Cecilia Alvear – The Story We Needed Ken Burns to Tell

“As a Latina, I’ve unfortunately run across another kind of Ken Burns effect, one that leaves Hispanics largely invisible in those documentaries.

For ” The War,” his 14 1/2 -hour PBS series that begins tomorrow, Burns concentrated on how World War II affected the lives of people from Sacramento; Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn.

I recently attended a screening of highlights of “The War.” I found it stunning, moving and sadly incomplete. Deftly cutting between the battle lines and the home front, Burns shows the cruelty of war in intimate detail. We see hundreds of bodies floating in the ocean during the Pacific campaign. We see the injustice of a black soldier from Mobile serving his country in a segregated Army. We see law-abiding Japanese Americans herded off to internment camps. “

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