Martialing Latinidad : Latina/os re-making the military from Vietnam to the Global War on Terror, 1969-2003

This dissertation considers the political and cultural import of Latina/os within the U.S. Armed Forces over the last four decades, from the latter years of the Vietnam War (1969) to the contemporary “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), to examine the productive tensions between U.S. military expansion and liberal racial inclusion. This study examines how the cultural meaning of race, specifically Latinidad, accrued meaning for the USAF from 1969-2006. Beginning just before the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, Department of Defense officials, responding to intense racial turmoil and accusations of discrimination by African Americans, turned their attention towards the emerging Latina/o populace. The USAF began foregrounding Latina/o desires for national belonging, racial inclusion, and social prestige into Spanish language recruitment materials and national promotional campaigns presenting the Armed Forces as a desirable site of upward mobility, cultural recognition, and enfranchised citizenship. More broadly, I suggest that centering the racial, ethnic, and juridical identity of Latina/o participants in the military offers productive ways of interrogating the project of U.S. empire and global military hegemony after 1973. Martialing Latinidad employs multi-archival research methodologies, moving between congressional hearings, oral histories, and recently de-classified records in military archives. Martialing Latinidad argues that military authorities demonstrated a surprising interest in various Latina/o social movements, turning programmatic statements by the UFW, the Young Lords, MAYO, and land grant movements into the basis of new syllabi and ethnic studies programming for officers and NCO’s. Focusing on research reports, government studies, memos, Congressional hearings, personal and official correspondence, military periodicals, and military authored race relations training guides/ teaching syllabi demonstrate the vast transformation of military policies towards Latina/os from ancillary figures to a central role in public discussion of the future of military recruitment under the AVF. Martialing Latinidad argues for the prominent place of US military recruitment efforts in establishing the emerging visibility of Latina/os as a pan-ethnic political formation.