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San Diego
Union Tribune
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PUBLISHED BY 2 A.M.
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March 17, 2007
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NADIA
BOROWSKI SCOTT / Union-Tribune
Gus Chavez is in a campaign to change a World War II
documentary to include Latino experiences.
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Missing
in action
WWII documentary chronicling
50 people features no Latinos, leading to calls for the film to be
changed
By John Wilkens
STAFF WRITER
March 17, 2007
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NADIA BOROWSKI
SCOTT
/ Union-Tribune
Gus Chavez is in a campaign to change a World War II documentary
to include Latino experiences.
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 SAN DIEGO – Gus Chavez of San Diego had five uncles who served in
World War II, including two who were injured and one who was captured by
the Germans. The uncle he's named after died during training for the war.
So Chavez took it
personally when he learned that acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns' seven-part
documentary about the war, scheduled to air nationally on PBS in
September, doesn't feature any Latinos.
“It's a
misrepresentation,” said Chavez, a retired San Diego State
administrator and longtime local activist. “You have a documentary that
runs 14 hours and it doesn't mention the Latino experience? It's
unacceptable. It's shameful.”
Chavez, 63, is
helping spearhead a campaign called “Defend the Honor” to pressure Burns
and PBS not to air the series until changes are made.
The campaign drew
support this week from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the American
GI Forum, a Hispanic veterans group. Cartoonist Lalo
Alcaraz – tipped off to the controversy by
Chavez – has been lampooning Burns in his comic strip “La Cucaracha,”
which runs in newspapers including The San Diego Union-Tribune.
In a written
statement, Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick
asked viewers to “refrain from passing judgment on our work until they
have seen it.” The statement said:
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PBS
The Ken Burns documentary "The War" tells the
stories of about 50 "ordinary" people, most from four
American towns: Sacramento; Waterbury, Conn.;
Mobile, Ala.;
and Luverne,
Minn.
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“We are dismayed
and saddened by any assumption that we intentionally excluded anyone from
our series on the Second World War. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
“For 30 years we
have made films that have tried to tell many of the stories that haven't
been told in American history. In this latest project, we have attempted
to show the universal human experience of war by focusing on the testimonies
of just a handful of people. As a result, millions of stories are not
explored in our film.”
Burns, who worked
on “The War” for six years, is used to controversy. His earlier big
projects about the Civil War, baseball and jazz were so sweeping and
powerful that they generated heated debates about what he put in and what
he left out, raising questions about artistic license, political
correctness and historical accuracy.
He said the goal
this time was to reduce “the greatest cataclysm in human history” to an
intimate scale through the personal stories of about 50 “ordinary”
people, most from four geographically distributed American towns:
Sacramento; Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.,; and Luverne,
Minn.
The film was
finished last fall and Burns has been touring the country, screening
excerpts for veterans groups and active-duty military. He was at the Veterans Museum
and Memorial Center in Balboa Park
on Jan. 31.
Latinos
who saw previews grew concerned and contacted Maggie
Rivas-Rodriguez, a journalism professor at the University of Texas and director of the U.S.
Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project.
Rivas-Rodriguez
said she contacted the filmmakers to ask whether any Latinos were
featured – about 500,000 served in the war – and to offer sources from
her project's hundreds of interviews.
Word came back that
the film is largely about individuals, not groups, although
discrimination against Japanese-Americans and African-Americans is
highlighted. No changes would be made, she was told.
“World War II
affected us all,” Rivas-Rodriguez said. “Our parents, our grandparents
fought in it. We paid our dues and for that to be so completely
disregarded is a huge insult to all of us.”
Earlier this month,
Rivas-Rodriguez, Chavez and other critics met with PBS President Paula Kerger in her office and asked her to push for
modifications in the film. She declined, noting that each episode opens
with this disclaimer:
“The Second World
War was fought in a million places, too many for any one accounting. This
is the story of how four towns and their citizens experienced that war.”
Kerger said PBS is giving grants
to local stations in every state so they can do their own war-related
programming, which will be an opportunity to “bring forth the many
stories that are not part of the Ken Burns series.”
Chavez and other
members of “Defend the Honor” are considering their next move. He said
the controversy has outraged Latinos across the country, with some
calling for boycotts of PBS programming and fundraising.
Although Burns
often stresses that he is a filmmaker, not a historian, Chavez pointed to
the popularity and influence of earlier documentaries and said “The War”
is likely to wind up in schools and libraries.
“Our concern is our
proper place in recorded history,” Chavez said.
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