By J. Barrett Williams
Brigadier General Belisario Flores, who served his country for more than 40 years during three wars, retired from the Texas Air National Guard and the United States Air Force in the summer of 1986. Upon his retirement, then-Gov. Mark White gave him a one-rank, honorary promotion, making him a Major General in the Texas National Guard.
Shortly after Marcelino Ramirez Bautista’s mother, Petra Ramirez, died in 1916, Bautista’s father took young Bautista with him when he left Zacatecas, Mexico, for New Mexico in search of work.
When Tiburcio Bautista lost his job in the United States, he and Bautista moved back to Mexico, where Bautista later met and married Anastacia Muñez Robles on June 7, 1930, in Zacatecas.
By Nilka Campos
Growing up during the Great Depression was difficult for Epifanio Salazar and his family. Like most others during the era, Salazar was unable to find work.
“We couldn’t make a living, so we would take whatever we could scratch – chicken, rabbits, deer,” he said.
So Salazar decided to join the Armed Forces and fight alongside thousands of other Americans in World War II. Though his father worried he could be killed, to Salazar, joining the Army was the only way to survive.
By Zachary Warmbrodt
Around March of 1921, Anita Vega Reyes and her three young boys were on the run. Her husband, Pedro Reyes, had owned a mine in their hometown of Cananea, Sonora, and he was getting too political, his youngest son Adolfo Reyes– then six months old – recounts. Pedro was shot and killed by enemies in Baja who wanted his mine. Now, his killers were after his wife and sons.
By Christina Tran
When he became vice chairman of Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1990, Alfonso Matta would recall his closest experience with a railcar, when he was a 14-year-old on a bike.
“The railcar – we had rail then – it turned on Houston Avenue, and I came and bumped up into it, and I fell onto there and hit something, and it stopped the streetcar, and the streetcar driver was like what are you doing there, and get off,” Matta said. “It was electric. I thought the wheels were gonna get me.”
By Melissa Watkins
Carlos Peña's mother, Natividad, used to say the only time Anglos came around their little farm near San Benito, Texas, was when they needed another football player or when there was a war.
The first happened when "Coach McMillan" from a local high school – Peña doesn't remember his first name – approached the family looking for a player. Young Peña's dad, Fermín, thought football was just a bunch of crazy guys beating each other up, but he left the decision to Carlos, the oldest of his six sons. Peña, then 13, said yes.
By Melissa Ayala
A devastating bomb on the other side of the Pacific Ocean and, the war was over for Jose Rivera and the rest of the world.
When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying that Japanese city, Rivera was stationed in the Galapagos Islands as a driver with U.S. Special Services. It was near the end of his two years of service during World War II.
The youngest of three sons, Rivera was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, in the mountainous western interior of the Caribbean island, on March 1, 1920.
By Cary-Anne Olsen
A four-line poem written on a birthday card had more influence on World War II Air Force pilot Lieutenant Colonel Henry "Hank" Cervantes than his teacher could have ever imagined.
"On my eighth birthday, Miss Neilmeyer, my third-grade teacher, gave me a card on which she had written,
'Dream your dreams upon a star
Dream them high and dream them far.
For the dreams we dream in youth,
Makes us what we are.'
I thought it had to do with flying-high, stars [and] ‘far,’ and I began thinking about being a pilot at that age."
By Michael Trevino
Following his brothers' example of taking a stand against a foreign power and volunteering for the military, Ezequiel Hernandez enlisted in the Armed Forces as a teenager.
"When I turned 18, none of my brothers were home so I joined," Hernandez said.
By Cheryl Smith Kemp
When Moses “Moe” Alemán’s parents emigrated from Mexico to Austin, Texas, as children, the horse and buggy was one of the most common modes of transportation and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was a bunch of farmland.
That’s where Arturo Alemán and Antonia Garza first met, in the community encompassing the fields in which their parents both labored.
Alemán, an airport-security consultant in a post-9/11 world, brings this and other sweeping changes up when reflecting upon his life.
