COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
The War for Latinos
ROBERTO LOVATO, THE NATION
October 3, 2005
Jessica Sanchez poses an urgent threat to the US military. For a Pentagonstretched 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