September 28, 2015 • 28 mins
Macario Garcia was a Mexican-born soldier who served in the U.S. military in WWII, earning a Medal of Honor and a Purple Heart. But after his homecoming as a hero, he was involved in an incident which launched a debate about racial discrimination.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. When we talk about the civil rights movement
in the United States, one piece of historical context that
(00:22):
comes up pretty frequently is that African American soldiers returned
home from serving in World War Two to find that
even though they had just risked their lives for their country,
they were still being treated as second class citizens as
they had been before, that they were still the targets
of intense discrimination and segregation. So the idea is that
this incongruity between having served a nation at the risk
(00:45):
of one's own life and then being treated that way
by that nation after getting home again prompted a lot
of people to advocate for their own equal treatment, and
so that it's a little more complicated than that, but
that atit heart is basically true. But it also was
not unique to black soldiers, or as we are going
to talk about in another episode a little farther down
(01:05):
the road, it also wasn't unique to World War Two.
But today we are going to talk about how World
War Two prompted efforts towards equal rights for Hispanics and
Latinos in the United States, and we're going to do
that by telling the story of Maccario Garcia. Garcia was
born in Mexico and was the first Mexican national to
be awarded the Medal of Honor, which is the United
(01:26):
States Armed Forces highest award for a valor. But when
he got back to Texas, he found that he was
still the target of segregation and discrimination himself. So we
are going to talk about that story today. Mccario Garcia
was born in Via di Castagno, Mexico, on January second
of nineteen. His parents were Luciano Andsfa Garcia, and he
(01:49):
was one of ten children. The Garcias were farm workers,
and in nineteen twenty three they moved to Texas with
the hope of finding work as farm laborers. They settled
near sugar Land End, which is outside of Houston and
Fort Bend County. I have asked multiple Texan people whether
it is Sugarland or sugar Land, and I got two
(02:09):
different answers, So we're saying Sugarland all those Sugarland is
now a city at this point. This area was quite
rural in nineteen fifty six, which is About a decade
after this story takes place, there were only about twenty
two hundred people living there. Maccario's parents both got jobs
working on a cotton farm, and Maccario eventually left school
(02:30):
to work on a ranch. By nineteen forty, World War
two was well underway elsewhere in the world, and it
was clear that the United States might be drawn in
as well, so on September sixteenth of nineteen forty, the
Selective Training and Service Act of nineteen forty, also called
the Burke Wadsworth Act, was signed into law by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. It required men between the ages of
(02:53):
one and thirty six, regardless of whether they were citizens,
to register with the Draft Board. Had also established a
lottery that would be used to draft soldiers into the military.
Since the United States wasn't actually at war at this point,
this is considered to be the first peacetime draft in
United States history, and the draft began that October. The
United States entered the war on December seventh of nineteen
(03:16):
forty one. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in in
nineteen forty two, when he was twenty two, Macario Garcia
was drafted. Although African American soldiers were segregated into their
own units. At this point, Hispanic and Anglo soldiers served together,
so Garcia became a private and U. S. Army B Company,
first Battalion, twenty second Infantry, fourth Infantry Division. He was
(03:40):
part of the Allies D Day invasion and he was
wounded at Normandy. He spent four months after that recovering,
and we don't really have a lot of detail there
other than that he went on to rejoin his unit
after he had recovered. The event that earned Garcia the
Middle of Honor took place on November twenty seven of
nineteen forty four. Machine gunners protected by trees were blocking
(04:01):
his company's advance en route to Cologne, Germany. There was
almost no cover between Garcia's company and the machine gunners
and they were pinned down. Garcia, who was acting as
a squad leader, volunteered to try to take out the nests.
He basically crawled toward one machine gun nest and lodged
grenades into it, destroying the gun before shooting three soldiers
(04:23):
who tried to escape in the process. He was shot
himself in the shoulder and the foot when he tried
to return to his company, though another machine gunner in
a second nest opened fire. Even though he was already wounded,
He approached that second gun as well, killing three other
soldiers and taking four prisoners. He refused to be evacuated
(04:45):
until the area was secure, and he was hospitalized for
two months. After this, he was offered a promotion that
would have made him a lieutenant, but he elected to
return to his company instead. Sorry. Kind of amazes me.
Not only at the single landedly take out two machine
gun nests, he did it while injured, um so fairly.
(05:06):
Before the end of the war, after Garcia returned to
the United States, President Harry S. Truman presented him, along
with twenty seven other soldiers, with the Medal of Honor.
Has happened at a ceremony at the White House that
was on auguste. While draping the medal around Garcia's neck,
Truman reportedly told him, I would rather earn this than
(05:27):
be president. In addition to his Medal of Honor, Garcia
also received a purple Heart, which, in case you did
not know, is presented to those who are wounded or killed,
the Bronze Star, which is for quote heroic or meritorious
Achievement and the Combat infantry Man's Badge. After serving in
the United States Army for three years, one of them
in overseas combat, Maccario Garcia was honorably discharged with the
(05:50):
rank of sergeant. When he returned home to sugar Land,
he received a hero's welcome, and he was treated as
a celebrity. Local newspapers wrote stories about out him, and
local governments and civic organizations blooded him with request for
speeches and appearances. The League of United Latin American Citizens Council,
also known as LULAC, held a special ceremony to honor
(06:13):
him at the nearby Richmond Courthouse, followed by a party
and a dance on September nine of ninety So the
Hispanic and Latino community in Texas was quite proud of
Macario Garcia, and so were the sugar Land and Greater
Houston areas as a whole. So it's a little surprising
what happened the next day, which is what we're going
to talk about, after a brief sponsor break, a little
(06:37):
less than three weeks after his Medal of Honor ceremony
and the day after a dance had been held in
his honor. On September ten ninety five, Macario Garcia made
the news again, and this time it was after an
incident at a Richmond, Texas restaurant. This is about ten
miles from his home in Sugarland. It was the same
town where the party in the dance had been held
at this at the county courthouse the night for Richmond
(07:01):
is the county seat of that county. Many restaurants and
public areas were at this point segregated in terms of
both race and ethnicity. And while Jim Crow laws made
segregation of African Americans commonplace, particularly in the South, Texas
was at that point the only state with a large
Hispanic population, so in Texas, segregation also targeted Mexican Americans
(07:24):
and other people whose origins were in Mexico or other
parts of Central and South America. As a side note,
this was also true in other states that had other
large populations of other minorities. So communities with large populations
of people with Asian and ancestry, for example, had had
segregation laws and practices that targeted those groups specifically as well.
