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09/19/2007: "Latinos protest late inclusion into documentary"

A group calling itself Defend the Honor is staging a four-city protest Sunday against filmmaker Ken Burns and his PBS documentary "The War," on the grounds that the 15-hour series did not initially include interviews with Latino or American Indian veterans of World War II.

"[The eventual inclusion of Latinos] was definitely a victory, but we're still angry and feel like we've been treated like a footnote. Mainly, we want to put pressure on them to make sure nothing like that ever happens again," said Rendon, an East Bay resident and author of "The Chicano Manifesto."

Burns said on a visit to San Francisco last week that the protests reflected a "huge misunderstanding" of the film's intentions. "We never intended this to be a comprehensive film about the war." Submariners aren't represented, he said. Neither are women who served in the military or Filipino Americans. No Latinos came forward, he said, when the call for interviews went out in four cities.

[ History is now a matter of pacifying the right consumer lobbies. If everything's for sale... ]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/19/DDOSS80EM.DTL