Army

By Cindy Carcamo

From a young age, Jessie Ortiz learned his Mexican American heritage would be an obstacle in a world dominated by what he calls the "white man's law." He would experience prejudice and discrimination -- even when he fought for his country in World War II. Looking back on his life, he recalls a story of constant struggle, survival and success on the battlefields of war and life.

Ortiz literally was born on the "wrong side of the tracks" -- the Southern Pacific Railroad Tracks, in Fresno, Calif. His parents, Felipa and Jose Ortiz, were Mexican immigrants.

By Celina Moreno

Tomás Martinez, a veteran of the Normandy Invasion and the Battle of the Bulge who became a barber, has lived by a "do-it-yourself" philosophy since his youth in southern New Mexico.

Born Dec. 21, 1923, to Amador Martinez and Manuela Mendoza Martinez, Martinez was the fourth of 12 children who grew up in the New Mexican farm village of Vado, where the Mendoza side of the family had lived since the 1590s, before the United States annexed what is now the Southwestern United States.

By Brian Villalobos

Raul Martinez's hands, thick, square and accented by a crest of jagged, walnut-sized knuckles, don’t seem to match his large, soft eyes.

Over the past 76 years, these hands have handled everything from cement to machine guns to mortar charges.

Martinez was born and raised in Cementville, Texas, a small cement company village north of Alamo Heights in San Antonio. One of 10 children born to Teofilo and Manuelita Martinez, both Mexican natives, he soon got a job at the same local cement factory where his father and grandfather had both worked.

By Robert Mayer

Johnnie Marino was working as a tinsmith in Houston, having learned the trade from President Roosevelt's National Youth Administration program, when he heard about Hitler's running amok in Europe.

By Nikki Muñoz

Before he reached the age of 22, Ernesto Pedregón Martinez had already worked as a painter of bullfighting posters, helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp and returned home to start a new life, which would eventually lead to his becoming a nationally known artist.

Martinez was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1926 to a hardworking tailor and a mother who was a homemaker. Martinez proved to be a survivor: All six babies his mother bore died at birth before he was born.

By Denise Chávarri

In the Army, Agustin Lucio, a 10th-grade dropout from a farming community outside San Marcos, Texas, noticed that many other young soldiers were educated or had finished high school. So, while in training, he decided to educate himself, asking for books and learning from those around him.

After two years at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Lucio was sent to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, where he received elite Ranger and ski training. He would be sent to fight in Europe as part of the D-Day invasion.

By Antonio Gilb

In the first days of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, in Schmidt, Germany, American scouts reported that a division of German tanks and soldiers lay on the outskirts of town, ready to attack. To minimize casualties, officers hastily ordered the unit to abandon the area. But in their haste, the unit commanders left behind a handful of soldiers. Catarino Hernandez, an 18-year-old from Seguin, was among them.

By Raquel C. Garza

Julian L. Gonzalez didn’t walk the stage during the Thomas A. Edison graduation ceremonies in May of 1944. Instead, his father walked the stage in his place.

"It was announced that I wasn't there, that [my father] was receiving [my diploma] because I was in the service," Gonzalez said. "They told me that he got the biggest applause of anybody there."

Gonzalez had completed his high school education a semester early in order to be inducted into the armed services. He was inducted on March 20, 1944, at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

By Liliana Martinez

When Jose Guadalupe Garza was in the 9th grade in Brownsville, Texas, in 1937, his Anglo teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.

"I told her I wanted to be a lawyer, but she told me that I wanted to fly too high because that career required a lot of money and I didn't have it," Garza said. "I got discouraged so I got out of school."

By Stephen Stetson

Ernest Eguia spent a lifetime on the cutting edge. Rising above the crippling poverty of the Great Depression, Eguia was at the forefront of the Allied Invasion of Normandy during World War II and was also on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement, pioneering the movement for Latino integration in the Houston area after the war.