(07:49):
And while Richmond's Oasis Cafe didn't have signs posted about
who was or wasn't allowed to eat there. It had
a reputation as a white establishment, one that just didn't
offer food, music, or entertainment, intended to appeal to a
Hispanic customer base. In the words of the owner's son,
Louis Payton, speaking in a documentary quote, we had very
(08:10):
few Blacks or Mexican Americans come in and ask for
service because we didn't cater to their needs. So we
just didn't see any of them. While there were also
other restaurants and Richmond that did serve Hispanic and Latino customers,
the Oasis Cafe was really Richmond's only night spot, and
this incident happened around eleven PM, and there's some dispute
(08:31):
as to what actually happened. Garcia's assertion was that he
arrived at the restaurant and its owner, Donna Andrews, refused
him service because he was Mexican. He was furious. He
had just served the United States in wartime, risked his life,
been awarded a Medal of Honor along with many other
recognitions for his heroism and patriotism, and now back in
(08:52):
Texas he was being refused service for his ethnicity. In
his version of the story, he demanded an explanation physically
sisted being thrown out and was hit with a baseball bat.
The restaurant's assertion was that Garcia was drunk and belligerent
from the start, and that he was refused service for
that reason, not because of his ethnicity. When the restaurant's
(09:14):
version of the story, Garcia started throwing things pretty much
immediately and also hit the owner in the mouth. Regardless
of how I went down, though everyone agrees that Garcia
was refused service, the restaurant's owners called the police and
Garcia was removed from the premises and taken to jail.
Garcia insisted throughout that his treatment at the Oasis Cafe
(09:35):
was because he was Mexican. The sheriff ultimately decided to
let him go home. Here's how this was later reported
in The Texas Coaster, which was the weekly local paper
and it's issue that came out on September. The incident,
which has caused widespread interest, occurred after Mrs Andrews refused
service in the cafe to Garcia and his party on
(09:56):
the night of September ten. Mrs Andrews and her brother Pete,
where he was a partner in the cafe business, set
in statements made to County Attorney Brown that they refused
service to Garcia, quote because he had been drinking. The
affidavits stated that after being refused service, Garcia broke sugar bowls,
salt and pepper shakers, catchup bottles, several bottles of wine,
water glasses, and three window panes, and struck Mrs Andrews
(10:19):
in the mouth with his fist before he was quieted.
After he struck Mrs Andrews, the statements continued, a struggle
ensued between Garcia and Lower and Mrs Andrew's son, Louis Peyton.
Garcia was quieted after he was hit across the back
with a baseball bat, the statement said. According to the
same Texas Coaster article, the responding deputy confirmed that Garcia
(10:39):
had been drinking, but said he did not know of
any damage to the restaurant. So September was more than
two weeks after the original incident actually happened. But The
Texas Coaster was a weekly newspaper, and there are a
couple of reasons for this lengthy gap between the event
happening and the article coming out. One was that The
(11:01):
Texas Coaster had originally considered reporting the story in its
previous issue, but then it decided not to out of
respect for Garcia being a war hero number two. At
the point of the prior issues preparation, it just didn't
seem like that much of a story. The sheriff and
sent Garcia home. The whole thing seemed like kind of
a minor, are isolated scuffle, with two sides telling pretty
(11:24):
distinctly different stories about it. However, John Jay Herrera, one
of the area's only Mexican American lawyers, was also one
of the community leaders who had helped plan Garcia's reception
and ceremonies that took place prior to the incident at
the Oasis Cafe. Harrera's involvement in Hispanic and Latino social
and civic organizations meant he was very aware of the
(11:46):
real ongoing prejudices and discrimination in Texas, and he thought
Garcia's story was exactly the sword that would raise awareness
of that discrimination, and it would rally the Mexican American
community and possibly the Anglo community as well, around fighting
for equality, and he hoped that it would perhaps force
local and state governments to take action to end it.
(12:08):
So someone, almost certainly Herrera tipped off gossip columnists and
radio host Walter Winchell that a war hero and Medal
of Honor recipient had been refused service at a restaurant
because of his ethnicity. So on September Winchell gave a
scathing account of the whole thing, which really wasn't entirely accurate.
(12:29):
On his radio show. He said that this had occurred
in sugar Land rather than in Richmond. He described the
involvement of two sailors who seemed not to have existed
at all, and he also reported that Garcia wound up
in the hospital afterward. So if Walter Winchell's name rings
a bell and you're struggling to place it and can't
quite remember why, longtime listeners will remember that he also
(12:51):
played a part in the Tokyo Rose episode from when
Sarah and Deblina were hosting together. He was actually one
of the people who stirred up outrage against Iva to
keen know. Once Winchell's radio program and his column were out,
this story really spread all over the country, with a
lot of the tone being that Fort ben County was
a racist, discriminatory, and incompetent place, especially against war heroes.
