There were hispanics in World War II?

I didn't think they started letting hispanics fight in wars until just now - because they can get their immigration status fixed as a condition of enlistment. But you guys know I'm racist as shit.

Come to find out, something like 500,000 hispanics fought in World War II, presumably for our side, but who knows. In fact, I'm not even sure how they came up with that figure, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, a) because I lack the resources to prove otherwise, and b) why should I give a shit anyway?

I have seen my share of films about World War II and various other wars, and I don't think any of them featured any hispanic characters. White guys and black guys? Sure. Steven Spielberg's silly Saving Private Ryan even had a few Jewish characters (natch!), but it could be the case that there's never been a war film with any hispanic characters in it.

That is, until now. Ken Burns spent six years working on The War, his new 14 hour-long documentary about World War II, but he never did get around to mentioning any hispanic people. So of course the hispanic community got all pissed off about this. They raised a big stink, so he had to tack on some bonus footage of some beaners with machine guns or whatever.

You have to wonder though if this was a purposeful effort on behalf of Ken Burns to write the hispanic community out of the history of World War II, or if the shit just kinda happened. If you've never seen one of these Ken Burns films, they're made up almost entirely of stock footage and photographs. Could it be the case that he just couldn't find any picture of hispanics in World War II? Like I've said, I know I've never seen any other World War II films with hispanics in them.

Also, what did hispanics do during World War II anyway? Maybe the real reason there's no pictures of them is because they were all pulling latrine duty and washing the filthy underwear of all of the real soldiers, and who would want to see a picture of that? I'm just saying.

After the jump is a clip of some hispanic broad discussing this issue on Democracy Now. If you've never heard Democracy Now, it's the most dreadfully boring radio program possible. It's not even entertaining enough to be on regular NPR. I only watched about two minutes of these clips myself.