Citizen, Student, Soldier
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Citizen, Student, Soldier

Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream

Gina M. Pérez

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eBook - ePub

Citizen, Student, Soldier

Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream

Gina M. Pérez

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About This Book

Since the 1990s, Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs have experienced unprecedented expansion in American public schools. The program and its proliferation in poor, urban schools districts with large numbers of Latina/o and African American students is not without controversy. Public support is often based on the belief that the program provides much-needed discipline for "at risk" youth. Meanwhile, critics of JROTC argue that the program is a recruiting tool for the U.S. military and is yet another example of an increasingly punitive climate that disproportionately affect youth of color in American public schools. Citizen, Student, Soldier intervenes in these debates, providing critical ethnographic attention to understanding the motivations, aspirations, and experiences of students who participate in increasing numbers in JROTC programs. These students have complex reasons for their participation, reasons that challenge the reductive idea that they are either dangerous youths who need discipline or victims being exploited by a predatory program. Rather, their participation is informed by their marginal economic position in the local political economy, as well as their desire to be regarded as full citizens, both locally and nationally. Citizenship is one of the central concerns guiding the JROTC curriculum; this book explores ethnographically how students understand and enact different visions of citizenship and grounds these understandings in local and national political economic contexts. It also highlights the ideological, social and cultural conditions of Latina/o youth and their families who both participate in and are enmeshed in vigorous debates about citizenship, obligation, social opportunity, militarism and, ultimately, the American Dream.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9781479863662

1

JROTC’s Enduring Appeal

Militarism, Ethnic Pride, and Social Opportunity in the Postindustrial City

And I tell this story because for decades, Puerto Ricans like Juan and Ramon have put themselves in harm’s way for a simple reason: They want to protect the country that they love. Their willingness to serve, their willingness to sacrifice, is as American as apple pie—or as arroz con gandules. The aspirations and the struggles on this island mirror those across America.
—President Barak Obama, San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 14, 2011
On June 14, 2011, President Barak Obama visited Puerto Rico, fulfilling a 2008 campaign promise to return to the island if he were elected president. During this visit, President Obama referred to Puerto Rico’s military service as “American as apple pie” and noted that Puerto Ricans’ aspirations “mirror those across America.” This is not the first time that Puerto Ricans’ military service has been highlighted as a measure of their Americanness and loyalty. In fact, Puerto Ricans’ long record of military service, like that of Mexican Americans, is often celebrated as a powerful example of their loyalty, patriotism, sacrifice, and, ultimately, their worthiness of American citizenship. President Obama, for example, spoke reverently of Juan Castillo, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, and he honored Chief Master Sergeant Ramón Colón-López of the United States Air Force, whose bravery in Afghanistan made him the first Hispanic American to be awarded the Air Force Combat Action Medal.1 These comments echo those by prominent military officials like former Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera and retired General Ricardo Sanchez who consistently praise Hispanics for being “great soldiers” and embodying the kind of values and ethics that define military values.2 Love of one’s family and nation, and self-sacrifice and loyalty are celebrated as the shared values binding Hispanic heritage and the military. They are also characteristics of an ideal form of citizenship that is often portrayed as “the most desired of conditions, as the highest fulfillment of democratic and egalitarian aspiration.”3 Given the American public’s high regard for the military, and Latinas/os tenuous and contested claims to full citizenship, the linking of military and Hispanic values is no small matter. Indeed, political discourse and popular culture, past and present, rely on idealized notions of this connection in order to challenge stigmatizing tropes and lay claim to full national membership and belonging.4
President Obama’s observation that Puerto Ricans’ “aspirations and struggles on the island reflect those across America” is a prescient one that captures what many young Puerto Rican, Latina/o, and working-class youth in Lorain experience on a daily basis. As part of a long history of labor recruitment and chain migration to Northeast Ohio, Puerto Rican and Mexican families have been defined, in large part, by their aspirations for a better life as well as ongoing struggles to attain economic, social, and political advancement, first in the context of rapid industrial expansion and living-wage jobs, and later in a deindustrialized political economy increasingly characterized by low-wage service sector employment. Recognizing how these aspirations and struggles converge with military service and ethnic pride is critical for understanding the appeal and success of JROTC among many working poor youth, and specifically young Latinas/os and their families. For many Puerto Ricans in Lorain, their willingness to serve and sacrifice is, indeed, as “American as apple pie—or as arroz con gandules”—precisely because it is woven into the fabric of American Dream ideology that rests on notions of hard work, economic success, and social mobility. Their experiences resonate with many young people, who regard their participation in JROTC (and possible enlistment in the military after high school) as part of a tradition of military service that has conferred both economic stability and respect on their families and broader communities. And although this view is certainly not shared by all, it is absolutely essential for understanding not only students’ motivations to participate in JROTC but also JROTC’s broad support both locally and nationally.
As noted earlier, since its inception in 1916, JROTC has been a controversial program whose popularity has waxed and waned over time, although beginning in the 1990s it experienced unprecedented expansion in American public schools, and its supporters traverse the political spectrum. By analyzing this cultural shift and locating the experiences of Puerto Rican, Latina/o and other working-class youth in Lorain within this nexus it becomes clear that support for JROTC is inextricably linked with three powerful trends in American public life: the military’s goal to maintain high visibility during heated debates about the size of the military budget; an educational landscape that is increasingly defined by zero-tolerance policies to address growing concerns about discipline in American public schools; and increasing economic inequality and diminished social opportunities for youth in urban and rural school districts where JROTC programs are expanding the fastest. These trends occur simultaneously with intense debates about immigration, citizenship, race, and national membership. In this way, vitriolic contestations over citizenship and race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries parallel those of a hundred years before, an era characterized by high levels of immigration as well as heightened levels of xenophobia and anti-immigrant legislation that created legal and social barriers to citizenship and inclusion. Both then and now, race, gender, sexuality, and class are central to these debates. What distinguishes these two important historical moments, however, is what Andrew Bacevich calls “the new American militarism,” our contemporary yet historically informed “outsized ambitions and infatuation with military power.”5 JROTC expansion needs to be understood in this context of new American militarism. In a moment when full citizenship is vigorously contested on the basis of class, race, sexuality, and immigration status, Latina/o youth turn to military programs like JROTC as a way to gain social standing and assert full citizenship rights that are often denied or elusive to them. They also do so in a context of increased economic uncertainty. It is important, therefore, to understand how students in JROTC navigate the effects of deindustrialization in Lorain. With limited employment opportunities and deteriorating conditions in their neighborhoods and schools, JROTC and military service become real, if overdetermined, options for young people seeking economic mobility, social standing, and improved living conditions for their families and their communities. While a proud ethnic tradition of military service is intimately bound up with Latina/o youth’s experiences in JROTC, local political economic realities, as well as national debates about citizenship and belonging, also shape their aspirations for themselves and their communities.

