By Jocelyn Ehnstrom
As a young kid, Julius Moreno enjoyed playing baseball, tending to his family’s farm animals at their home in San Antonio and singing in his neighborhood band called “The Holly Boys.”
But the first priority of Moreno’s father, Julio Moreno, Sr., was making sure all nine of his children, the second oldest of whom was Moreno, got a good education.
By Layron Livingston
Before entering World War II, Richard M. Bustos, Sr. endured a different kind of battle. As an adolescent in rural southeastern Texas, he encountered racial segregation and discrimination daily.
“On signs, you’d see ‘No Mexicans’ and ‘No Blacks.’ … You couldn’t drink water from the fountains. … At restaurants, you had to go to the kitchen to get something to eat,” Bustos said.
By Frank Trejo
When Antonio F. Moreno stormed ashore Iwo Jima as a U.S. Marine medical corpsman, a familiar odor greeted him.
Moreno, who grew on Texas' Gulf Coast, knew there was no mistaking the smell that wafted up to him as he dug into the earth to prepare a foxhole. The sulfur bubbling under the volcanic island smelled just like the sulfur of his childhood a half a world away.
"It smelled like rotten eggs; that's why it reminded me of home," he said.