By: Voces Staff
Richard Villa is a 27-year old licensed investment broker born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He is planning a carrer change into law and ultimately wants to be able to prosecute injustice, especially injustice at the hands of police, such as police brutality and deaths that result from police violence. He also wants to help provide public defender assistance to those who can’t afford it, especially to minorities and those who are in poverty.
By: Voces Staff
Tony Pena is 29 years old from Phoenix, Arizona, who currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He works at Squarespace, an internet domain tech company, where he has worked as a senior customer advisor for three years. He also works as an employee resources group co-chair for the Queer Resource Group. He first heard about coronavirus back in October 2019, after reading about this virus in Wuhan, China in the BBC or NPR. He didn’t think it was going to impact his life all that much at first, given how far away it was all happening and spreading.
By: Voces Staff
Elizabeth Villa is a 51-year-old kindergarten teacher and mother of six. She has five sons and one daughter and is also a grandmother to two girls. She has been teaching for 20 years and has lived all over the country, but mostly in Phoenix. Villa discusses the challenges she has faced during the pandemic and the impact COVID-19 has had on her family. As an educator, she also discusses how COVID-19 will affect the education system and what the future holds for teachers and students.
By the Voces Staff
Gunshots peppered the ground around Cpl. Juan De La Garza. The mud of the rice paddies filled his boots. He did not know where the shots were coming from, just that he had to get his men back to Hill 327, a base camp near Da Nang, Vietnam.
U.S. machine guns would protect the squad once they were close enough to the communication towers on the hill. His radioman became hysterical, but De La Garza could not afford to lose his cool. He had to get his men back safely.
By Stephanie De Luna
Growing up in Phoenix, Rudolph “Rudy” Lopez knew that he was destined to serve in the military. Born in 1946, Lopez grew up in a close-knit family with a long line of military war heroes.
“We were very much an all-American family. The military was just something that you do. That’s all there was to it,” Lopez said.
Lopez’s father was a member of the Army military police during World War II in France.
By Ben Wermund
As a captain in the U.S. Air Force Nursing Corps, Rita Brock-Perini provided care to thousands of soldiers, as well as guidance to hundreds of nurses in the largest Air Force hospital in the United States during the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War.
Some of the soldiers, who were often drafted right out of high school, had suffered severe physical and psychological wounds. Caring for them took a toll on the younger nurses at the hospital, Brock-Perini recalled.
By Haley Dawson
Manuel Lugo boarded a plane in Okinawa, Japan, in November 1969 on the last leg of his journey to Vietnam. From the U.S. mainland to Hawaii and then to Okinawa, the flights had been lively—chattering, joking, laughing. But “from Okinawa to Vietnam, you could have heard a pin drop,” Lugo remembered. “The atmosphere just changed from day to night.”
By Claire Carroll
“Pinda!” a corporal yelled.
The young Mexican American soldier stood quietly in line. He did not address the corporal or any of his peers.“Pinda!” the corporal bellowed out once more.
The young soldier felt nervous. It was his first day, and he couldn’t speak English proficiently.
“P-I-N-E-D-A!” the corporal spelled out impatiently.
The young Latino finally stepped forward. Before he could correct the pronunciation, the corporal screamed at him, “Wake up, soldier!”
By Laura Zvonek
As a child, José María Burruel's family lived in a shack on land that didn't belong them: They were, in essence, "squatters." And they were unwelcome. At night, the houses were pelted with stones.
"One morning, we got up, and there was a hole in the tent where the rock had come through the top of the tent and just barely missed my sister's head," Burruel recalled.
The other squatters living on Salt River Valley Project land in Arizona soon put a stop to the discrimination by blocking off both entrances to the territory.
By Brandon Rawe
It was a time in America's history when communities were racially segregated and shunning minorities was accepted.
But none of that mattered during World War II to Henry Sillik, who served on a naval ship in the middle of the China-Burma-India Theater, the first racially equal setting in which he says he ever lived.
Sillik grew up in Buckeye, Ariz., a segregated town of about 600 outside of Phoenix. Sillik, who is of Anglo and Latino parentage, noticed the different standard of living for Hispanics.