(13:15):
So it was only after this story was suddenly everywhere
with it consistently being covered as an active discrimination against
a war hero based on his ethnicity, that the county
actually took legal action against Garcia and the Texas Coaster
printed that story that we quoted from. Garcia was charged
with aggravated assault, and John Jay Herrera, along with other
(13:36):
lawyers in the months that followed, took the case. We
will talk about what happened when this got to court
after another brief word from one of the great sponsors
that keep the show on the air. Get back to
Makario Garcia's story. Regardless of whether Winchell's broadcast and all
the reporting that followed it were totally accurate or not,
(13:57):
people were definitely outraged at the yea that a highly
decorated veteran had been denied service. The furor did exactly
what John Jay Herrera had hoped that it would. Galvanized
the Mexican American community in the area, and it raised
the ire of the Anglo community as well. Robert E. Smith,
the chairman of the Good Neighbor Commission, posted Garcia's bond
(14:20):
after charges were filed, and community organizations started raising money
to help pay his legal fees. There was also huge
media interests in the court proceedings. In the late fall
of Ninetti, when the case was supposed to come to trial,
the judge, who was named Charles Schultz, was quoted as saying, quote,
nearly all the newspapers in the in the state have
(14:41):
asked for courtroom space to hear the case. However, that
November Fort Bent County requested a postponement and the trial
was put off until the February nineteen six session. Then,
just before the trial was about to begin, another Mexican
American veteran was also denied service at the Oasis Cafe,
apparently after an act of disobedience that was intended to
(15:04):
mimic Garcia's initial arrest and bring the issue back to
the forefront. Yeah, he basically went to the cafe with
a friend, both of them already drunk, and caused trouble
on purpose to get thrown out to make it major
news again, which worked. It meant that Garcia's original encounter,
along with all the inaccurate reporting that had followed it,
(15:25):
was once again all re reported, which put all eyes
back on for ben County with the idea that it
was an unfair and discriminatory place for Hispanics. So the
county took the probably pretty prudent move to try to
reschedule the trial once again, this time until June, when
hopefully the news would not be so focused on it
(15:46):
or so openly critical of Fort Ben County officials. At
this point, James V. Alread became Garcia's attorney of record.
This was a huge deal. Alread had been the Texas
Attorney General as well as a federal district judge and
the governor. Having such an enormously high profile Anglo attorney
(16:06):
representing Garcia proved to be too much for the county,
which quietly dropped the charges and Garcia quietly returned to
life as a private citizen. Even though Garcia's case never
actually came to trial, all the publicity surrounding it did
have the result that Herrera seems to have hoped for
from the beginning. The movement for equal rights for Mexican
(16:27):
Americans and others within the Hispanic and Latino communities, which
had been kind of loosely organized before this point, did
begin to come together for more meaningful and effective collective actions.
Herrera would go on to be part of other important
civil rights cases in Texas and elsewhere, including fighting to
overturn the verdicts in several criminal cases against Mexican American
(16:50):
defendants that had been tried with deliberately all anglo juries.
One of these, Hernandez versus. Texas, eventually went to the
United States Supreme Court, which unanimously found the intentionally excluding
jury members that shared a defendant's race or ethnicity violated
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yeah, that
(17:11):
ruling was basically, you cannot promise somebody a trial by
the jury of their peers and then specifically exclude all
their peers from the jury. That's not okay. Herrera was
also one of the lawyers who was part of the
school segregation case that became known as Mendez versus Westminster,
which we've talked about in another podcast. During all of this,
(17:33):
Garcia was still a Mexican national, and on January eighth
of nineteen forty six, that was a few months before
the charges against him were dropped, he actually traveled to
Mexico City where he was awarded the Merito Militar, which
is an award for exceptional acts of heroism. Maccario Garcia
became an American citizen on June nineteen forty seven. He
(17:53):
earned his high school diploma four years later, and then
married Alicia Reyes on May eighteenth, nineteen five two. Eventually,
Garcia became a counselor for the Veterans Administration, which is
a job that he held for twenty five years. On
December two, Macario Garcia was killed in a car accident.
He was survived by his wife and children, and sources
(18:16):
actually differ on how many children they had. Uh He
was buried with full military honors, with an honor guard
from Fort sam Houston and San Antonio present at the
grave side. In his eulogy, John Jay Herrera said, Maccario
Garcia was made in the best traditions of the country
of his birth and of his ancestors, Mexico, and of
his adopted country, the United States, for which he was
(18:38):
willing to offer and give his last measure of devotion.
All of this as a private infantryman in the United
States Army, as a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor,
and finally as a counselor in the Veterans Administration of
the United States. Nine years after Garcia's death, the Houston
City Council changed the name of sixty nine Street, which
runs through a predominantly mixed a can American neighborhood, to
(19:01):
Macario Garcia Drive. Houston's Macario Garcia Army Reserve Center was
dedicated in and the following year a middle school in
Sugarland was also named after him. That is a story
of Maccario Garcia, which I had never heard it all before,
so I had not either, and I it's one of
(19:23):
those things that it seems obvious that, um, that while
there were definitely black soldiers who came home from the
war and we're like, this is not acceptable. Let's let's
work together to change it, that that did not only
affect black soldiers, and I also didn't only affect World
War Two, which we talked about the top of the podcast.
