![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Like many working-class communities, Chicago Puerto Ricans have a complicated relationship with the United States military. This article explores ethnographically how Latina/o youth in Chicago public schools come to decisions regarding their participation in Junior Reserve Officer Training Programs. While limited economic opportunities certainly inform these decisions, Latina/o youth and their parents are also influenced by gendered understandings of autonomy, kinwork, honor, and respectability in turning to military programs while in high school. This article explores the experiences of Latina/o youth in an increasingly militarized educational context.
Many thanks to Micaela di Leonardo and Jeff Maskovsky both for organizing the American Anthropological Association panel that provided the original forum for this article and for their constructive feedback on this article. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers at Identities for their invaluable comments and suggestions. I am indebted to colleagues who provided critical insight during my presentations of this at the Puerto Rican Studies Association Meetings, the University of South Florida, Northwestern University, and Dartmouth College. Finally, students in my course “Militarization in American Daily Life” at Oberlin College shared profound enthusiasm, engagement, and commitment to investigating the subtle (and not-so-subtle) processes of militarization that shape us all. Gracias.
Notes
Many thanks to Micaela di Leonardo and Jeff Maskovsky both for organizing the American Anthropological Association panel that provided the original forum for this article and for their constructive feedback on this article. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers at Identities for their invaluable comments and suggestions. I am indebted to colleagues who provided critical insight during my presentations of this at the Puerto Rican Studies Association Meetings, the University of South Florida, Northwestern University, and Dartmouth College. Finally, students in my course “Militarization in American Daily Life” at Oberlin College shared profound enthusiasm, engagement, and commitment to investigating the subtle (and not-so-subtle) processes of militarization that shape us all. Gracias.
1. In CitationLutz (2001: 214).
2. See, for example, important research by Catherine CitationLutz and Lesley Bartlett (1995) and the CitationAmerican Friends Service Committee (1999). See also Cynthia CitationEnloe (2000) for critical analysis of the relationship between JROTC and post-graduation enlistment as well as the racial, class, and gendered dimensions of JROTC programming in urban public schools.
3. Chicago Reverses 50 Years of Declining Population, New York Times, 15 March 2001; Hispanics Increase City's Population, Chicago Tribune, 15 March 2001.
4. According to the 2000 census, Latinas/os are a majority in eleven of the city's seventy-seven community areas. See Hispanics Increase City's Population, Chicago Tribune, 15 March 2001.
6. John CitationBetancur et al. (1993) point out that despite Cubans’ and South Americans’ economic success, their wages according to the 1980 census still approximated those of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans rather than that of whites. The 1990 census, however, paints a very different picture, emphasizing the growing gap between Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups in terms of average incomes, employment rates, and poverty levels.
8. See CitationRanney and Cecil (1993) for a detailed analysis of the impact of transnational investment on women, Latinos, and blacks in the Chicago metropolitan area.
9. For a longer discussion of how poor and working-class Puerto Rican families use military service to make ends meet, see CitationPérez (2004). The following discussion is a version of material presented in CitationPérez (2004: 220–226).
10. Chicago Public Schools, CPS at a Glance, February 2005. Available at http://www.cps.k12.il.us/AtAGlance.html The three full-time military academies, Chicago Military Academy, Carver Area High School, and Austin Community Academy, all opened since 1999 (http://www.cps.k12.il.us/AtAGlance.html).
11. Ana Beatriz Cholo, Military Marches into Middle Schools, Chicago Tribune, 26 July 2002; Chicago Public Schools, JROTC Program Book, nd; Education to Careers (ETC) FY 2003–2004, available at http://www.cps.k12.il.us/AboutCPS/Financial_Information/FY2004_Final/CPS_Unit/Education/Education_to_Careers.pdf
12. Quoted in Recruiting the Class of 2005, David Goodman, Mother Jones, January–February 2002.
13. CPS budget, FY 2002 and FY 2003; One news report cites Lt. Rick Mill's goal as being 15,000 by 2007. Feeding the Military Machine, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, National Catholic Reporter.
14. Elsewhere (CitationPérez 2002), I have documented how Latina/o youth (especially those in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods) are implicated in the policing of urban space aimed at curbing, for example, gang activity. Although Chicago's anti-loitering ordinance was declared unconstitutional in 1999, some scholars and activists have highlighted the “ongoing attempts to legalize harassment and street sweeps of youth,” particularly youth of color who are regarded as dangerous and who allegedly “need to be locked up or removed from public space” (CitationLipman 2003: 95).
