Mexico in World War II

Comments · 748

• MU

  @MundoLoco86 · 1 year ago

  You forgot to mention that Mexico was the only country in the world to protest Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. That is why Austria named a square in the city of Vienna as “Mexikoplatz” (Mexico Square) as thanks to the Mexican government’s support of Austrian sovereignty.

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• SI

  @sixmike · 1 year ago

  how dare the algorithm hide this from me for a whole 19 hours

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• ZE

  @zekkyauditore3021 · 1 year ago (edited)

  Hi! I&apos;ve been watching you channel for a few months now. I&apos;m a historian from Mexico, and although 20th century is usually outside my area of expertise, I had to read a lot about these things in college and other personal projects. <br>There are a few details that are very well known in mexican historiography that you may not have found because of the language barrier and executive decision you mentioned at the start of the video. (As a spanish speaking historian that mostly studies East Asia, I absolutely get how hard working with a language barrier is) I&apos;ll mention them in order of what I remember:<br>- Lázaro Cárdenas was absolutely cozying up to socialism during his term. Land reform, nationalization of key industries, socialist education and the welcoming of hundreds of exiled left wingers shows a pretty clear pattern. <br>- The Catholic Church was mad at the socialist education in particular because most of the population received their basic education from the Church; and it was a pretty clear continuation of anti-clerical policies from previous revolutionary governments. It was yet another measure to make the Church lose even more of their waning power. <br>Ironically enough, the first person in charge of the education system, José Vasconcelos, was an outright nazi.<br>- US-México relations had been an absolute dump since the Mexican-American war, and pretty much every Mexican government after it absolutely hated the US. Even Porfirio Díaz welcomed so much european influence and investments to counteract US power over México. <br>As a general rule, the people vehemently hated the US. During the Revolution this contempt increased even more, firstly because during Villa&apos;s prosecution US troops violated the borders, because the US propped up the universally-hated Victoriano Huerta and lastly, because the US withheld official recognition of post-revolution government for quite some years. <br>The people along the northern border were particularly wary of the US because there was constant talk (and even some attempts!) of annexing northern states to the US through invasion, officially sanctioned or not. <br>WWII was a watershed moment for US-México relations, as they improved significantly after that. Even the populations general attitude towards the US softened, as they became an ally; and a lot of mexicans that were part of the bracero program, although very often exploited in the US, made a lot more money there than they ever had in México. Of course, this was all helped by a huge propaganda effort by the Camacho government.<br>- It was a crime that you didn&apos;t show the most baller propaganda posters during the small propaganda segment: the eagle tearing up a nazi flag and the british knight stomping on a swastika while leading several countries behind him. <br>I&apos;m guessing you didn&apos;t show them because of Youtube things, but I mention them so people reading this comment look them up.<br>- The US had a pretty extensive spy and informant network in México for a long time, but during the eve of WWII it intensified its activities, and during the war they even cooperated with mexican authorities. This was part of a larger network that covered all of Latin America because of the US&apos; plans of hemispheric defense. <br>Most of what they did was survey and watch closely the movements of axis nations citizens, and their sympathizers. It&apos;s pretty easy to find the declassified maps and charts in the NARA website.<br>-Now, this is my area of expertise, because most of my reading, research and public speaking concerns the Japanese and Nikkei communities in Baja California, I can confidently say you kinda underplayed how México treated the japanese during WWII. <br>México had concentration camps for italians, germans, japanese and their descendants too. The most infamous one was established in an old spanish fortress near Perote, Veracruz. The japanese and the Nikkei community had to operate their own concentration camp in Temixco, Morelos due to the government&apos;s vigilance policies at the time. <br>Were the conditions A LOT better than in similar camps in the US? Absolutely. Were they huge violations to human rights? Yes. Japanese citizens, mexicans of japanese descent, and mexican women married to japanese men living in Baja California had to quickly sell their businesses, boats, fishing equipment and land for a very small amount of money to be concentrated in Mexicali and then pay for their own travel expenses to Guadalajara or México City. <br>They also needed special permissions to acquire housing and jobs while in those cities. These were almost always granted, but the added bureaucracy didn&apos;t help an already desperate community. <br>All of this happened while there was no longer an official japanese embassy to legally fight for them. The little protection that they had was afforded to them by three japanese luminaries, Kiso Tsuru, the Shibayama family and a Navy Admiral whose name I forget at the moment, who used Tsuru&apos;s connections in the mexican political class, Navy funds and money left over from the former embassy to establish the camps in Temixco where poor farmers and fishers could live and work.<br>- Miguel Alemán was just as corrupt and boisterious as Maximino was. He was known as &quot;El cachorro de la revolución&quot; (the puppy of the revolution), the first president that didn&apos;t fight in the revolution; and everyone knew him as a flashy womanizer. Actually, he was the one in charge of the Bureau that spied the japanese, italians and germans. <br>He put together the Dirección de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DIPS), pretty much the mexican CIA and FBI rolled into one.<br>- The Bracero program was the defining factor of a HUGE part of the economic activity of Northern México, and it even changed the way we talk about work in spanish! A pretty common way to say &quot;job&quot; is chamba, and &quot;working&quot; can be said as chambear. <br>It is widely believed that this comes from braceros referring to the US Chamber of Commerce, a place where braceros had to go to get assigned to a workplace.<br>- Just a little anecdote because you mentioned the sinarquistas throughout the video. The mexican extreme right wing is mostly catholic and college educated. After the Sinarquistas disbanded and fell out of the public eye it splintered into a lot of groups in Guadalajara, el Bajío and Monterrey. <br>These groups are so little known that my highschool&apos;s basketball team name is the same as the extremist group that sprung out of the catholic college that my high school is closely associated to, and barely anyone knows that 15 year olds playing basketball bear the name and the insigna of extremists responsible for a couple of high-profile assassinations.<br>The PAN, the only semi-competent opposition to the PRI during the 20th century, was VERY closely associated to the Sinarquistas and other extreme right wing groups. Before being elected president, Vicente Fox was the governor of Guanajuato, where León is. You know, the place where the sinarquista candidate won in 1946, and where a lot of extreme right wing activity was carried out. That is no coincidence.<br><br><br>As a general note to improve your pronunciation of spanish, almost every &quot;h&quot; is completely silent, and every syllable that contains an acento (´ one of these little things above a vowel) is the stressed syllable of a word.

