Sofia Zavala’s story may seem like it begins on the South Side of Chicago. However, she knows better.
As she tells it, her story really begins in Mexico. When her parents left Mexico, separately, at 17, and traveled to America, they took little with them to Chicago, where they met, married and divorced. What they did take, however, they imparted on their five children, all now American citizens – their culture.
“I am a child of the sun,” said Zavala, who considers herself a second-generation immigrant, “but I am also a child of freedom.”
It is in Chicago that Zavala grew up, and was stage manager for her high school musical. It is also here that she met her first military recruiter, at Thomas Kelly High School in a predominantly Latino area in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.
A black haired, bespectacled girl, wearing a gray t-shirt with the words NERD replacing those usually saying ARMY in capitalized type-face, Zavala hopes to join the military. She is similar to many of those now in high-school planning to join. She is from a low-income background, and plans to attend a two-year vocational college before beginning her service. Zavala is different, however, because she is also a counter-recruitment activist.
“What I don’t like about the military is the false advertising,” said Zavala, who has spoken to six high-school military recruiters, two each from the Navy, Army and Marines, during her final year of school. Along with three of her four brothers, five of Zavala’s 15 cousins have served or are currently serving in the military.
Chicago’s JROTC
This military education program is the largest in the United States, according to the Chicago Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps. With more than 9,000 cadets in 41 schools, it encompasses full military academies, JROTC programs and the presence of military recruiters in most public high schools.
With Arne Duncan moving from his years at the helm of the Chicago Public School system to become Secretary of Education, advocates fear that Chicago, and its military school system in particular, may become a blueprint for the nation.
"These are positive learning environments," Duncan was quoted as saying in a November 2007 issue of USA Today about military schools. “I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline.”
Though they are not officially recruiting tools, JROTC courses, taught in high schools by retired military personnel, are also used as recruiting and public relations tools for the military, advocates say.
According to a House Armed Service Committee Report on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, “The committee understands from testimony provided . . . that 40 percent of the graduates of JROTC programs eventually join the military services.”
“Although the committee understands that the JROTC program is not a military recruitment program . . . the committee strongly believes that additional funding provided to the program will serve well the long term manpower interests of the Department of Defense,” the report, published in 1999, stated.
Though Chicago’s military academies, four out of six of which were opened under Duncan’s tenure, are the most heavily reported aspect of Chicago Public School’s affiliation with the military, they are not the most pervasive. Most CPS schools have had a military recruiter pass through their halls, says Captain Ivers Easterling, who is company commander for the Chicago Recruiting Company.
Truth in Recruiting
Jesus Palafox, a student at Northeastern Illinois University, works with the Truth in Recruitment program where Zavala first learned what she knows about the boundaries of recruiters working within high schools, and is himself a first-generation Mexican immigrant.
Run by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker pacifist orgranization, the program teaches students at high schools across the city -- ‘counter-recruitment’ – how to dispel myths about the realities of military service and disprove false information provided by military recruiters.
Some groups are particularly vulnerable to this. According to Palafox, immigrants were “probably more likely not to know the difference between their home army and the United States army,” confusing it for a peacetime army because most in Central and Southern America are.
A study conducted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found that the 2005 national recruit-to-population ratio was 1.15 for Latinos compared to 0.98 for non-Latinos, indicating that they are over-represented among recruits.
The military is seen by some immigrants as a fast-track to citizenship, and recruitment programs such as MAVNI – Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest – only reinforce this assumption. Under this recruitment pilot, running only during 2009, skilled immigrants who sign up to the armed forces can be fast-tracked to citizenship without the usually mandatory permanent residency.
The number of immigrants in uniform who became citizens jumped from 750 in 2001 to 4,000 in 2005, according to the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force.
Palafox also said most immigrants in the army are Latino.
A 22-year-old Chicago-born Latino male who considers himself a first-generation immigrant and recently joined the Marines, would speak only on condition of anonymity because he did not have military approval for media contact. He attributes the high percentage of Latinos he sees in the military to the “macho culture,” as well as the low-income status of many immigrants in Chicago.
He said that in growing up in “the Spanish ghetto area” on the South Side of Chicago, which he describes as rife with drugs and violence, he saw no option other than the military. “I didn’t have money; I didn’t have school, so I mean I didn’t really have no other choice,” he said.
A study conducted by the Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank, found that one-quarter of all children living in low-income families in 2001 had one or more foreign-born parents.
Zavala’s experience echoes these statistics. Growing up, her family of seven slept in a one-room apartment, and until the age of 16 she shared a bed with her mother. The chance the military presents for her to be independent, and as she says, “showing everyone that I can do it,” is invaluable.
