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By Jose Villa, Senior Editor, Hawaii Hispanic News
ARIZONA MEMORIAL, Hawaii -- Daniel Martinez has one of the most unique jobs in our nation. He has served as the historian at the Arizona Memorial since 1988 and is the only person ever to have held that job. How did this Mexican-American become the steward of historical documents, photos and artifacts relating to ”a date which will live in infamy?”
Daniel Martinez
His grandfather, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico was hired in Mexico and brought to the U.S. to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad (SPR) sometime prior to the 1920s. According to Martinez, at that time SPR officials promised Mexican nationals that fulfilled their work contracts assistance in helping them become U.S. citizens. His grandfather settled in Owenyo, California, which was a site on the SPR, and raised his family there.
Martinez’ father was one of eight children. He enlisted in the Navy in 1949 and when he got out, he went to school using the G.I. Bill. In 1958 started his 40-year career as an electrical engineer at the corporation that later became aerospace giant TRW. Martinez said his dad was to work on projects that spanned the growth of America’s space program from the early satellites to the Space Shuttle.
In discussing his history, Martinez points out events along the way that had Hawaii connections though he didn’t realize it at the time.
His mother was English and German. Her grandfather was a miner who had been brought to Hawaii to work. He was one of the foremen on the Red Hill project, so Martinez mom spent several years living here in Hawaii. Her family had a long line of nurses and teachers. After a time here, her grandfather was transferred to Lone Pine, California, near Owenyo.
Ironically, Lone Pine is located seven miles from the Manzanar National Historic Site, where many Hawaii families of Japanese descent were sent after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Martinez parents attended Lone Pine High School, where they were high school sweethearts. They got married when America still was not ready for interracial marriages. Martinez is thus the product of a courageous couple that prized education highly. He said his dad was a model for studying and achieving. Four of the couple’s five children earned college degrees and two earned advanced degrees.
Thanks to his father’s aerospace program position, Martinez grew up in a middle-class residential neighborhood in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. He said whenever his family went to visit his cousins in East Los Angeles it was always such a culture shock. Physically it was only a 20-mile distance, but it was a wide chasm in terms of lifestyle and values.
When Martinez was in high school, his then girlfriend got him involved in Bobby Kennedy’s political campaign. 1968 had already been a tumultuous year. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated a few months earlier. Then, as luck would have it, Martinez and his girlfriend were on stage at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. the morning Bobby Kennedy was killed. Martinez said: “That night ended in a crescendo of despair.”
Martinez went on to study history and communications at Cal State Dominguez Hills. There he found himself immersed in a multicultural, multi-ethnic caldron of students and faculty that caused him to grow substantially. “It was a wonderful experiment. We had small classes and professors that inspired us to keep learning.”
During the summers, Martinez got a job as a interpretive ranger at the national park that became the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, also known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” He would conduct walks through the park and would ride park patrol on horseback.
He said that about the third or fourth season, he fell in love with the National Park Service and decided to go into it as a career. He was offered a choice of three National Park assignments: the Statue of Liberty in New York City; Independence Hall in Philadelphia; and the Arizona Memorial. He chose the Arizona Memorial.
As luck would have it, upon graduation from his ranger law enforcement training in 1988, the new position of historian was being created in preparation for the 50th anniversary (1991) of the Memorial. Forty-five individuals applied and he got the job.
And what exactly is his job? He is responsible for collecting historical documents, photos, oral histories, etc. that help document the events of that fateful day. He works closely with the: Memorial management and staff; Arizona Memorial Museum Association; survivors and their families; and the general public. He also does a lot of public speaking to groups interested in anything to do with the Memorial.
One of his special memories is having worked closely with the family of Rudy Martinez. Of the 1,177 U.S.S. Arizona crew members that lost their lives that day, Rudy Martinez was the first Mexican-American killed during the attack.
The Memorial is Hawaii’s most popular tourist destination with 1.6 million visitors annually. In concluding our interview, Martinez said: “The Arizona Memorial is a very special place. For those of us who work there every day is December 7th, 1941. Sixty-seven years later, oil from the Arizona still bubbles to the surface in a silent tribute to the brave men who lost their lives.”
