HONORING OUR REAL VET HEROS: A WW I MEX-AM DIARY

By Emilio Zamora, Ph.D.
Special to El Rrun-Rrun

(Ed’s. note: Emilio Zamora, an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Texas is currently translating the diary Luz Saenz wrote about his service in World War I. He expects to publish the translation though the Texas A&M University Press within the year. The following is taken from a paper published based on the Saenz diary. We extend our gratitude to Dr. Zamora.)

AUSTIN – In the midst of World War I, a 30-year old Mexican from Texas named José de la Luz Saenz recorded his thoughts and observations in a diary entitled Los México-Americanos y La Gran Guerra y Su Contingente en Pro de la Democracia, la Humanidad y la Justicia: Mi Diario Particular. Luz began making entries when he enlisted in the army in February 1918; he made his final entry at his discharge, 17 months and 298 pages later.
Luz’s diary is the only such personal account by a Mexican-American soldier in the U.S. military.
That distinction alone would make the work worthy of attention. What is even more significant, however, is the author’s appropriation of the wartime rhetoric of democracy and the sacrifice of the Mexican soldier to craft an argument of his own.

Luz returned over and over in his diary (and elsewhere) to the idea that the democratic ideals sustaining the effort at the front were equally applicable at home. He explicitly conjoined the rhetoric of democracy with the call for the equal treatment of Mexicans in Texas.

Luz’ commentary was part of a general discourse on minority rights emanating from Mexican communities throughout the southwestern part of the United States.

Luz elaborated on his reasons for joining the military when he was being transported for duty.

As his train passed by the farming community of Dittlinger, he remembered that the suffering of the Mexican people in the area had moved him to act on their behalf. He would continue invoking another motif: the enemy in France and in Texas as one and the same by virtue of its ethnic background and despotic ways.

Although not as explicit here as elsewhere, Luz reminds us that he joined the army so that he could use his war experience as a justification to wage a more effective battle against injustice at home. His sacrifice against totalitarianism would demonstrate Mexican loyalty and provide the protest community a moral advantage over “the bad citizens that we often encounter.”

“As the sun was setting we passed by Dittlinger, a community where many Mexicans worked and where I taught their children for one year. For me, that farming area is another battleground. I fought battles there until I convinced county officials to pay the teacher for the schooling of our children. Those were the triumphs that I sought in civilian life, to open the school doors for the workers’ children.

"Now that I wear the uniform of a warrior I have the hope of winning other battles that will bring justice for our people, one of many groupings that make up the suffering humanity that reclaims the sacrifice of their sound-minded and free men. It was exactly here, in this farming community, where it occurred to me to pick up a rifle. I was driven by the mistreatment that our people face in these parts, where the Teutonic and German races predominate. They are ungrateful, they deny us equality as a people, and they forget the thousand and one guarantees given their ancestors when they came to colonize these lands. . . And I think that those of us who have offered our services to fight the unjust and prideful Germans across the ocean could begin by making an example of the Izcariots, the bad citizens that we often encounter.”

W. E. B. Dubois, one of the most distinguished early leaders of the African American civil rights leaders, recognized this soon after the WW I. Like Luz, Dubois urged his compatriots to now fight the home front war: “We are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”

Military service also made it possible to serve the young in a more general way: “My country’s call took me from where I was, teaching the children of my people, and placed me where I could defend their honor, their racial pride, where I could assure them a happier future.”

His plans were to return to Texas and to point to the military contribution of Mexicans to justify a civil rights agenda. Luz thus called on Mexicans to consciously link the wartime language of democracy and the Mexican civil rights cause.

Luz also defined the Allied cause and the fight against discrimination in Texas as one war. Although the conflict was occurring in different places and involved different issues, the fighting was joined by a general concern for the rights of the dispossessed, both in France and in Texas.

Luz makes this connection especially clear in a passage where he is lamenting the unjust treatment of a soldier from Martindale, Simón Gonzalez. Gonzalez had been denied an exemption, although he was the only caregiver for his incapacitated father. The father died, presumably alone, while his son was overseas. Addressing Gonzalez in his diary, Luz promised, “The war for you and for me will not end when we finish with the Germans, unless they finish with us first. For us the worse war will remain, the one back home against the ones from Martindale that killed your father and unjustly sent you to war.”

The tragedy of the senior Gonzalez’ lonely death was not the end of the story; the son was killed in battle soon after Luz made his diary entry.

In another contemplative moment, Luz ponders the war back home as an immanent challenge: “As I see it, we will soon see our brothers in the grip of the “German” back home. This time, however, without a rifle to defend ourselves as we did against the Germans in Europe.”

The diary might never have had an audience beyond Luz’s immediate family, except that he eventually became a founder and leading spokesperson for a Mexican civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). In 1933, with the help of financial contributions from LULAC members and supporters in South Texas, Luz published the diary along with additional materials that he had written during the war.

Luz’s work merits scholarly interrogation on several counts…most importantly because his subtext, which argues that Mexicans served honorably and earned the right to equal treatment, is more than a personal view. He shared it with other soldiers and with fellow LULAC founders, who initially adopted this assessment as part of the emerging ethnic identity and accommodationist strategy of the postwar period.

Excerpts from his newspaper articles and other writings of the 1930s and 1940s suggest that, despite Luz’s high-level involvement in LULAC, he continued to reject the flag-waving brand of patriotism and the narrow definition of loyalty that historians usually attribute to this organization of upwardly mobile Mexican Americans.

A close reading of Luz’s work thus helps us see that identity is not a single, static construct but an evolving constellation of attributes and ideas that often either overlap or contradict one another. Notions such as the Mexican homeland, US citizenship, inequality, and an imagined community back home may coexist neatly as abstractions. In real-life, however, they may prove much less mutually agreeable partners.

