Filipino WWII Soldiers
America's Second-Class Veterans
Photographs by Rick Rocamora
Copyright 2009

from http://wppdocumentaryphotography.blogspot.com/

Photographer Rick Rocamora has documented the lives of the Filipino veterans, still clinging to hard-won medals, military commendations and scraps of uniforms as they make their way in San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods. Rocamora’s deep connection to the veterans allows a rare view into their difficult but always dignified lives, and creates a poignant story of pain, persistence and hope.

Rick Rocamora’s work belongs to the honorable tradition of documentary photography. In the 1930s, during the Depression, this photographic approach was used to change the ways we think about the world. Sponsored by the American government, such photographers as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange worked with the Farm Security Administration photographing the rural communities in both the South and the West hit by drought and in poverty. Lange’s wonderful pictures of the brave people who sat in the sun waiting to pick peas in the Central Valley when there was no work where they came from helped Americans understand some of the problems of those times.

Like Lange, Rocamora focuses his attention on the people he wants us to look at and think about. These are ordinary people. They fought alongside American soldiers in World War II in the Pacific, often at great personal cost. They are Filipinos, living here in the United States, promised benefits by the United States government that many still expect. Most of these men are also very poor, though it is not their poverty that we remember most, but their gentleness and bravery. Rocamora reminds us, in these quiet and dignified pictures, of the value and integrity of these people, and of their strong sense of community-which sustains them, even as they suffer from careless neglect. - Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

OOV Bookshelf 2009

AUGUST 2009 FEATURE Butete: The Story of a Remarkable Fish / The Song of Tampopo by Asela Hazel Z. Gundaya Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose Carillo America's Second-Class Veterans by Rick Rocamora and Rene P. Ciria-Cruz Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman The Long Lost Startle Poems by Joel Toledo