COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
The War for Latinos
ROBERTO LOVATO, TheNation
October 3, 2005
Jessica Sanchez poses an urgent threat to the US military. For aPentagon stretched by stagnating enlistments and an
Administration bent on waging a "global war on terror," the question of
whether this four-foot-eleven Mexican-born
legal resident and others like her will decide to join the military has
enormous geopolitical implications.
The Pentagon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to find out
whatever it can about Sanchez and other young
Latinos: what they wear, where they hang out, what kinds of groups they
form, what they read, what they watch on
TV, their grades, their dreams. Members of the military's numerous and
well-funded recruiting commands use
sophisticated Geographic Information Systems maps, souped-up recruiting
Hummers and other resources to establish
strategic positions in the minds, pocketbooks and neighborhoods of
young Latinos like Sanchez.
Recruiters are devising new and often unexpected ways to penetrate
daily Latino life. "I went to a birthday celebration
at Chuck E. Cheese's," says Sanchez, a 25-year-old single mom from San Marcos, California, just outside San Diego.
"We were watching a puppet show when all of a sudden a military song is
playing in the background. I thought that
was weird but kept watching. A couple of minutes later, all of us were
looking at pictures on a TV screen of people in
the Army giving food and supplies to kids in Iraq. My friends and I
thought that was really weird--and got out."
The bad news for Pentagon planners is not just Sanchez's negative
reaction to the puppet show, or even her eventual
decision not to join the Navy. It's that she and other Latinos who are
rejecting the military's overtures are turning around
and organizing a grassroots movement against recruitment in their
community.
From the northernmost corner of Washington State to the southernmost
beaches of south Florida, veteran Latino
counterrecruiters and younger activistas are facing off against
thousands of military recruiters in a battle that will
determine whether Latino youth continue echoing the "Yo soy el Army"
and other Pentagon PR slogans or instead
adopt the "Yo estoy en contra del Army" slogan taken up by Sanchez. The
counterrecruitment movement, spearheaded
by scores of Latinos in Chicago, El Paso, Tucson and other cities,
suburbs and rural communities, is largely occurring
beneath the radar of the mostly white antiwar movement, despite its
potential to alter the course of Iraq and future US wars.
"Latinos are very important to the national security of the United States,"
says Larry Korb, former Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics in
the Reagan Administration Defense Department, where
he administered about 70 percent of the largest line items in the
federal budget. "A decrease in Latino enlistment numbers
would make things very difficult for the armed forces, because they are
the fastest-growing [minority] group in the country
and they have a very distinguished record of service in the military.
If I were Donald Rumsfeld, I would be very worried
about the possibility of decreasing Latino numbers. I'd be thinking
about how to make do with smaller numbers of troops
or with further lowering standards for aptitude, age, education and
other factors."
The centrality of Latinos to the military enterprise can be seen in
statements by Pentagon officials like John McLaurin,
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Human Resources, who stated
that in order to meet recruitment goals, Latino
enlistments must grow to 22 percent by the year 2025, when one in four
Americans will be Latino. Two factors add to the
urgency. One is that while Latinos make up only 13 percent of the
active-duty forces, they also make up a fast-growing
16 percent of the 17- to 21-year-old population. In the eyes of
Pentagon planners, this rapidly growing, relatively poor
population is prime recruiting material. Latinos already in the
military are concentrated in the low ranks of the Marines and
the Army, serving in the high-casualty, high-risk jobs of front-line
troops urgently needed in Iraq. The second factor driving
the Latinization of the Pentagon's recruitment strategy is the decrease
in African-American and women recruits. Since 2000
the percentage of African-American recruits has dropped from 23.5
percent to less than 14 percent, thanks to the widespread
disaffection with the Iraq War--and good organizing--among parents and
students in the black community.
And some preliminary indicators show that the Pentagon's efforts are
paying off. Latino enlistment increased from 10.4
percent of new recruits in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. According to
University of Maryland military sociologist David Segal,
however, the jury is still out on whether the Latino enlistment
campaign will solve the Defense Department's recruitment
problem in the mid to long term. A drop in Latino numbers could, Segal
says, "plunge the military into an even deeper crisis.
They will have to learn how to better recruit whites." He adds that
"when antiwar efforts focus on recruitment, they're denying
recruiters major access they desperately need."
The Bush adventure in Iraq has done much to foster anti-recruitment
sentiment and create the "Latino unity" activists have
dreamed of for decades. Beyond the anonymous, individualistic rejection
of the war measured in recent polls of Latinos, a
more vocal and active rejection of war and recruitment is taking hold
on the ground, tapping into several currents of Latino
political tradition. Vietnam veteran and University of San Diego
professor Jorge Mariscal is among those working feverishly
to cut Pentagon strings they feel yank young Latinos further and
further into imperial entanglements. "We are trying to show
the historical continuity of Latino protest against the exploitation of
other Latinos in US wars of aggression," says Mariscal,
considered by many to be the dean of Latino counterrecruitment efforts.
