Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Asians or Chicano-Mexicanos or Afrikans serving in the
U.S. military we were supposedly helping our peoples
"earn" full citizenship rights by "proving" our loyalty to
Amerika. So the war period saw strange contradictions.
Perhaps the sharpest irony of the "win your
freedom" game was that of Japanese-Amerikans. We were
drafted right out of the U.S. concentration camps and told
that our willingness to fight for U.S. imperialism would
show whether or not our people were "disloyal." The all-
Japanese military unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat
Team, was used by the U.S. Army as disposable shock
troops to be thrown into every bloody situation in Europe.
The 442nd had over 9,000 Purple Hearts awarded for a
3,000-soldier unit.
Ordered to break through and rescue the "Lost
Battalion" of Texas National Guard settlers cut off and
surrounded by the German Army in France, the 442nd
took more casualties than the number of settler G.1.s saved.
One Nisei sergeant remembers how K Company of the
442nd "went in with 187 men and when we got to the Texans,
there were 1 7 of us left. I was in command, because all
the officers were gone. But I Company was down to 8
men. "(73)
The political effects of the war were not simple. It
definitely marked the end of one period and the start of
another. The Depression had been replaced by the fruits of
military victory - high employment fueled by new world
markets and U.S. international supremacy. The massive
dislocation of the war, coming after the harsh repression
of the 1930's and the war period itself, and the jetpropelled
rise of neo-colonial "citizenship" had definitely
side-tracked many people. Acuna writes of the Chicano-
Mexicano movement:
"...much of the momentum of the movement of
the 1930's was lost. Many Chicano leaders entered the
armed forces; many were killed; others, when they returned,
were frankly tired of crusades ... Understandably, during
the war and when they returned, many Chicano
veterans were proud of their records. They believed that
they were entitled to all the benefits and rights of U.S.
citizenship. A sort of euphoria settled among many
Chicanos, with only a few realizing that the community
had to reorganize. ..Many Chicanos believed the propaganda
emanating from World Wai I1 about brotherhood and
democracy in the United States. They thought that they
had won their rights as U.S. citizens. For a time, the G.I.
Bill of Rights lulled many Chicanos into complacency,
with many taking advantage of education and housing
benefits.. .
"Many Chicanos, because of their involvement in
the armed forces, realized that they would never return to
Mexico.. Many also became superpatriots who did not
want to be identified with the collective community. In the
urban barrio, many parents, remembering their own
tribulations, taught their children only English. Middleclass
organizations and, for that matter, civic organizations
became increasingly integrationist in the face of the
Red-baiting of the 1950's. "(74)
The neo-colonial pacification that came out of the
WWII years was not a calm, but the stillness that came
after devastation. We must remember how, once again, in
the Deep South returning Afrikan G.1.s were singled out
for assassination by the KKK. In the Chicano-Mexicano
Southwest the Empire conducted a genocidal mass deportation
drive of unequaled severity. Even the savage immigration
raids and deportations of the New Deal were
outdone by the new imperialist offensive after WWII.
Believing that the war-time labor shortage had permitted
"too many" Chicano-Mexicanos to live inside the
occupied territories, the Empire started a gigantic military
campaign to partially depopulate and terrorize the
Southwest. Under the cover of the 1952 McCarran-Walter
Immigration and Nationality Act, a reign of armed terror
descended upon the Chicano-Mexicano communities. This
was CIA population regroupment strategy in textbook
form.
Command of the campaign was held by INS Commissioner
Lt. General Joseph Swing (an open racist and a
veteran of Gen. Pershing's U.S. expedition into Mexico in
1916). Swing organized a series of barrio sweeps, with
pedestrians stopped and homes broken into; often without
hearing or any bourgeois legal formalities, the selected
Mexicanos would be taken at gunpoint to trains and
deported. Homes were broken up and communities terrorized.
Some with valid residency papers and U.S.
"citizenship" were deported. Others, suspected of being
revolutionaries, were arrested for "immigration" offenses.
Virtually all the militant Chicano-Mexicano labor
activists were victims of this campaign.
The overall numbers are staggering. In 1953 Swing's
para-military units deported 875,000 Mexicanos. In
1954 the number seized and deported was 1,035,282 -
more than were deported throughout the 1930s. Even in
1955 and 1956, after the main job was done, 256,000 and
90,000 Mexicanos respectively were deported. How masive
this was can be seen from the fact that in 1941 an estimated
2.7 million Chicano-Mexicanos lived in the U.S.-occupied
territories, while the 1953-56 population regroupment
drive uprooted and deported 2.2 million rhirnnn-
Mexicanos. This was the fruit of "The War for Democracy
."
The Chinese community, which had been largely
spared during WWII, was the target of a new repressive
campaign. The U.S. Empire had discovered that the imperialist
contradictions of World War had helped communism
and national liberation advance. Long soughtafter
China had stood up and brushed off the clutching
hands of U.S. imperialism. In 1945 over 50,000 U.S.
Marines landed in China to take over Peking, the Kailan
coal mines and the North China railroad lines. By 1946
there were over 120,000 G.1.s in China, backing up the
reactionary Kuomintang armies. The Red Army and the
Chinese people swept these forces away.
During the war years the Empire had professed
friendship towards the Chinese community, since China
itself was an Allied nation in the war against Japan. Now
the situation reversed itself: Japan was the new U.S.
"junior partner" in Asia, while Communist China was
hated and feared by imperialism. The FBI and INS moved
against the Chinese community, breaking up patriotic and
124 class organizations.