por Erick Galindo
A Nicaraguan farmworker victim of poisoning from the Nemagon during a protest for justice held in Nicaragua. (PHOTO BY LINDA PANETA)
WHITTIER, Calif. — Joe García likes to tell stories — about his days running Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign `office in East Los Angeles, about how he and his father used to run chorizo up and down California, or just about growing up as a Mexican American who loved this country. As we sat in the Whittier restaurant that bears his name, Famous Joe’s Legendary Mexican Food, the 85-year-old Army veteran told one about when the big war and the draft came to the barrio following Dec. 7, 1941.
“I remember one guy. His mom made him go to Mexico, like my mom wanted me to do,” he says. “But I wanted to fight for my country and so did he. The guy came back from Mexico the very next day and enlisted in the Army. He died in our second day of combat.” García stands six feet tall in a gray suit that matches his hair. A smile shines through his wrinkled face as he talks about the fellow Latinos with whomhe served during his threeyear Army stint, reminding me of William Faulkner’s words that the past is never dead or really even past.
“There were a lot of us that went be cause we were healthy and we wanted to fight for our country, And there were many of us who didn’t make it back. I was one of lucky ones,” he tells me. García was just 18 when he entered the service. As a paratrooper in the 503rd Airborne, he fought in battles throughout the Pacific. More than half a million Hispanics like him served during World War II. The number of Latino casualties isn’t recorded. They were counted as whites then, but only on the battlefield. Retired Navy veteran Gus Chávez of San Diego, who works with the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project at the University of Texas-Austin, had mentioned to me earlier, “Memorial Day has a special significance for Latino WWII veterans, especially for Mexican Americans.”
Chávez called the commemoration “a breaking point in moving forward to challenge the segregation and discrimination” that still awaited many of them on discharge. Pivotal was the refusal by a funeral home in Three Rivers, Texas, to bury a Mexican American soldier in the town’s all-white cemetery. Pvt. Félix Longoria had been killed in action in the South Pacific. Lyndon Johnson, then a member of Congress, took up the cause and arranged for Longoria to be interred in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C., where some of the nation’s most renowned military heroes rest. The incident led to the formation of the American GI Forum in 1948 by Mexican-American veterans. It remains an active civil rights organization. Restaurateur García continues our conversation, recalling, “It’s also been tough as a Mexican-American businessman.”
After the war, he became active politically while founding, building and eventually selling two multimillion-dollar businesses in Southern California, El Rey Mexican Food Co. and Reynaldo’s Mexican Food. The latter, a $25-million revenue maker, was sold in 2007 for about $12 million. A first-generation U.S. citizen, García was born in El Paso, Texas. But it was in Central California that he learned the trade as a child
working with his father.
“There wasn’t anyone sellingauthentic cratic political candidates, helping to elect some of the first Latino officeholders in this state, including the late Congressman Edward Roybal. García fought for inclusion of Latinos in the public consciousness. He takes pride in having ensured that his three children had opportunities equal to those of any other kids. In the ’60s, he launched Mas Gráfica, a pioneering bilingual magazine that incorporated Latinos in politics, business, sports, entertainment and fashion. To this day, García wears a pin on his lapel to commemorate those who fought in the big war.
“For Americans of Mexican descent, back then there was nothing. They didn’t even expect us to go to college.” He recalls his high school days when the counselor told Hispanics not to bother taking college prep classes. “She told us to take the courses that would prepare us for a life of manual labor.” Recently, one of his grandsons, who had studied economics at Notre Dame, earned his MBA at Stanford. Joe smiled his widest smile as he concluded, “I went to his graduation, and, boy, was that something!”
(Erick Galindo, formerly an editor with Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C., now reports for the Pasadena Star- News in California. His email is erick.geee@gmail.com)