JROTC: Origins and Uses

I am a great believer in the JROTC programs. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I succeeded in getting Mr. Cheney, my boss at the time, and President H.W. Bush to allow me to go to Congress and get the money to double the program, moving from something like 1,500 schools, and increasing it up to 3,000 schools. It’s close to that mark today and it’s going to continue to grow. I have had meetings with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Army leadership to see what more we can do to increase the number of JROTC units that there are.
. . . . [T]here is some resistance . . . in different parts of the country. But the resistance usually slips away when suddenly, 30 or 40 kids in the JROTC program start saying, “yes, ma’am,” “no ma’am,” “yes, sir,” “no, sir.” They clean up their act and they show a lot of discipline and patriotism. They show they are proud of themselves, and they look you in the eye. So, you give the program a chance to get started. You put some sergeants and a major in there with those kids and the most liberal group of educators will start to give it a second thought.
—Interview with Retired General Colin Powell, August 20096
It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is “youth development program.”
Pushed by multiple high-powered, highly paid public relations and advertising firms under contract to the Department of Defense, the program is a many splendored thing. Its major public face is the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps or JROTC.7
On November 14, 2006, San Francisco’s Board of Education voted to end the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program in the city’s public high schools. Media coverage of the debates, protests, and passionate responses to the proposal to discontinue the ninety-year-old program focused largely on the value of JROTC in local high schools and the various ways that students benefited from participating in the program. Student cadets often referred to JROTC as family, a safe place where they could go. And in the days leading up to the Board of Education’s vote, hundreds of supporters protested in the streets and vowed, in the words of one young Latino cadet, to “fight this to the end.”8 Op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and editorials in local San Francisco newspapers, as well as nationally, were unanimous in their support of JROTC and regarded opposition to the program as another example of “political correctness” and as “anti-military.”9 Three years later, following ongoing debates and protests, the Board of Education voted to reinstate the program, and since 2009 students have been allowed to take JROTC as an independent study course to satisfy their physical education requirement. Reflecting on the long, tumultuous struggle around JROTC, Rachel Norton, one of the elected school board members, explained why she ultimately decided to support JROTC, after her initial support to dismantle it. In her essay “Why I Support the JROTC,” she describes her ambivalence about JROTC, and how she was eventually persuaded by students’ pleading about the value of the program. She also raised concern about the failure of the school board to provide a viable alternative to replace JROTC despite its promises to do so. What is most striking about Norton’s position is her description of the tenor of the debates surrounding JROTC. She writes, “But it’s almost impossible to talk about JROTC in a nuanced way, or suggest anything approaching a compromise. Opponents shout down anything other than a complete end to the program—even if safeguards are put in place to make sure the class is purely voluntary. And proponents refuse to acknowledge the fact that an alternative is possible and that some of the military trappings of the program make some people uneasy.”10 This kind of impassioned response is also reflected in the views of prominent supporters of JROTC like General Colin Powell, who argue that the program can improve the lives of young people and their communities. This position is in contrast to those who oppose JROTC, like writer Ann Jones, who argue that school-based military programs are incompatible with the goals of public education and are merely sophisticated means of recruiting child soldiers for the U.S. military. Such fundamentally distinct opinions about JROTC are not new; indeed, they characterize the establishment of JROTC programs in the early twentieth century and provide an important lens through which to understand contemporary debates about the value and meaning of American public education.