But that's a teaser for a later episode that will
(19:45):
come probably later this fall well. And it's also another
good example of like how sometimes the accounts are fuzzy
and we have to kind of muddle through and figure
out as a people, not necessarily as specifically, but kind
of how we proceed. And I think it's important to
point those out, like there's very few black and White
(20:06):
kind of easily sussed out moments in history. There are
sides to every story, and we try to talk about
all of them. But this is a very good example
of we have fairly recent relatively speaking to some of
the other things we talked about on the podcast accounts,
and they just do not quite match up right well.
And if the case had come to child, they would
probably be a more definitive answer about actually what happened,
(20:28):
because there would have been lots of witnesses and sworn testimony,
and it might not have been totally clear, but maybe
a little less. Two totally different accounts of the same story.
Do you also have a listener mail? I do. We're
gonna do listener mail a little differently today. So I
got uh an email from Mary and Mary and I
(20:49):
had an email conversation uh, and it's about the recent
interview that we had with Dennis Carr from the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston about their exhibition called Made in
the Americas, which is about Asia's influence on the colonial
North and South America in terms of art and decorative
art and all that kind of stuff. Um our email
exchange was rather lengthy, which is one of the reasons.
(21:09):
I'm not going to read all of it, but basically
she wrote in to talk about the Casta paintings, which
there's only one of in the exhibition, and that depicts
um A, a white man, an African woman, and a
child who is presumably their child, who is uh multiracial. So,
(21:30):
as we alluded to in the episode, these paintings were
done as sets. It was like a whole genre of
these paintings that were done as sets documenting the social
and racial and ethnic hierarchies that emerged in Mexico during
the colonial era. And Dennis car described these basically as
being advertising spin that were written or that we're created
(21:54):
to sort of reassure the people in Spain that they
were sent to that yes, there were complicateds complicated social
and racial situations in Mexico, but the things were okay.
So when I heard his answer, I was sort of
interpreting as uh that these were kind of self serving
and deceptive paintings meant to portray a specific aspect of Mexico. Positively,
(22:17):
what Mary wrote in to point out is a whole
other aspect of them that we didn't talk about at all,
which is definitely racist because when you look at whole
sets of cast of paintings, they are organized in such
a way that the people with the lightest skinner at
the top and the people with the darkest skin or
at the bottom. And there's a whole theme of racial
purity that runs through the whole thing. And we didn't
(22:38):
really get into any of that in the and the
interview because the painting, the reason that painting is in
the exhibition of it, because of the clothes that the
people have on UM and the cast of paintings themselves
are are sort of a whole separate genre. So I
definitely wanted to make that more clear, because I did
not do a very good job of explaining what the
(23:00):
sets of paintings themselves are about when I was doing
the interview um and that the question that Dennis was
answering was you sort of specifically about what would prompt
people to do this, which I think is a really
interesting answer. The points that that Mary raises. Number one,
there's the fact that we didn't say specifically that the
(23:21):
paintings are pretty racist. They are. The way they describe
people in a lot of ways is offensive, especially when
you look at all of them, even the one that
is in the uh, the m f As exhibition. You know,
it describes this child as a mulatto, which is a
word that was in very common use for a very
long time. I did not know until researching before doing
(23:43):
that interview that the word mulatto comes from the same
word stem as mule, which is obvious now that I
see them in front of me on a piece of paper. Uh.
But that like adds a whole other layer of offensiveness
to that term. So one of the things that at
um that Mary pointed out, uh, is that I'm gonna
(24:04):
read a little piece of this within a set. The
clothing styles and compositions changed to show the class differences
that went along with skin color, and the terms below.
The first two generations were used in legal documents. The
terms for later generations were either made up by the
artists are used only colloquially and only in certain regions.
One translates as quote jump back, as in one eight
(24:27):
African plus pure Indian equals a jump back in racial purity.
Another is I don't understand, as in I don't know
what to call you because racial mixing in your family
goes back too many generations. So I wanted to talk
a little bit more directly about the painting, since we
didn't spend a lot of time on that in the
UH in the interview, which means we didn't give a
(24:49):
very full account of what these paintings were specifically about, UH,
and bring up the the cast system that they sort
of document UM from the colonial period, that the ramifications
of that still exist today in terms of both racism
and discrimination based on color in terms of people's skin. TOIM,
(25:14):
that still exists not just in Mexico and Latin America,
but also in the United States. There are definitely UH
discriminatory views and practices that are related specifically to a
person's color and what their skin looks like, UM, regardless
of exactly what their racial or ethnic ancestry is. So
thank you Mary for writing in UM. We had we
(25:36):
had a whole conversation in which she sent some pictures
of some other collections of Casta paintings. UM. I still
the thing that prompted me to ask about them, which
I don't think I expressed very clearly. What I was
asking was that, like UH, the fact that you would
need to chronicle a set of racial hierarchies like that
(25:59):
is in implicitly a discriminatory idea, And so the I
wondered what kind of mentality led to like a need
to spawn a whole genre of artwork to write that
down basically, Yeah, that's it's a lot of work to
go to to catalog humans. Yeah. Well, and it's still
(26:23):
even even having all these ideas of different influences that
went into it's still to me very odd that like
anybody was like, you know, what we should do. We
should make sixteen paintings. We should make sets of sixteen
paintings detailing what happens when a person of one ethnicity
marries or has a child with a person of another ethnicity.
Like that to me is still woo okay. There's been
(26:45):
a lot of racial and ethnic hierarchies that exist all
over the world. This is the only instance I know
of where it spawned an entire genre of formulaic art.
