In Laredo in the 1960s, Florentino Cantú Jr. loved dancing, science and helping his parents support their family of 11 children. He had no patience for high school. Florentino, or Tino, as he was called, set his sights higher.
Clippings from Laredo newspapers show Tino was a Boy Scout and won an essay contest when he was in seventh grade. He was smart. But Tino dropped out before graduating high school and worked at different jobs, including as a bell boy at the old Plaza Hotel.
“He didn’t want to go to school,” said his older sister Norma Elia Cantú, the Merkin professor of the humanities at Trinity University. “He wanted to go to college. His dream was to be a scientist. He loved science, chemistry and physics. Got super good grades and all of that.”
Norma said that their school, Martin High, wasn’t very helpful in terms of preparing students for college.
“You had to do it on your own,” she said. “I was told by the counselor that I shouldn’t apply to college, that I should just work at the phone company. Those were her words, and I understand it, because they saw everybody else in my community. And the reality was, it was true, we couldn’t afford to go to college, and there was no Pell grants or any of that stuff.”
Norma wanted to be a teacher, but she was struggling to get an education. After graduating high school, she got a scholarship for one year to the community college, then had to work.
“I’m the oldest of 11 children. [Tino] felt the same kind of responsibility. That’s why he was working,” she said. “My father has a very menial position at the smelter earning minimum wage.”
The military offered a path to a college degree.
“He saw that this was a way out,” Norma said. “He could do the four years and go to college because, of course, the recruiters were all saying, ‘and then you can get your tuition paid.’ And that was the plan.”
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Tino came home after basic training, then shipped out to Vietnam in December, part of the legendary 101st Airborne Division. Then, right after Laredo’s famous George Washington’s birthday weekend 1968, there was an early morning visitor to the Cantú home.
“I was getting ready to go to work – I was already working at Central Park and Light Company – and there’s a knock at the door,” Norma said. “All he said, the GI that was at our door, was ‘Your brother was killed in Vietnam on the 21st of February.’”
Tino Cantú was only 19 years old.
Norma remembers her brother as fun and smart – a young man who took to the dance floor.
“That’s why he had all those girlfriends, I think,” she said. “At the funeral, we had three girlfriends show up, claiming they were the one.”
Much later, one of the men who had served with Tino visited her family in Laredo and gave them details about his death.
“They were all in a line across a rice paddy, and Tino ran back to the guy who had the water in the back. And so that’s, we think, how the sniper hit him,” Norma said.
Years later, Norma visited Vietnam, looking for closure. She got within 5 kilometers of the place where her brother was shot, visiting a Buddhist temple in the town of Quảng Trị where she and the monks prayed for Tino – and for the man who killed him.
“They were both young kids and used by the powers that be to create this whole thing, the whole scenario, and cut their lives short,” she said.
