Her Military Mission in 1944 Helped Fellow Hispanic Women
Houston Chronicle | Jan 06, 2015 | by St. John Barned-Smith
Mercedes Vallejo was driving into San Antonio in the spring of '43 when she saw a poster of Uncle Sam, with his grizzled old beard and a top hat.
"It said, 'I need you,'" she recalled, imitating the poster with a jab of her well-manicured fingers. She and her friends were intrigued.
She was too young to join the U.S. Army's Women's Army Corps, so she lied about her birth date and was able to enlist. Her friends didn't pass WAC requirements.
"We were crazy, doing it as a fling," said the 92-year-old veteran at her granddaughter's north Houston home.
That impulse would lead her on a brief military career that took her to several states, forced her to fight homeland wars of ignorance and sexism, and, as a Hispanic woman, made her an unlikely cog in America's war effort.
Now Mercedes Flores, she was a butcher's daughter, one of 18 children who grew up just outside of San Antonio. Military training took her to Louisiana, Georgia, Colorado, then back to Texas. Her lieutenant at Kelly Field in San Antonio then came to her with an unusual request: travel across South Texas to recruit a "squadron" of Hispanic women.
Her superiors gave her a car and orders to travel across the state to help recruit 200 Mexican-American women. She traveled to within 30 miles of Houston and to towns like Port Lavaca, Gonzales and Victoria.
The unit was named the "Benito Juarez Squadron," after the former president of Mexico, but the group was nicknamed "The Bee-Jays."
"The patriotic Latin American women who join the squadron definitely will be busy as the proverbial bees as they work, for the Air Wac, like the American bluejay, possessing attractive 'plumage' and a happy, air-minded disposition," Capt. John V. Deuel, the local recruiting chief, told the San Antonio Express shortly before the group's swear-in in late March 1944. The event was covered by Fox, Universal and Paramount newsreel cameramen. The event was attended by high-ranking American and Mexican officials.
Uncovered history
Flores' story was almost lost to obscurity, until a budding historian stumbled across a reference to the squadron in a book while working on her doctorate degree.
Valerie Martinez spent years tracking down records in archives across the country, sending letters to hundreds of veterans seeking information about the group and other Latino and Latina service members.
The 29-year-old graduate student of history at the University of Texas at Austin found a few news articles about the squadron in American papers -- the story even made one newspaper in Mexico -- but little else.
"Finding these women has been hell," she said, laughing.
Many details about the squadron are still cloudy: It's unknown how many women actually ended up getting recruited, though Martinez said she believes the number could be as high as 40 or 50. How many are still alive is also unclear.
After tracking down Flores, however, some of the gaps are finally getting filled in.
Approximately 350,000 women served in the Armed forces in WWII. The WAC -- the female branch of the Army -- contained about a third of that number.
The Benito Juarez Squadron was part of the targeted recruiting efforts by the U.S. military, said Leisa Meyer, a professor of American Studies and author of "Creating G.I. Jane."
Involvement in the war effort was important for women and minorities because it was an expression of full citizenship, she said.
"For WAC, (the Benito Juarez Squadron) was demonstrating it was open to everyone," Meyer said. "For the women who participated -- and for community leaders and Mexican-American leaders -- they saw this as (possibly) clarifying these women were citizens."
Not everyone was thrilled to have women -- Hispanic or otherwise -- join the ranks, however.
Women battled misogyny, sexism and paternalism from male commanders. There was also, at one point, a vicious slander campaign from a public not ready to see women in uniform, Meyer said.
It was a struggle Flores experienced firsthand.
Male commanders frequently shoehorned the WACs into roles like KP duty or other administrative clerical work. The women weren't allowed to go near the base's tanks and had to be escorted everywhere.
Some accused them of working as prostitutes, slander so insulting that she and her friends once chucked rocks at the women taunting them.
A grand adventure
"They considered us servants to the soldiers!" Flores said, still indignant. "We didn't even sleep in the same camp."
Still, it was a grand adventure for many of the women.
"They had never been away from home," she remembered. "They were happy."
By the time Flores was 20, she was already a war widow. She'd gotten married by proxy to an American serviceman who said he didn't want to die unmarried. An elderly man stood in for him at the wedding, and the husband would perish abroad in Italy months later.
She met her second husband during her service, at a party thrown by another Bee-Jay. She was a raven-haired beauty then. They married, leading her to leave the military in July 1945. They would have eight children.
Of the 16 million Americans who served at home or abroad during WWII, as many as 500,000 were Hispanic, according to Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas who heads the VOCES Oral History project, which records interviews with surviving WWII, Korea and Vietnam-era Latino servicemen and women.
The war would come to be a defining experience for them, she said.
Minorities and women made an invaluable, if less well-known, contribution to the war effort, but their participation in the conflict would have deep repercussions on them when they returned to the U.S.
'I would go again'
"They would walk into a pub in England -- and just be regarded as an American military man," she said of Latino servicemen abroad. "It had a tremendous effect on them. They came back to segregated towns and wanted to dismantle the barriers they had faced."
Women in the armed services, meanwhile, would forge a path of greater gender equality.
For Flores, those days are long since past, of course. Her raven curls have grayed, but she keeps them in a studied pile atop her head. She pays attention to the little details, a gold necklace and a rosary bracelet of string. She lives in north Houston with her grandchildren, with whom she likes to joke and argue. She is small and slim, and though age has slowed her and bent her, it has not softened her tongue or her feisty spirit.
"If there was a war and they asked me to go again," she said, with defiance, "I would go again."
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/06/her-military-mission-in-1944-helped-fellow-hispanic-women.html?comp=7000023468004&rank=3