So that is more detail about us to paint things.
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(27:05):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. When we talk about the civil rights movement
in the United States, one piece of historical context that
(00:22):
comes up pretty frequently is that African American soldiers returned
home from serving in World War Two to find that
even though they had just risked their lives for their country,
they were still being treated as second class citizens as
they had been before, that they were still the targets
of intense discrimination and segregation. So the idea is that
this incongruity between having served a nation at the risk
(00:45):
of one's own life and then being treated that way
by that nation after getting home again prompted a lot
of people to advocate for their own equal treatment, and
so that it's a little more complicated than that, but
that atit heart is basically true. But it also was
not unique to black soldiers, or as we are going
to talk about in another episode a little farther down
(01:05):
the road, it also wasn't unique to World War Two.
But today we are going to talk about how World
War Two prompted efforts towards equal rights for Hispanics and
Latinos in the United States, and we're going to do
that by telling the story of Maccario Garcia. Garcia was
born in Mexico and was the first Mexican national to
be awarded the Medal of Honor, which is the United
(01:26):
States Armed Forces highest award for a valor. But when
he got back to Texas, he found that he was
still the target of segregation and discrimination himself. So we
are going to talk about that story today. Mccario Garcia
was born in Via di Castagno, Mexico, on January second
of nineteen. His parents were Luciano Andsfa Garcia, and he
(01:49):
was one of ten children. The Garcias were farm workers,
and in nineteen twenty three they moved to Texas with
the hope of finding work as farm laborers. They settled
near sugar Land End, which is outside of Houston and
Fort Bend County. I have asked multiple Texan people whether
it is Sugarland or sugar Land, and I got two
(02:09):
different answers, So we're saying Sugarland all those Sugarland is
now a city at this point. This area was quite
rural in nineteen fifty six, which is About a decade
after this story takes place, there were only about twenty
two hundred people living there. Maccario's parents both got jobs
working on a cotton farm, and Maccario eventually left school
(02:30):
to work on a ranch. By nineteen forty, World War
two was well underway elsewhere in the world, and it
was clear that the United States might be drawn in
as well, so on September sixteenth of nineteen forty, the
Selective Training and Service Act of nineteen forty, also called
the Burke Wadsworth Act, was signed into law by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. It required men between the ages of
(02:53):
one and thirty six, regardless of whether they were citizens,
to register with the Draft Board. Had also established a
lottery that would be used to draft soldiers into the military.
Since the United States wasn't actually at war at this point,
this is considered to be the first peacetime draft in
United States history, and the draft began that October. The
United States entered the war on December seventh of nineteen
(03:16):
forty one. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in in
nineteen forty two, when he was twenty two, Macario Garcia
was drafted. Although African American soldiers were segregated into their
own units. At this point, Hispanic and Anglo soldiers served together,
so Garcia became a private and U. S. Army B Company,
first Battalion, twenty second Infantry, fourth Infantry Division. He was
(03:40):
part of the Allies D Day invasion and he was
wounded at Normandy. He spent four months after that recovering,
and we don't really have a lot of detail there
other than that he went on to rejoin his unit
after he had recovered. The event that earned Garcia the
Middle of Honor took place on November twenty seven of
nineteen forty four. Machine gunners protected by trees were blocking
(04:01):
his company's advance en route to Cologne, Germany. There was
almost no cover between Garcia's company and the machine gunners
and they were pinned down. Garcia, who was acting as
a squad leader, volunteered to try to take out the nests.
He basically crawled toward one machine gun nest and lodged
grenades into it, destroying the gun before shooting three soldiers
(04:23):
who tried to escape in the process. He was shot
himself in the shoulder and the foot when he tried
to return to his company, though another machine gunner in
a second nest opened fire. Even though he was already wounded,
He approached that second gun as well, killing three other
soldiers and taking four prisoners. He refused to be evacuated
(04:45):
until the area was secure, and he was hospitalized for
two months. After this, he was offered a promotion that
would have made him a lieutenant, but he elected to
return to his company instead. Sorry. Kind of amazes me.
Not only at the single landedly take out two machine
gun nests, he did it while injured, um so fairly.
(05:06):
Before the end of the war, after Garcia returned to
the United States, President Harry S. Truman presented him, along
with twenty seven other soldiers, with the Medal of Honor.
Has happened at a ceremony at the White House that
was on auguste. While draping the medal around Garcia's neck,
Truman reportedly told him, I would rather earn this than
(05:27):
be president. In addition to his Medal of Honor, Garcia
also received a purple Heart, which, in case you did
not know, is presented to those who are wounded or killed,
the Bronze Star, which is for quote heroic or meritorious
Achievement and the Combat infantry Man's Badge. After serving in
the United States Army for three years, one of them
in overseas combat, Maccario Garcia was honorably discharged with the
(05:50):
rank of sergeant. When he returned home to sugar Land,
he received a hero's welcome, and he was treated as
a celebrity. Local newspapers wrote stories about out him, and
local governments and civic organizations blooded him with request for
speeches and appearances. The League of United Latin American Citizens Council,
also known as LULAC, held a special ceremony to honor
(06:13):
him at the nearby Richmond Courthouse, followed by a party
and a dance on September nine of ninety So the
Hispanic and Latino community in Texas was quite proud of
Macario Garcia, and so were the sugar Land and Greater
Houston areas as a whole. So it's a little surprising
what happened the next day, which is what we're going
to talk about, after a brief sponsor break, a little
(06:37):
less than three weeks after his Medal of Honor ceremony
and the day after a dance had been held in
his honor. On September ten ninety five, Macario Garcia made
the news again, and this time it was after an
incident at a Richmond, Texas restaurant. This is about ten
miles from his home in Sugarland. It was the same
town where the party in the dance had been held
at this at the county courthouse the night for Richmond
(07:01):
is the county seat of that county. Many restaurants and
public areas were at this point segregated in terms of
both race and ethnicity. And while Jim Crow laws made
segregation of African Americans commonplace, particularly in the South, Texas
was at that point the only state with a large
Hispanic population, so in Texas, segregation also targeted Mexican Americans
(07:24):
and other people whose origins were in Mexico or other
parts of Central and South America. As a side note,
this was also true in other states that had other
large populations of other minorities. So communities with large populations
of people with Asian and ancestry, for example, had had
segregation laws and practices that targeted those groups specifically as well.