On June 3, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act, which, among many things, formally established the Reserve Officer Training Corps Program (ROTC) to provide formal training for army officers at designated colleges and universities.11 It also established the beginning of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program in American public high schools by authorizing active duty military personnel to work as high school instructors and by loaning military equipment to schools to support the program.12 The passage of this legislation and the development of these programs need to be understood in the historical context of the early twentieth century, when anxieties around high levels of immigration, labor unrest, and an increasingly vocal preparedness movement informed public debates about the role of public education in developing ideal American citizens. As a number of scholars have noted, military training was one of many ways that class, ethnic, and racial difference were managed in schools prior to World War I.13 Newly emerging institutions like public health boards also played a significant role in ordering and rationalizing social difference based on national origins, class, gender, and race in similar ways. As historian Natalie Molina has shown, the question of who is fit for citizenship rested on not only education but also on physical benchmarks deeply embedded in ideologies of race, gender, and class.14 So although the number of military schools and students involved in military education were quite small prior to 1916, youth-focused programs both inside and outside schools concerned themselves with moral discipline, physical fitness and good citizenship. According to Lesley Bartlett and Catherine Lutz, support for universal military training in public schools and universities increased beginning in 1914, in the early years of World War I in Europe, as U.S. civilian elites and some military personnel advanced the idea of military education as a way to address growing social ills. Bartlett and Lutz observe that these social problems included “a ‘moral rot’ that had become symbolically associated with the country’s growing wealth; the lack of a sense of duty or loyalty in the massive number of new immigrants; and the social disorder of strikes and other labor unrest.”15 Military training, it was believed, would provide much-needed moral and physical discipline for young people and ultimately instill in them the kind of citizenship that would best serve the nation.
While American schoolchildren were of great concern to those advocating the benefits of military education, immigrants were the principal focus of Progressive Era reformers, preparedness movement advocates, public health officials, and military elites alike. Anti-immigrant sentiment converged with fears of social disorder, physical decline, and contamination and led to a number of intrusive public health campaigns that reinforced racial difference between native and immigrant communities. These concerns also led to restrictive immigration legislation and local ordinances affecting immigrant communities’ economic and social livelihood. And although powerful social movements increased educational opportunities for immigrants and their families during this time, from very early on these educational spaces were mired in debates about the alleged value of military training for immigrants in particular, and for national unity more broadly.16 Major General Leonard Wood was one of the most vocal proponents of including military training in schools. In a 1916 speech to the National Education Association, he made patriotic appeal for the value this kind of training would provide and how it would ultimately strengthen and serve the nation:
What is needed is some kind of training which will put all classes which go to make up the mass which is bubbling in the American melting pot, shoulder to shoulder, living under exactly the same conditions, wearing the same uniform, and animated by a common purpose. . . . With this training will come a better physique, a greater degree of self-control, habits of regularity, promptness, thorones [sic], respect for law and the rights of others, and a sense of individual responsibility and obligation for service to the nation.17
For Wood, military training held the promise of meeting multiple goals: not only would it accelerate the assimilation of immigrants “bubbling in the American melting pot” (the title of his address to the NEA was “Heating Up the Melting Pot”), it would also instill values, a sense of purpose, and indebtedness to the nation.18 These visions clearly rested on ideas of class, race, and gender, with ideas of a reinvigorated masculinity being central to the success of the nation. In this way, Wood’s vision aligned itself with that of preparedness movement advocates, who sought to strengthen U.S. military power and who, according to Catherine Lutz, advanced the idea that military conscription and training would “solve the problem they saw of American manhood gone soft.”19 His comments also reflect what David Serlin has identified as a military culture that not only deemed certain body types as worthy of military investment, but, more importantly, illustrate how “normative concepts of male behavior and able-bodied activity [formed] the invisible threadwork that protect[ed] homosocial institutions like the military.”20
Although Wood and others were quite vocal in their support of military training, there was a great deal of opposition by those who not only regarded compulsory training as un-American but also believed that it was fundamentally contradictory to the ideals of public education as the cornerstone for a strong democracy.21 Even with the passage of the National Defense Act authorizing the creation of JROTC in 1916, skeptics doubted the value of ...

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