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• HO

  @HoorayVGs · 1 year ago

  WE&apos;RE. SO. BACK.

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• CE

  @cesarhigashi2318 · 1 year ago

  I don´t usually comment but I felt that I needed to do it. I´m Mexican of Japanese descent, and hearing about japanese people being moved from Baja California to other cities further south makes me think about how my grandmother used to tell me all those stories about her childhood. <br>My great grandparents arrived in Mexico around the late 1920&apos;s from Wakayama. My grandmother was born in Ensenada in the early 1930&apos;s. She, and her family, lived a brief period of time in Japan (around 1936, can´t remember the exact period of time), and told me how her parents wanted to go back to Mexico as soon as possible to evade the consequences of the coming war with the US (she told me that her father used to be a sailor in the Imperial Japanese Navy when he was younger), because according to what she told me, there were rumors already about a war coming against the US. They eventually returned to Baja California but were moved by the goverment a few years later, and eventually ended settling in Guadalajara. She told me how she lost relatives to the war, and her family never went back to Japan, since they had already made a life in Guadalajara. My great grandparents where so grateful to all the people who helped them back then when they had little to non because they were moved from their home in Baja California, and even after all they had to go through, I was told that my great grandfather once said &quot;Cuendo me muera, quiero que me entierren abajo de un nopal&quot; (When I die, I want to be buried beneath a nopal), meaning how much he loved Mexico. My grandmother eventully married my grandfather, he was from Japan, then they had my dad, and my dad married my mom whose family is from chinese descent. <br>My grandmother passed away in 2022, and I miss hearing her stories. (Sorry for any grammar or orthographic mistake)

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• DA

  @davideduardoperazamena832 · 1 year ago (edited)

  Being Mexican it is literally just a fun fact for us “we did participate in WW2” but other than that all of the realization that even though we were basically just under 20 pilots helping the US all of the surrounding context is as interesting as Mexican history can get, it is baffling to me that this isn’t studied enough by us Mexicans and having this gem of a video now as detailed and as interesting is a gem, thanks a lot for this entertaining and &nbsp;rich &nbsp;video!

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• ER

  @ErinAnodea · 1 year ago

  Everyone SHHHH my show is ON!!!!

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• KR

  @KronnangDunn · 1 year ago (edited)

  Mexico&apos;s participation in World War II was not exclusive to the 201st Squadron. Thousands of Mexicans fought on the battlefield as volunteers in foreign armies or as residents of other countries. There are figures of between 50 thousand to 80 thousand Mexicans who fought on different fronts, many of them did so voluntarily. On D-Day there were also Mexican fighters, all of whom were volunteers and born in other countries, including Luis Pérez Gómez (1922-1944), who enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, participating in various missions during the Normandy landings. <br> <br>One of the most prominent Mexicans as reinforcements for other troops was José M. López, who fought alongside the American troops and his bravery in the conflict was such that after the Allied victory, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration in the army. This after his participation in the Battle of the Bulge, where he and other soldiers counterattacked the German offensive. Mendoza, with a machine gun, left almost 100 casualties to the Germans.<br><br>In the Pacific theater there was also the case of Mexican American soldier Guy Louis Gabaldon (March 22, 1926 – August 31, 2006), a Chicano fluent in street Japanese in the United States Marine Corps who, at age 18, captured or persuaded to surrender over 1,300 Japanese soldiers and civilians during the battles for Saipan and Tinian islands in 1944 during World War II. Called &quot;Gabby&quot; by his friends, he became known as &quot;The Pied Piper of Saipan&quot; for his heroism on that island. Though Gabaldon was recommended for the Medal of Honor, he received the Silver Star, which was upgraded by the Marine Corps to the Navy Cross in 1960.

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• RO

  @roberto417OE · 1 year ago

  I’m a Mexican from Tampico, my grandfather was a survivor of the Mexican ship “Amatlan” that was destroyed by a german torpedo, he was stranded for days. He was interviewed on 2004 (62 years after) he said “We spotted them before they shot at us. They signaled us using the light code used in maritime navigation, why were we supplying an enemy of Germany? Then I felt the impact, and immediately, chaos broke out. Five of our comrades died instantly. They don’t remember us… The government doesn’t want this tragedy to be remembered because it only highlights the injustices, failures, and ingratitude that those in power have shown the people”. My grandpa died 2 years later, I do remember him everyday of my life and I’m proud of him, I’m proud of Mexico because of people like him who stood up and spoke loud and truly. Thank you so much for this video, you made my year!

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• HO

  @honeymoon.cherie · 1 year ago

  My great grandfather was Agustín Velasco Alegría, support crew for the Escuadrón 201. It&apos;s really cool that the Aztec Eagles are getting recognition outside Mexico.

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• MO

  @mofoftriangle · 1 year ago

  My grandpa was born in 1921. Mexican born and raised, he grew up to be a good friend of one of Mexico’s pilots in Eacuadron 201. Thanks for making this video!

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• AN

  @annakonda6289 · 1 year ago

  I had no idea about Mexico’s role in WWII - so excited to learn something entirely new! Thank you for you hard work an greetings from Germany!

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