(07:49):
And while Richmond's Oasis Cafe didn't have signs posted about
who was or wasn't allowed to eat there. It had
a reputation as a white establishment, one that just didn't
offer food, music, or entertainment, intended to appeal to a
Hispanic customer base. In the words of the owner's son,
Louis Payton, speaking in a documentary quote, we had very
(08:10):
few Blacks or Mexican Americans come in and ask for
service because we didn't cater to their needs. So we
just didn't see any of them. While there were also
other restaurants and Richmond that did serve Hispanic and Latino customers,
the Oasis Cafe was really Richmond's only night spot, and
this incident happened around eleven PM, and there's some dispute
(08:31):
as to what actually happened. Garcia's assertion was that he
arrived at the restaurant and its owner, Donna Andrews, refused
him service because he was Mexican. He was furious. He
had just served the United States in wartime, risked his life,
been awarded a Medal of Honor along with many other
recognitions for his heroism and patriotism, and now back in
(08:52):
Texas he was being refused service for his ethnicity. In
his version of the story, he demanded an explanation physically
sisted being thrown out and was hit with a baseball bat.
The restaurant's assertion was that Garcia was drunk and belligerent
from the start, and that he was refused service for
that reason, not because of his ethnicity. When the restaurant's
(09:14):
version of the story, Garcia started throwing things pretty much
immediately and also hit the owner in the mouth. Regardless
of how I went down, though everyone agrees that Garcia
was refused service, the restaurant's owners called the police and
Garcia was removed from the premises and taken to jail.
Garcia insisted throughout that his treatment at the Oasis Cafe
(09:35):
was because he was Mexican. The sheriff ultimately decided to
let him go home. Here's how this was later reported
in The Texas Coaster, which was the weekly local paper
and it's issue that came out on September. The incident,
which has caused widespread interest, occurred after Mrs Andrews refused
service in the cafe to Garcia and his party on
(09:56):
the night of September ten. Mrs Andrews and her brother Pete,
where he was a partner in the cafe business, set
in statements made to County Attorney Brown that they refused
service to Garcia, quote because he had been drinking. The
affidavits stated that after being refused service, Garcia broke sugar bowls,
salt and pepper shakers, catchup bottles, several bottles of wine,
water glasses, and three window panes, and struck Mrs Andrews
(10:19):
in the mouth with his fist before he was quieted.
After he struck Mrs Andrews, the statements continued, a struggle
ensued between Garcia and Lower and Mrs Andrew's son, Louis Peyton.
Garcia was quieted after he was hit across the back
with a baseball bat, the statement said. According to the
same Texas Coaster article, the responding deputy confirmed that Garcia
(10:39):
had been drinking, but said he did not know of
any damage to the restaurant. So September was more than
two weeks after the original incident actually happened. But The
Texas Coaster was a weekly newspaper, and there are a
couple of reasons for this lengthy gap between the event
happening and the article coming out. One was that The
(11:01):
Texas Coaster had originally considered reporting the story in its
previous issue, but then it decided not to out of
respect for Garcia being a war hero number two. At
the point of the prior issues preparation, it just didn't
seem like that much of a story. The sheriff and
sent Garcia home. The whole thing seemed like kind of
a minor, are isolated scuffle, with two sides telling pretty
(11:24):
distinctly different stories about it. However, John Jay Herrera, one
of the area's only Mexican American lawyers, was also one
of the community leaders who had helped plan Garcia's reception
and ceremonies that took place prior to the incident at
the Oasis Cafe. Harrera's involvement in Hispanic and Latino social
and civic organizations meant he was very aware of the
(11:46):
real ongoing prejudices and discrimination in Texas, and he thought
Garcia's story was exactly the sword that would raise awareness
of that discrimination, and it would rally the Mexican American
community and possibly the Anglo community as well, around fighting
for equality, and he hoped that it would perhaps force
local and state governments to take action to end it.
(12:08):
So someone, almost certainly Herrera tipped off gossip columnists and
radio host Walter Winchell that a war hero and Medal
of Honor recipient had been refused service at a restaurant
because of his ethnicity. So on September Winchell gave a
scathing account of the whole thing, which really wasn't entirely accurate.
(12:29):
On his radio show. He said that this had occurred
in sugar Land rather than in Richmond. He described the
involvement of two sailors who seemed not to have existed
at all, and he also reported that Garcia wound up
in the hospital afterward. So if Walter Winchell's name rings
a bell and you're struggling to place it and can't
quite remember why, longtime listeners will remember that he also
(12:51):
played a part in the Tokyo Rose episode from when
Sarah and Deblina were hosting together. He was actually one
of the people who stirred up outrage against Iva to
keen know. Once Winchell's radio program and his column were out,
this story really spread all over the country, with a
lot of the tone being that Fort ben County was
a racist, discriminatory, and incompetent place, especially against war heroes.
