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Military Formations: Mexican American Civil Rights And Community Belonging During The World War II Era

Abstract

This dissertation explores the World War II experiences of the "Mexican American Generation." More specifically, this study focuses on home front civilians and active duty military personnel as a means to examine the relationship between war, people of Mexican descent and their notions of belonging to the nation state. In doing, so I illustrate that while military service, defined here to include the work of non-soldiers on the home front, functioned as a catalyst for the upward social mobility of Mexican Americans it also operated as a means for them to situate themselves in oppositional ways to state apparatuses not yet fully accounted for in Chicana/o or U.S. history. I argue that this country's state of total war ultimately served to consolidate a Mexican American war of position that commenced long before the Second World War. In linking race, gender and war, offers an understanding of Mexican American civil rights efforts that date to the early 20th century. The Mexican American Generation's participation in World War II did not merely reflect blind loyalty, but a tense and conflicted loyalty based on prewar endeavors to advance social movement. By examining the Mexican American Generation's participation in "the good war," this dissertation contributes to a new understanding of ethnic, women's and World War II history, as well as Chicana/o Studies.

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