On this past August 29, Mariscal's organization, the Project on Youth
and Non-Military Opportunities (YANO), and dozens of
other Latino groups launched a campaign to educate Latino parents and
students about military recruitment in schools. A main
focus was simply informing people that the No Child Left Behind Act,
which allows recruiters access to student contact
information, also contains an opt-out provision. The organizers chose
to launch the campaign on August 29 because it was the
anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium of 1970--the largest, most
radical Latino antiwar, antirecruitment mobilization in US
history. The campaign draws strength from the antimilitaristic
traditions of US-born Latinos (especially Mexican-Americans
and Puerto Ricans) as well as from the anti-militarismo traditions of
more recent Latin American immigrants from such
countries as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
While the war for young Latino hearts rages in all corners of the
country, the strategic theater of battle for Latino bodies remains
the Southwest, especially Southern California. A 2001 study by the US
Army Recruiting Command (USAREC), for example,
defined Los Angeles, the rest of Southern California, Phoenix and
Sacramento as its top markets for Latino recruits. But
California has also become the de facto heart of the nascent movement
among US Latinos. Animating it is Fernando
Suarez del Solar, a former student activist in Mexico who now lives in
Escondido, California. Del Solar traces his struggle
against the military to the moment he witnessed Mexican military
personnel "push their bayonets into young men--and
women" during a 1972 protest in the Zocalo, the central square of
Mexico City. "That was my first encounter with militarismo."
Three decades later Del Solar took another, sharper turn against
militarismo after his son, Jesus, a marine, died in Iraq in 2003.
Since then, his denunciation of the "lies and half-truths" recruiters
use on kids like Jesus has been unceasing. Because he can't
shake images of how his then-13-year-old boy was first "seduced" by the
trinkets, posters and ideas given to him by recruiters
at a mall in National City, Del Solar works to educate other parents
and students about recruitment and war.
Bemoaning the "lack of leadership among Latinos at the national level,"
Del Solar and others in the Latino counterrecruitment
movement complain that national advocacy groups like the League of
United Latin American Citizens and the National Council
of La Raza are not only silent but complicit in finding fresh Latino
bodies to feed the war machine. LULAC and NCLR do
accept sponsorships from and provide forums for Pentagon promotion at
some of their national conferences and local events.
In their determination to meet what recruiting handbooks call
"influencers," Marine, Army and other Defense Department
personnel can be seen at LULAC and NCLR events either glad-handing or
manning the recruitment Hummers, chin-up
challenges, inflatable obstacle courses and other props in front of
their trinket-stuffed information booths. To fill the void,
Del Solar's organization, Guerrero Azteca, and Mariscal's group, YANO,
have joined forces. They plan to convene a national
meeting of Latino counterrecruitment organizations and leaders to
connect the numerous efforts springing up across the country.
But the forces of counterrecruitment face an armada of military
recruitment organizations backed by the best civilian, corporate
and community alliances our tax dollars can buy. Continuing the Latino
recruitment focus that started with the Clinton
Administration's Hispanic Access Initiative, the Pentagon has invested
hundreds of millions of dollars to turn poor Latino
neighborhoods and decrepit, Latino-heavy schools into soldier
factories. Last year alone USAREC deployed five brigades,
forty-one battalions, 5,648 recruiters and 1,690 recruiting stations.
The military won't reveal what share of its recruitment
resources is being targeted at Latinos, but it's clearly substantial.
For Hispanic Heritage month, the Army is highlighting Hispanic
soldiers in a massive ad campaign and a Congressional Medal of Honor
tour of high schools across the country.
In Puerto Rico counterrecruiters have fanned out to all 200 of the
island's high schools to deliver the antimilitaristic and opt-out
messages to thousands of students there. "We are picketing recruitment
offices and asking Puerto Rico's Department of Education
to give us 'equal time' or 'equal access' so that we can go to the
schools to talk to the students against military recruitment," says
Jorge Colon, spokesperson for the Coalición Ciudadana en Contra del
Militarismo (Citizen's Coalition Against Militarism), a
broad-based network of labor, parent, teacher, student and other
groups. Like Mariscal, Colon and other Puerto Ricans link
current counterrecruitment efforts to antimilitaristic traditions; much
of the energy and momentum of the successful movement
to rid the island of Vieques of bombing and other military exercises
has been transferred to the counterrecruitment effort.
In the northernmost corner of Washington State, Rosalinda Guillen is
also drawing on tradition to combat what she sees as
deception in the farmlands of Skagit and Whatcom counties, where
recruiters are seeking to harvest new recruits among the
Oaxacan and Chiapanecan Indians and Mexican, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan
immigrants working the fields. Guillen, a former
leader in the United Farm Workers, returned to her hometown to fight
for Latino rights, including the right of youth to decline
military service. "Recruiters are going into high schools. They're
going after our young people and new immigrants," says
Guillen, whose organization translates opt-out materials, does
educational work and plans larger strategy to fight Latino recruitment.
Like many Latinos I spoke with, Guillen has one message for the larger
progressive community, especially those fighting the war
and recruitment: "White-led social justice programs and organizations
need to do something. They need to make broader strokes to
make sure they include Latinos, and they're not right now. All they
need to do is help bring the resources and we can do the
work like we always have."
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of