(13:15):
So it was only after this story was suddenly everywhere
with it consistently being covered as an active discrimination against
a war hero based on his ethnicity, that the county
actually took legal action against Garcia and the Texas Coaster
printed that story that we quoted from. Garcia was charged
with aggravated assault, and John Jay Herrera, along with other
(13:36):
lawyers in the months that followed, took the case. We
will talk about what happened when this got to court
after another brief word from one of the great sponsors
that keep the show on the air. Get back to
Makario Garcia's story. Regardless of whether Winchell's broadcast and all
the reporting that followed it were totally accurate or not,
(13:57):
people were definitely outraged at the yea that a highly
decorated veteran had been denied service. The furor did exactly
what John Jay Herrera had hoped that it would. Galvanized
the Mexican American community in the area, and it raised
the ire of the Anglo community as well. Robert E. Smith,
the chairman of the Good Neighbor Commission, posted Garcia's bond
(14:20):
after charges were filed, and community organizations started raising money
to help pay his legal fees. There was also huge
media interests in the court proceedings. In the late fall
of Ninetti, when the case was supposed to come to trial,
the judge, who was named Charles Schultz, was quoted as saying, quote,
nearly all the newspapers in the in the state have
(14:41):
asked for courtroom space to hear the case. However, that
November Fort Bent County requested a postponement and the trial
was put off until the February nineteen six session. Then,
just before the trial was about to begin, another Mexican
American veteran was also denied service at the Oasis Cafe,
apparently after an act of disobedience that was intended to
(15:04):
mimic Garcia's initial arrest and bring the issue back to
the forefront. Yeah, he basically went to the cafe with
a friend, both of them already drunk, and caused trouble
on purpose to get thrown out to make it major
news again, which worked. It meant that Garcia's original encounter,
along with all the inaccurate reporting that had followed it,
(15:25):
was once again all re reported, which put all eyes
back on for ben County with the idea that it
was an unfair and discriminatory place for Hispanics. So the
county took the probably pretty prudent move to try to
reschedule the trial once again, this time until June, when
hopefully the news would not be so focused on it
(15:46):
or so openly critical of Fort Ben County officials. At
this point, James V. Alread became Garcia's attorney of record.
This was a huge deal. Alread had been the Texas
Attorney General as well as a federal district judge and
the governor. Having such an enormously high profile Anglo attorney
(16:06):
representing Garcia proved to be too much for the county,
which quietly dropped the charges and Garcia quietly returned to
life as a private citizen. Even though Garcia's case never
actually came to trial, all the publicity surrounding it did
have the result that Herrera seems to have hoped for
from the beginning. The movement for equal rights for Mexican
(16:27):
Americans and others within the Hispanic and Latino communities, which
had been kind of loosely organized before this point, did
begin to come together for more meaningful and effective collective actions.
Herrera would go on to be part of other important
civil rights cases in Texas and elsewhere, including fighting to
overturn the verdicts in several criminal cases against Mexican American
(16:50):
defendants that had been tried with deliberately all anglo juries.
One of these, Hernandez versus. Texas, eventually went to the
United States Supreme Court, which unanimously found the intentionally excluding
jury members that shared a defendant's race or ethnicity violated
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yeah, that
(17:11):
ruling was basically, you cannot promise somebody a trial by
the jury of their peers and then specifically exclude all
their peers from the jury. That's not okay. Herrera was
also one of the lawyers who was part of the
school segregation case that became known as Mendez versus Westminster,
which we've talked about in another podcast. During all of this,
(17:33):
Garcia was still a Mexican national, and on January eighth
of nineteen forty six, that was a few months before
the charges against him were dropped, he actually traveled to
Mexico City where he was awarded the Merito Militar, which
is an award for exceptional acts of heroism. Maccario Garcia
became an American citizen on June nineteen forty seven. He
(17:53):
earned his high school diploma four years later, and then
married Alicia Reyes on May eighteenth, nineteen five two. Eventually,
Garcia became a counselor for the Veterans Administration, which is
a job that he held for twenty five years. On
December two, Macario Garcia was killed in a car accident.
He was survived by his wife and children, and sources
(18:16):
actually differ on how many children they had. Uh He
was buried with full military honors, with an honor guard
from Fort sam Houston and San Antonio present at the
grave side. In his eulogy, John Jay Herrera said, Maccario
Garcia was made in the best traditions of the country
of his birth and of his ancestors, Mexico, and of
his adopted country, the United States, for which he was
(18:38):
willing to offer and give his last measure of devotion.
All of this as a private infantryman in the United
States Army, as a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor,
and finally as a counselor in the Veterans Administration of
the United States. Nine years after Garcia's death, the Houston
City Council changed the name of sixty nine Street, which
runs through a predominantly mixed a can American neighborhood, to
(19:01):
Macario Garcia Drive. Houston's Macario Garcia Army Reserve Center was
dedicated in and the following year a middle school in
Sugarland was also named after him. That is a story
of Maccario Garcia, which I had never heard it all before,
so I had not either, and I it's one of
(19:23):
those things that it seems obvious that, um, that while
there were definitely black soldiers who came home from the
war and we're like, this is not acceptable. Let's let's
work together to change it, that that did not only
affect black soldiers, and I also didn't only affect World
War Two, which we talked about the top of the podcast.
