This essay examines Rolando Hinojosa’s Korean Love Songs(1978) and The Useless Servants(1993), both of which depict his alter ego Rafe Buenrostro’s military service during the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952) and the Korean War (1950–1953). Although Hinojosa refers to these two events briefly in his US-based narratives, in the two works discussed here, he moves beyond the Texas borderland to explore cross-racial relationships, between Mexican Americans and Asians as two non-white groups, that supersede war-era geopolitical divides. There is a significant stylistic difference between the two, as Korean Love Songs is a collection of short poems, while The Useless Servants is presented as Rafe’s diary. However, Hinojosa presents the same characters and episodes in both: Rafe encounters racism toward Mexican Americans in the army, experiences the bloody battlefield and loses many of his ethnic American friends in Korea, survives R&R in Japan, and eventually decides to leave the military to return to Texas. Hinojosa may be said to harp on this theme in part because of frustration over Korea as the “Forgotten War” in the US, despite heavy causalities. However, he also updates his own understanding of Asia during the fifteen years between the two publications, indicated by the protagonist’s growing awareness that Mexican Americans and Asians are both “friends” and “enemies.” Despite their racialized status in the US military, Mexican Americans are part of the military and could potentially oppress Asians along with their white counterparts in the midst of the rapidly shifting geopolitical circumstances in mid-20^th century Asia.

In Korean Love Songs, Japan is envisioned as the place where Mexican American soldiers can sleep with Japanese women on R&R and rehabilitate their bodies and masculinity damaged by enemy soldiers in Korea as well as Anglo racists in the military. Rafe sleeps with several prostitutes in Japan, and his Mexican American friend from Texas, Sonny Ruiz, deserts the army after getting injured in Korea, lives in Japan with his Japanese wife by racially passing as a Japanese person, and calls Japan his “home.” In The Useless Servants, Hinojosa revises this overly simplistic romantic scenario similar to James A. Michener’s Sayonara and complicates the standpoint of Mexican Americans in Asia. In his diary, Rafe refers to the unromantic events, including the US’s dropping atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US military’s war crime against Korean civilians, Japan’s colonialism in China and Korea, and Japanese racism toward ethnic Koreans in Japan, and points out the continuity between WWII in the Pacific and the Korean War. In other words, instead of simply placing “wartime” Korea and “peacetime” Japan as an opposition, Hinojosa compares tension between Asian racial groups to racial conflict in the US and raises and challenges stabilizing oppositions between home and away, Mexican Americans and the Japanese, South Koreans and North Koreans, and WWII allies and Cold War commies. Navigating these dissolving oppositions, Hinojosa’s hero Rafe exhibits a racial double consciousness exacerbated by his role in the US military that remains unresolved.