. of Houston and the University of Illinois at Chicago, has written and edited over thirty books on Latin American, Latino and other themes. Director of LACASA Chicago and the Chicago Latino Artists Project (CLAS), he is currently publishing research on Chicago Latino art and literature is El BeiSMan, and has just published his second book of fiction, Martín and Marvin.