But that's a teaser for a later episode that will
(19:45):
come probably later this fall well. And it's also another
good example of like how sometimes the accounts are fuzzy
and we have to kind of muddle through and figure
out as a people, not necessarily as specifically, but kind
of how we proceed. And I think it's important to
point those out, like there's very few black and White
(20:06):
kind of easily sussed out moments in history. There are
sides to every story, and we try to talk about
all of them. But this is a very good example
of we have fairly recent relatively speaking to some of
the other things we talked about on the podcast accounts,
and they just do not quite match up right well.
And if the case had come to child, they would
probably be a more definitive answer about actually what happened,
(20:28):
because there would have been lots of witnesses and sworn testimony,
and it might not have been totally clear, but maybe
a little less. Two totally different accounts of the same story.
Do you also have a listener mail? I do. We're
gonna do listener mail a little differently today. So I
got uh an email from Mary and Mary and I
(20:49):
had an email conversation uh, and it's about the recent
interview that we had with Dennis Carr from the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston about their exhibition called Made in
the Americas, which is about Asia's influence on the colonial
North and South America in terms of art and decorative
art and all that kind of stuff. Um our email
exchange was rather lengthy, which is one of the reasons.
(21:09):
I'm not going to read all of it, but basically
she wrote in to talk about the Casta paintings, which
there's only one of in the exhibition, and that depicts
um A, a white man, an African woman, and a
child who is presumably their child, who is uh multiracial. So,
(21:30):
as we alluded to in the episode, these paintings were
done as sets. It was like a whole genre of
these paintings that were done as sets documenting the social
and racial and ethnic hierarchies that emerged in Mexico during
the colonial era. And Dennis car described these basically as
being advertising spin that were written or that we're created
(21:54):
to sort of reassure the people in Spain that they
were sent to that yes, there were complicateds complicated social
and racial situations in Mexico, but the things were okay.
So when I heard his answer, I was sort of
interpreting as uh that these were kind of self serving
and deceptive paintings meant to portray a specific aspect of Mexico. Positively,
(22:17):
what Mary wrote in to point out is a whole
other aspect of them that we didn't talk about at all,
which is definitely racist because when you look at whole
sets of cast of paintings, they are organized in such
a way that the people with the lightest skinner at
the top and the people with the darkest skin or
at the bottom. And there's a whole theme of racial
purity that runs through the whole thing. And we didn't
(22:38):
really get into any of that in the and the
interview because the painting, the reason that painting is in
the exhibition of it, because of the clothes that the
people have on UM and the cast of paintings themselves
are are sort of a whole separate genre. So I
definitely wanted to make that more clear, because I did
not do a very good job of explaining what the
(23:00):
sets of paintings themselves are about when I was doing
the interview um and that the question that Dennis was
answering was you sort of specifically about what would prompt
people to do this, which I think is a really
interesting answer. The points that that Mary raises. Number one,
there's the fact that we didn't say specifically that the
(23:21):
paintings are pretty racist. They are. The way they describe
people in a lot of ways is offensive, especially when
you look at all of them, even the one that
is in the uh, the m f As exhibition. You know,
it describes this child as a mulatto, which is a
word that was in very common use for a very
long time. I did not know until researching before doing
(23:43):
that interview that the word mulatto comes from the same
word stem as mule, which is obvious now that I
see them in front of me on a piece of paper. Uh.
But that like adds a whole other layer of offensiveness
to that term. So one of the things that at
um that Mary pointed out, uh, is that I'm gonna
(24:04):
read a little piece of this within a set. The
clothing styles and compositions changed to show the class differences
that went along with skin color, and the terms below.
The first two generations were used in legal documents. The
terms for later generations were either made up by the
artists are used only colloquially and only in certain regions.
One translates as quote jump back, as in one eight
(24:27):
African plus pure Indian equals a jump back in racial purity.
Another is I don't understand, as in I don't know
what to call you because racial mixing in your family
goes back too many generations. So I wanted to talk
a little bit more directly about the painting, since we
didn't spend a lot of time on that in the
UH in the interview, which means we didn't give a
(24:49):
very full account of what these paintings were specifically about, UH,
and bring up the the cast system that they sort
of document UM from the colonial period, that the ramifications
of that still exist today in terms of both racism
and discrimination based on color in terms of people's skin. TOIM,
(25:14):
that still exists not just in Mexico and Latin America,
but also in the United States. There are definitely UH
discriminatory views and practices that are related specifically to a
person's color and what their skin looks like, UM, regardless
of exactly what their racial or ethnic ancestry is. So
thank you Mary for writing in UM. We had we
(25:36):
had a whole conversation in which she sent some pictures
of some other collections of Casta paintings. UM. I still
the thing that prompted me to ask about them, which
I don't think I expressed very clearly. What I was
asking was that, like UH, the fact that you would
need to chronicle a set of racial hierarchies like that
(25:59):
is in implicitly a discriminatory idea, And so the I
wondered what kind of mentality led to like a need
to spawn a whole genre of artwork to write that
down basically, Yeah, that's it's a lot of work to
go to to catalog humans. Yeah. Well, and it's still
(26:23):
even even having all these ideas of different influences that
went into it's still to me very odd that like
anybody was like, you know, what we should do. We
should make sixteen paintings. We should make sets of sixteen
paintings detailing what happens when a person of one ethnicity
marries or has a child with a person of another ethnicity.
Like that to me is still woo okay. There's been
(26:45):
a lot of racial and ethnic hierarchies that exist all
over the world. This is the only instance I know
of where it spawned an entire genre of formulaic art.
So that is more detail about us to paint things.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast where at history podcast at how
(27:05):
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in history as well. If you would like to learn
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(27:26):
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(27:52):
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