15. Lipman notes, for example, how Chicago's 1995 school reform law not only gave Mayor Richard Daley control of the schools, but also allowed Chicago Public School CEO Paul Vallas (and eventually Gery Chico) to establish “a corporatist regime focused on accountability, high-stakes testing, standards, and centralized regulation of schools” that has resulted in the retention of thousands of Latino and black youth as well as their being sent “to mandatory remedial programs and basic education transition high schools” (CitationLipman 2003: 81). The result has been not only a deepening stratification of academic programs, but also stronger centralized control over local school districts.
16. Saltman notes, for example, that attempts to address the militarization of education “must go beyond challenging militarized schooling so as to challenge the many ways that militarism as a cultural logic enforces the expansion of corporate power and decimates public democratic power” (2003: 21).
17. All names are pseudonyms.
18. Lincoln's Challenge is a federally funded youth program for at-risk youth between the ages of sixteen and eighteen whose quasi-military training in “discipline, esprit-de-corps, leadership, and teamwork is producing rapid and effective change in individual behaviors and attitude.” Lincoln's Challenge is the largest National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program in the nation (http://www.lincolnschallengeacademy.org/challenge/challenge.htm).
19. Colin Powell, My American Journey, 1995, in Class Warfare, Time, 4 March 2002, p. 50.
20. Racism and Conscription in the JROTC, Peace Review, September 2002; Class Warfare, Time, 4 March 2002, p. 50.
21. Linda D. Kozaryn, Help Wanted: DoD Seeks JROTC Instructors, American Forces Press Service, Available at http://www.pentagon.gov/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi
22. Congressional Record, House National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002 (147:123), Washington, DC: Congressional Record, 20 September 2001, sec. 538, cited in CitationBerlowitz and Long (2003: 167).
23. Troops to Teachers (http://www.dantes.doded.mil/dantes_web/troopstoteachers/index.htm?Flag=True).
24. Linda D. Kozaryn, Help Wanted: DoD Seeks JROTC Instructors, American Forces Press Service, Available at http://www.pentagon.gov/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi
25 American Friends Service Committee, Military Steps Up Drive to Recruit Latinos, December 2004.
26. Rudi Williams, DoD Wants More Hispanics in Civilian Workforce, Military Ranks, American Forces Press Service, 19 October 2003. Available at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Oct2003/n10202003_200310201.html The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities collaborated with the Department of the Defense in these events and represent broader efforts to implement Hispanic Initiatives Originally Issued in 2000 (Williams 2003).
27. American Friends Service Committee, Military Steps Up Drive to Recruit Latinos, December 2004.
28. Ten Hut! Army Junior ROTC Finds Surprise—More Women in Ranks, Boston Globe, 3 February 2002.
29. I want to thank Maura Toro-Morn and Luz del Alba Acevedo for pointing out the importance of recognizing how young women's participation in JROTC may be a creative, albeit circumscribed, strategy for exercising autonomy. This observations also advances the theoretical contributions of scholars like Katherine CitationMcCaffrey (2002), whose work on popular resistance to naval exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques also foregrounds the agency of people whose power is severely limited by United States economic and political power.
30. Gutiérrez was one of the first United States soldiers to die in combat in Iraq and, as a Guatemalan citizen, he represents one of thousands of non-citizen soldiers comprising today's United States military (see CitationMariscal 2003).
31. Class Warfare, Time, 4 March 2002, p. 50.
32. John McLaurin, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Human Resources, in CitationBerkowitz (2003). CitationMariscal (2003) notes that while Latinos have high labor force participation rates, over 11% of Latino workers live in poverty. About 7% of Latinos with full-time jobs were still living below the poverty line in 2001 (compared to 4.4% of African Americans and 1.7% for whites).
Chicago Urban League, Latino Institute, and Northern Illinois University 1994. The Changing Economic Standing of Minorities and Women in the Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1970–1990. Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, Final Report
Mariscal, George 2004. No where to go: Latino youth and the poverty draft. Public Affairs, accessed at http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/295/1/36 November
Pew Hispanic Center 2003. Hispanics in the Military. Fact Sheet. Washington, DC: 27 March