When serving in the U.S. military isn’t enough to prevent deportation

*It’s estimated that there are 2000 deported U.S. veterans living in northern Mexico. After the end of the Vietnam war the U.S. no longer offered naturalization upon enlistment and completion of boot camp. The ban was in place until 2009. The deported veterans served in those gap years. VL

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By Nigel Duara, The Los Angeles Times

When they pushed him off the prison bus into the swirling dust of the U.S.-Mexico border, they gave him only one instruction: Run.

He watched the other inmates scamper in all directions across the line dividing Laredo, Texas, from Mexico. This is how it ends, he thought to himself, after three honorable years of service in the U.S. Navy and one serious run-in with the law, he was being set adrift, here in a deadly Mexican border town hundreds of miles from home.

So he ran.

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Juan Valadez once embraced the Navy’s ideals: Be your best, serve with honor, protect your country. But because he was born in Mexico and taken to the U.S. as an infant, his pact with America when he joined the military came with a catch: If he ever was convicted of a felony, he would be deported.

The only legal way to return would be in a casket — a final mercy the U.S. government grants veterans who die after deportation.

“They’ll take you back once it’s not no good to you anymore,” Valadez said.

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[Photo courtesy of nacla]

Suggested reading

Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement is the most comprehensive account of the arduous struggle by Mexican Americans to secure and protect their civil rights. It is also a companion volume to the critically acclaimed, four-part documentary series of the same title. This volume is a testament to the Mexican American community’s hard-fought battle for social and legal equality as well as political and cultural identity.

Since the United States-Mexico War in 1846-1848, Mexican Americans have striven to achieve full rights as citizens. From peaceful resistance and violent demonstrations, when their rights were ignored or abused, to the establishment of support organizations to carry on the struggle and the formation of labor unions to provide a united voice, the movement grew in strength and numbers. However, it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the campaign exploded into a nationwide groundswell of Mexican Americans laying claim, once and for all, to their civil rights and asserting their cultural heritage. They took a name that had been used disparagingly against them for years—Chicano—and fashioned it into a battle cry, a term of pride, affirmation and struggle.

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