Erasure, Indifference, Willful Ignorance: Ken Burns and PBS

But this is not a mere politically correct claim that Latinos make at this juncture, but rather a challenge that highlights the problematic of any storytelling quite evident since Nietzsche (and reconfigured by Foucault and post-colonial theory): that any utterance and/or inscription that attempts to permanently inscribe a history into the mental framework of a human subject and collectivity (film, any film, fictional or not, is well within the dictates of inscription) dictates an ethical understanding and genealogical trajectory obligated and responsible not only to the self that is an author, but to the other that is the reader/viewer and the Other that is subject of that history. It is, as Gayatri Spivak warned a decade ago, this responsibility between one and the Other that focuses not on an external burden superimposed by oscillating moral values, but rather on the response between the one and the other–the infinite volley of utterances, receptions, inscriptions, translations and reconfigurations that construct historical (historia) knowledge. It is precisely this volley that cannot be swept aside in the name of artistic license or integrity.

In fact, if the writer/maker/filmmaker cannot implicitly and explicitly accept the ethical burden that comes with the privilege of making culture and history, then this “maker” falls prey to the derogatory and exclusive cultural and historical production methods so well employed by U.S. imperialism and neo-colonialism well-versed and apparent in the Germanic and Italian methods of early and mid-20th Century fascism.

Simply put, for Burns and PBS to claim that a seven-part historical documentary, and a six-year project, can accurately portray and represent the “American” psyche and landscape during and after the Second War through the “personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four quintessentially American towns,” is not only preposterous and remarkably ignorant, but disingenuous. To call it inaccurate would be a compliment only because the absurd claim by PBS and Burns that the sophisticated and complicated dynamic of the Second War can be adequately told through the eyes of a few hand-selected narratives at the expense of over 750,000 Mexican Americans who served in WWII (including 350,000 Chicanos)and who won more Medals of Honor and other decorations than any other ethnic group in proportion to their numbers (and not counting the number of Mexican American women who directly aided the war effort through their labor). In fact, it is estimated that during the time of military recruiting the Latino population in the U.S. was at approximately 2.7 million.

Moreover, as the defense industry grew causing shortages of manual labor, temporary workers from Mexico and Puerto Rico, called Braceros (derived from the Spanish word brazo, meaning arm) were transported to the U.S. through a 1940’s labor agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to work primarily in agriculture and certain other industries. It has been documented that approximately 100,000 contracts were signed between 1943 and 1945 to recruit and transport Mexican workers for employment on the railroads living in substandard conditions in ‘box car camps,’ where laborers had little contact with the general population and limited access to healthcare, recreation, translators, or legal aid. (see “A History of the Mexican American People,” by Julian Samora and Patricia Vandel Simon)

Thus, it is not that Latinos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and yes, even so called “Hispanics” intend to regulate and control artistic expression. They are not asking George Lucas to include more brown-skinned peoples in science-fiction narratives. But if any progress has been made by ethnic and racial groups to index the ethical responsibility inherent in any historical story-telling of a seminal moment in the construction and identity of a diverse and complex nation such as the United States, that much fought-after progress cannot be acquiesced to those institutions of power and lazy creators of culture who happily appropriate the dictates and ignorance of post-modernism in order to obfuscate and erase a history, a people, a culture, and a sacrifice all under the rubric of “artistic integrity.” — Sergio Muñoz-Sarmiento

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