Mexico City

By Cheryl Smith Kemp

Joseph Ramirez turned the Army down when officers tried to keep him on at the end of 1945, asking him to serve six more months in World War II, at the promised rank of Sergeant.

Ramirez wanted to go home.

“I was certain I would be able to get a job in the Engineering Department,” he said, referring to Armor Institute of Technology, now Illinois Institute of Technology, from where he’d graduated before the war.

By Juliana Torres

It wasn't the hard work he'd have to endure as a laborer that scared Genaro Cortes as he considered his decision to travel to the States. At 24, he was most worried about the possibility of being drafted. A mason by trade, Cortes remembered the rumors that swirled about how the notion of recruitment for labor work was simply a guise to actually "draft people and send them to the Pacific to fight."

By Benjamin Smith

After serving his time in the Army and tasting equality in various parts of the country and world, Alfred J. Hernandez wanted nothing more than to leave the city he’d later change.

By Guillermo X. Garcia

Ruben Mungia, a career printer, laughs as he recalls "how smart the U.S. Army was" to let him join the service in the middle of World War II, only to assign him to Randolph Field in San Antonio, his hometown, where he ran the print shop at headquarters command.