There is also a greater cultural issue for Zavala inherent in her decision to enlist – how immigrants are viewed in American society. “Some people say we come just to be lazy and that’s not right,” she said.
Military recruiters on the inside
The privileges that military recruiters are allowed inside high schools such as Kelly High, where Zavala met her recruiters, vary greatly, depending on the rules of each school administration. This ranges from not allowing recruiters to leave their stands during career fairs, to recruiters having the authority to pull a student out of class.
The effort is funded by the Department of Defense’s recruiting budget - according to the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute, a left-leaning organization. It was $20.5 billion in fiscal year 2009 and DOD Fiscal 2010 Budget Proposal indicated an additional $0.6 billion has been allotted for recruitment and retention in the upcoming year.
Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, schools are obliged to provide military recruiters the same access to students as they do to higher education recruiters. Those that receive federal funding are also obliged to provide students’ contact information to a recruiter if requested and if their parents have not signed a form to opt out of this informational release.
Along with giving presentations to classes, Zavala and her fellow Truth in Recruiting graduates hand out opt-out forms to students to make sure they are aware of the option to keep information from being given to the military.
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Zavala says she has seen students being followed to their classes by military recruiters, which she believes blurs the boundaries of acceptable behavior. What is most problematic for her, however, is the misinformation and that they “they are somewhat manipulative.”
She recalls that when she told one of the six recruiters she consulted that she was considering attending college before her military service, she “saw this change of tone to him. It went from like cool and mellow to . . . stubborn.”
Sergeant Clifford Brown, a recruiter who works in three high schools on the South Side, said the majority of recruits who enlist wait until after they graduate. However for most students their high school recruiter is their initial contact with a military representative even before they reach 18, the enlistment age.
The usual trajectory of recruitment within a school, says Sergeant Clifford Brown, is: “The first time I am meeting them, we are usually sitting down with them (the student) within the next 72 hours. And then 72 hours from that, we are scheduling them to take the test (ASVAB – aptitude test), and then 72 hours from that, if they pass the test, we are actually taking them up to do the physical (exam). Once they complete the physical, if they are eligible . . . they sit down with a guidance counselor and they actually pick their job, what they want to do in the army or the army reserves.”
This process – initial meetings, aptitude testing, and a physical examination -- are all done before a contract is signed, which comprises the official enlisting. This takes place at a Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), and once the enlistment contract is signed, the student has an eight-year contract with the military. There is some flexibility as to what percentage of this time is spent on active duty or reserves.
Zavala says confusion about the length and flexibility of the military contract is one of the biggest misunderstandings in military recruitment. She said students often ask questions only about how much they are going to get paid or how long their active service will be, and other more important issues are not brought up. Sexual harassment, for example, was one point on which recruiter silence was commonly noted among counter-recruitment activists.
Patricia McCann, an Iraq war veteran who joined the National Guard when she was still in high school in Carbondale, Ill., now works with Iraq Veterans Against the War, an anti-war group which also runs a Truth in Recruiting program. She said her recruiter was unclear or did not mention a number of important issues that McCann later came across during service, particularly that of sexual harassment.
When Zavala brought this up with a recruiter, saying she knew about issues of sexual harassment but wasn’t concerned because she knew how to defend herself, his response was – “That doesn’t happen in the military.”
“Oh it does, it’s just not reported,” Zavala told him. They concluded their meeting with his promise to follow up with Zavala in a week, and though she still sees him in school, he never called her again and “doesn’t look at me.”
Zavala says the low rate of sexual harassment reporting has been the biggest worry she has encountered from her brothers, all of whom object to her enlisting. Zavala tells them she has her reasons for joining the military.
A heavy burden
“Because I’m second-generation, people expect so much of me, but (I tell them) ‘don’t worry this is what I want to do.’ It will help me develop a stronger personality,” she says of her future military career.
During her time speaking to recruiters, she has also received mixed messages about their own reasons for joining. One told Zavala that he entered the military to get money for his deaf daughter’s operation – stories like this, she says, have only served to make her more wary.
Zavala, who hopes to indulge her love of the water, working with her hands and penchant for adrenaline-induced rushes when she joins the military, doesn’t think the enlisting should be taken lightly. She worries that recruiter pressure leads to uncertain decisions.
“Be careful with what they say to you and what they promise. Try to save a copy of everything,” she counsels. And “don’t join unless you are a hundred percent sure that is what you want to do.”
A hundred percent certain is what Zavala feels she is. Not only is she “for the country having protection in case some danger does come about,” but “my body, my heart, you know, my soul, my self is hungry for the feeling of accomplishment.”
Zavala plans to bring aspects of both her beloved cultures with her into service. “I am one of those . . . examples that shows that neither one is better than the other,” she says of her Mexican-American heritage. “It’s a balance.”