Latinx Veterans, Outsider Patriotism and the Motives Behind Minoritized Military Service

Abstract: For many Americans, the figure of the veteran—usually imagined as a straight, white, native-born cisgender male—embodies a profoundly resonant patriotic ideal. However, although the working class and veterans of color who make up the majority of the US Armed Forces’ enlisted ranks themselves generally acknowledge that a range of motives inspired the decision to enlist, the scholarship to date on veterans and patriotism, which focuses primarily on white former servicemembers, does not. As a first step toward filling this gap, this essay proposes a new scholarly conversation about the relationship between patriotism and military service for Latinx veterans. Using a “veteran-centric” methodology that brings together theoretical insights from critical race and ethnic studies, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and narrative inquiry, it analyzes the narratives of eighteen diverse Latinx veterans in order to offer preliminary reflections on why they decide to enlist and how they understand patriotism in relation to their service. Concluding that Latinx military service is simultaneously pragmatic, personal, and patriotic, this study also suggests that Latinx veterans articulate a particular form of “outsider patriotism” that reflects their uneasy location in the borderlands between idealized notions of white/U.S. born/cisgender male veterans as the highest embodiment of patriotism, and racialized notions of all Latinx people as “foreigners” and “illegals” who reject American values and threaten the nation’s economy and security. Pointing toward the need for sustained future research on this topic, this essay seeks to inspire other military-connected scholars to think more critically about the relationship between minoritized military service and the political, social, and economic inequalities of contemporary US society, while challenging them to expand the ways we theorize patriotism to include the voces perdidas of BIPOC, immigrant, refugees, LGBTQ/Trans and other marginalized peoples.