The small print run of his book and the general practice of excluding the Mexican voice from recorded Texas and U.S. history effectively restricted Los México-Americanos y La Gran Guerra to the Spanish-speaking readers of his own generation and region.

Luz was born in May 17, 1888, in the South Texas rural community of Realitos. His family migrated from central Mexico to the border area in the late 1860s. Luz’s widowed grandmother brought the family into Texas during the early 1870s.

Luz’s father, Rosalío, did ranch work in shepherding in the Hebbronville area. Around 1880 a San Antonio family that Luz affectionately described as having “gachupín,” or Spanish, features passed through the area. They stopped long enough to earn enough money to continue on their trip to Mexico. They left, however, without one of their daughters, Cristina Hernandez, who stayed to marry Rosalío.

Luz spoke fondly of his parents.

Rosalío was a hard worker, a fair-minded person, and highly responsible husband and father. Luz especially admired the caring and uncomplaining nature of his father who worked as a laborer in ranches, farms, and railroad lines throughout South Texas. Earnings were low and work often took Rosalío away from the family for months at a time. In part because of limited resources and his absence, Rosalio expected everyone in the family to always behave with the same sense of family responsibility.

Cristina inculcated this value too. She was a highly independent and resourceful person who labored hard in her home and in her garden, often as a single parent.

Luz attended the local public schools and became, in 1905, the first Mexican American male graduate of Alice’s high school. His earliest venture into public life allowed him to embrace his indigenous identity and to launch a career as a teacher and leader in the Mexican community of South Texas.

At about the same time as his graduation, Luz and a small group of friends established a literary club and organized a formal celebration commemorating the birth and life of Benito Juarez, a member of an indigenous community who became one of Mexico’s major historical figures.

Local papers gave wide publicity to the Juarez festivities and acknowledged Luz’s role as the president of the literary club and one of the program’s major orators. A group of parents in the adjoining working class community expressed deep admiration for the public leadership role that Luz had played. Years later he wrote in his characteristically humble manner, they “received me so well and with such respect that I may not have deserved.”

The parents proposed that he teach the children during the day and the adults in the evenings. He agreed, and this is how Luz began his career of over forty years as a teacher and a public figure concerned with issues of inequality and discrimination in the Mexican American community of Texas. Soon after the school term at Oso, Luz attended a business school in San Antonio and obtained a teaching certificate. He taught in numerous places, beginning in the area around San Antonio and ending in the Rio Grande City and McAllen region.

He joined the Mexican Protective Association during the 1910s and served as its president in Moore. He married María Petra Esparza, a descendant of Gregorio Esparza of Texas revolutionary fame, and they eventually had nine children. Although Luz may have been able to obtain a deferment from military service because of his occupation and his young family, he volunteered for military service in 1918.

When he joined the military, Luz was the parent of three young children. He had eight years’ experience as a teacher in predominantly Mexican schools and sophisticated language skills in English and Spanish. Luz was posted to the Intelligence Section of the 36th Infantry Regiment of the 90th Division, which allowed him the opportunity to use his translation skills primarily in English and Spanish, but also French, which he learned once he landed in that country.

After his discharge, he led an effort to build a monument in San Antonio to commemorate the contributions of the Mexican soldier.

The group, however, diverted the enlisted funds to support the famous desegregation fight against the Del Rio Independent School District, which became known as the Salvatierra case of 1930. A local court favored the plaintiffs, however, a state court reversed the ruling and decided that the school district was not segregating children on the basis of race.

In his private moments Luz must have seen this early legal challenge against school segregation as a symbolic tribute to Mexican American veterans of WWI.

In 1924, Luz, Alonso Perales from San Antonio, and José T. Canales from Brownsville attempted to form a statewide organization that could effectively address discrimination and inequality. He joined Perales in a speaking tour in the Rio Grande Valley with this in mind.

During the first failed attempt in 1927 to form this organization in Harlingen, Luz served as the Secretary of the convention. Two years later, Luz delivered a key address during the Corpus Christi Convention that was to successfully unite various organizations as LULAC. According to his family, Luz wrote the first constitution of what was to become the leading Mexican American civil rights organization.

He remained one of LULAC’s most active members as evidenced by his membership on the organization’s Board of Trustees between 1930 and 1932. He also served as the president of the McAllen chapter in the 1930s, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s Luz promoted and expanded the views of LULAC with numerous articles in English and Spanish-language papers.

Luz retired from teaching soon after WW II. He did not remain inactive, however. Luz wrote two manuscripts; an autobiography that focused on his childhood and a philosophical treatise on life here and in the hereafter. He also accompanied his youngest son at Sul Ross University and used the opportunity to complete his B.A. studies.

Luz continued using his pen to comment on issues affecting the Mexican community. In 1947, parents and community leaders from Alice successfully petitioned the naming of an elementary school after Luz.

He received this recognition for his long years of service to the teaching profession as well as for his tireless work on behalf of the Mexican community through LULAC, the American G. I. Forum, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Texas Council on Human Relations, and the American Council of Spanish Speaking Persons.

(After we published this post, we received a message from J. Luz Saenz Jr.,  now a retired military veteran living in California. We hope we're not being indiscreet in publishing his gracious note: Mr. Juan Montoya, You cannot imagine how surprised I was when I read your article about how you found my father's book in an alley way and recognized the fact that it was indeed a valuable and historic book. I remember sitting on the floor of our library at my father's feet and reading that book under his watchful eye. I was only five years old at the time but I was intelligent enough to realize that it was an important book and I was very proud of my father. Now, seventy years later, I am still filled with pride when I look at the book on the shelf of MY library. May you live long and prosper.

Sincerely,

J. Luz Saenz, Jr.)