A whole community starts on that road to fully realizing its own American citizenship or its rights as full-fledged Americans. In that sense they really are the catalysts for the (Latino) civil rights movement.

Even as human rights norms have steadily evolved over the past half-century, the field of citizenship has remained one of the last bastions of untrammeled state sovereignty. As a result, citizenship creates a giant loophole in the international human rights framework.

What ultimately happens is that they become the parents of what we know of as the civil rights movement and ultimately have so much to do with where the Latino community is today and without them in that crossroads it probably wouldn't have happened.

What it really is a story about is about a community went from being a second-class community in every way to participating in the war and coming back understanding they were just as much Americans as anyone else.

Before we are citizens of any nation, we are first citizens of the human race.

That was basically the largest single extension of citizenship rights in the country.