Santiago Erevia, once denied Medal of Honor over ethnicity, dies at 69

*He fought in the battlefield then came home to battle the prejudices in the military that valued his sacrifice and valor less than it valued the sacrifices of his white brothers in arms. Rest in peace Santiago Everia. VL

---

By Sam Roberts, The New York Times

Santiago Erevia, a Vietnam War veteran and retired mail carrier who had been denied the nation’s highest military honor for 45 years because he was Hispanic, died on Tuesday in San Antonio. He was 69.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Letica Lopez Erevia.

Mr. Erevia, who single-handedly wiped out four enemy bunkers while his comrades lay wounded, said years later that after his heroics had been made known a fellow soldier was asked to draft a citation for the Medal of Honor, the highest military award.

Instead he received the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for valor. Mr. Erevia long believed that he had been denied the Medal of Honor because he had survived the firefight. (In fact, recipients are frequently still alive when given the award.)

But a 12-year Pentagon investigation, mandated by Congress, of discrimination in the awarding of the Medal of Honor came to a different conclusion: that the heroism of Mr. Erevia and 23 other Army veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars — most of them Hispanic — had been undervalued because of their race, religion or ethnicity and thus denied the medal unjustly.

Click HERE to read more.

---

---

[Photo by The White House/Flickr]

Suggested reading

The second installment in Rolando Hinojosa’s acclaimed Klail City Death Trip Series returns to South Texas, where Mexicans and Anglos share an uneasy coexistence.

Don Aureliano Mora waits three years for justice after his son, a World War II veteran, is murdered by a Belken County Deputy Sheriff. When the Anglo gets away with murder, Don Aureliano takes matters—in the shape of a crowbar—into his own hands, pulverizing the plaque in old Klail City Park that honors the town’s World War II vets.

The younger generation has to fight for equality, too. The Texas Mexican boys playing high school football in Klail City don’t get letter jackets, even though all of their Anglo peers do. And when the Mexican boys aren’t interested in hustling for the ball the following year, the school board comes up with enough money for all the eligible players to get letter jackets. In the end it doesn’t really matter; several of the Mexican boys die in the Korean War. But life goes on in Klail City. The rains come and go, crops are raised and people are buried.

[cc_product sku=”978-1-55885-799-5″ display=”inline” quantity=”true” price=”true”]