Mexican Pride And Death In U.S. Service

March 22, 2005

Mexican Pride And Death In U.S. Service

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

EGOLLADO, Mexico - The shrine set up on a broken television in the corner would be familiar to many American military families. The somber Stars and Stripes is folded neatly in a triangle, encased in wood and glass. A couple of medals lie in boxes, inert as rocks, collecting dust.

A stern young man in his dress United States Army uniform peers at visitors from a small photograph. His dog tags hang beside the photo. A photo of the same young man with his even younger wife, caught in a swirl of laughter, is nearby. These are the relics of a life cut short, in the name of honor, liberty and country. The question is whose?

What seems odd is that the mementos are not in a living room in upstate New York or rural Virginia, but in an impoverished house with concrete floors in a dusty town deep in the hills of central Mexico. The soldier, Pfc. Jesús Fonseca, 19, was not an American citizen, but one of at least 22 Mexican citizens who have died fighting for the United States in two years of war.

As of January, about 41,000 permanent resident aliens were in the United States armed forces - 3,639 of them from Mexico. The Mexicans are the largest group among the 63 immigrants who have been killed in action in Iraq, the Pentagon says.

It is a fact that points to Mexico's ambivalent yet deeply intertwined relationship with the United States, the country Mexico fought its last war against, and lost. That defeat, in 1848, is not forgotten here.

Yet so many Mexicans have migrated to the United States seeking jobs in recent years that they and their children are willing to fight and die for it, even if they are frequently motivated more by economic necessity than patriotism.

For many, armed service is seen as a fast track to citizenship. During wartime, foreigners with residency permits need only to serve honorably for their citizenship to be all but guaranteed, immigration officials said. Of course, they must survive as well.

Indeed, in a cruel twist, soldiers like Private Fonseca, who in the horrible minutes of Jan. 17 took a sniper's bullet in the stomach while patrolling in Ramadi, are accorded citizenship only after death.

"He lost his life for another flag," said his cousin Noé Beltrán, echoing the views of many in this town. "Personally, I think it should have been for Mexico."

Like Private Fonseca, most Mexicans in the armed forces straddle two worlds. Some join the Army or the Marines for the usual reasons: poverty, a desire for adventure, love for their adopted country, the prospect of a subsidized education and, of course, the adolescent urge to prove themselves as something more than pimply youths.

Fernando Suárez del Solar, a United States citizen who began a family in Mexico with a Tijuana woman, said a Marine Corps recruiter started working on his son, Jesús, when the boy was only 14 and still living in Tijuana.

Jesús Suárez del Solar, who was eligible for a residency permit but not citizenship, wanted to be a Tijuana police officer and fight drug traffickers. A recruiter convinced him that after a stint in the Marines he could easily be hired by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, his father said.

The family moved to Lomita, Calif., and after four years of high school, during which he received weekly calls from the recruiter, Jesús signed up. Part of his motivation was to become a United States citizen, his father said.

"When he got out of boot camp, he called me and said, 'Papa, now I'm a marine, but I made a mistake,' " Fernando Suárez del Solar said. "I don't want any of my cousins to go into the Army. There is a lot of discrimination here."

Jesús, a lance corporal, 20, was killed by fragments from an American cluster bomb on March 27, 2003, near Nasiriya, in the initial offensive to occupy Iraq. He left a wife and infant son in Escondido, Calif.

"The recruitment system really goes after the Hispanic community," Mr. Suárez del Solar said. "A lot of Hispanics are born in Mexico but live in the United States and don't have citizenship. They see a good option in the Army to get papers, to get citizenship more quickly, and one thing the recruiters say often is that military service will make it easier for them to become accepted in society."

For others citizenship is less important than economic opportunity.

Sergio Díaz Sr. said his son Sergio Jr. had few prospects when he graduated from Narbonne High School in Lomita. He was a lanky young man who played basketball well and liked to tinker with his family's old Mustang.

The father, a legal immigrant, made a meager living doing odd jobs and fixing cars. They lived in a trailer park. "There weren't many other options, so he enlisted," Sergio Díaz Sr. said.

The boy told relatives that someday he hoped to have a well-paid job in the States, as a full-fledged citizen. Then, he said, he wanted to buy his mother her own house in Mexico, so she would no longer have to live on her sister's charity.

That dream ended last Thanksgiving, when a roadside bomb exploded near Ramadi and the shrapnel ripped through Specialist Sergio Díaz Varela's 21-year-old body.

He was buried in the cemetery in Tlaquepaque, a suburb of Guadalajara, on Dec. 12. His mother, María Guadalupe Varela, did not want the American flag draped over the coffin, but relented under pressure from family members. She blames United States Army recruiters for her son's death, Mr. Díaz Sr. said.

Two hundred people turned out to bury the young soldier, including the local mayor and the American consul. He was eulogized as a hero, though some at the burial struggled to connect his sacrifice to Mexico, where many people oppose the Iraq war or are indifferent to it.

"He is considered a hero because he died for peace and liberty, which are values that in some way we share with the United States," said Juan Ramón Cruz Mejía, the manager of the cemetery, who knows the family. "Many people from here migrate over there, and they must have some sympathy for the United States to offer their lives. These things are also important for us, especially liberty and democracy."

Private Fonseca, too, had deep roots in Mexico. He returned every summer, like a migratory bird.

The lure of citizenship was not important, his parents said. His father said his son had earned good marks in high school and could easily have gone to college but had chosen a military career instead. His goal was to become an intelligence officer, family members said.

"Citizenship was not important to him," the father said. "I'm proud of my son, because even though he did not accomplish everything he wanted, it was still one of his dreams to belong to the Army."

Having gone to the United States as a toddler, Jesús Fonseca also felt as much a part of the community in Marietta, Ga., where his family had settled, as he did part of Degollado, his parents said.

But it was here that he met his wife, Marlene Zaragoza, 18, on the last of his long summer sojourns home. Theirs was a whirlwind romance that began when he saw her on the village soccer field.

To everyone's surprise, he appeared again in November 2003, fresh from basic training, and asked for her hand. They were wed in December, just before he was shipping off to his first posting in Korea. They talked of settling in Colorado after the war, once his citizenship papers were in hand.

"He was an easy person to love," she said. "So open. He treated everything just as it was, without hypocrisy."

Private Fonseca's grandmother, Amada Ayala García, fought back tears when she was asked whether she supported the war that had taken her grandson's life. "I don't know about politics," she said. "I can only say that it's a sad thing to see so many dead."

When they buried Private Fonseca on Feb. 2, an officer from the United States Army gingerly handed the flag that had covered his coffin to his teenage wife. Then a group of mariachis, including his father-in-law, belted out the classic "México Lindo y Querido" as they lowered the casket.

"Beloved and beautiful Mexico, if I die far from you, just say that I'm sleeping and bring me back to you," they sang.