While Don Imus spent this week trying, unsuccessfully, to make amends for sexist and racist remarks he made on the air, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was forced to address a controversy over what was left unsaid in his upcoming PBS series about World War II.
Latino advocates have been up in arms recently over the exclusion of Latino soldier stories from Burns' new seven-part documentary, "The War," which explores the conflict through the personal narratives of veterans and their families. Critics argued that the history would not be complete without the stories of Latino soldiers who enlisted in droves -- as many as 500,000 strong -- and were represented in the ranks more prominently than in civil society back home.
This week, PBS announced that Burns agreed to incorporate Latino and Native American voices. Burns will assemble a new production team, including a Latino, to create the material in time for the Sept. 23 premiere.
"That's quite a concession," said Otto Santa Ana, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UCLA, whose father and five uncles served in WWII. "I'm very excited that Maggie and her team worked so hard to make PBS aware that they cannot ignore the story of Latino veterans anymore."
He's referring to Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, the person who spearheaded the campaign to get the ear of PBS.
Rivas-Rodriguez, who teaches a class in narrative journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, has been at the heart of an effort to collect and preserve the previously undocumented stories of Latinos in the war. In 1999, she founded the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project.
But this is no mere affirmative action issue for the people involved.
World War II marked a seismic shift in the social life of Latinos, who were still facing overt discrimination in the U.S. at the time. The sacrifices Latino soldiers made on the battlefield alongside whites gave them a new sense of equality.
When they returned home, they got college degrees and bought homes through the GI Bill. And more important, they became pioneers in the Latino civil rights movement, battling discrimination through new organizations such as the GI Forum and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
"All of a sudden they were in the same barracks with Anglos," said Hector Galan, a Texas-based documentary filmmaker whose father fought in the Philippines. "They would eat, sleep, fight and die together, all as human beings. So for Latinos to come back and be placed in the same [inferior] situation, they said, 'Hell no!' "
