ABSTRACT
As the United States becomes more and more dangerous every day for people of color, the authors turn toward to familial and cultural histories to unpack the ways they perform both with and against historical iterations of whiteness. They turn to personal narrative to explore their relationships to whiteness as people of color in a White supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, the United States of America. The authors include narratives that speak to not only their experiences, family, and personal histories but also the larger social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which their narratives are situated. For many Mexican Americans, the path to assimilation into whiteness in the United States in the wake of increasing racial animosity and violence was the military. The military symbolized a potential space not only to enter the national fabric of whiteness, but also middle class "respectability."
