Dreams Found: Alvarado Photo Exhibit Opens at Smithsonian Gallery

A handful of kids are sitting around a long wooden table in a plain room with a single simple window. It has no shade or curtains. They are waiting to devour the two birthday cakes sitting on one end of the table. One of the girls has Shirley Temple curls and one of the boys is making a funny face toward the camera. The floorboards are clean, but flecks of dark and light paint can be seen on one of the chairs and on the flooring itself near one wall.

At the end of the table closest to us, a father sits in a chair that faces at an angle toward our right. He holds his newborn son in his lap. The father’s dust-covered boot and the boy’s tiny bootie both point our eyes toward the right side of the photo. The child stares contentedly off to the right side, his tiny right arm leaning against his father’s powerful forearm, while the father stares straight back into the camera. His cleft chin, high cheek bones and long forehead might make you mistake him for a Hollywood matinee idol, but his worn, callused hands tell a different story. Puffy, scarred fingers absentmindedly caress the tender skin of his baby’s right leg, as this migrant laborer holds his hope for a better future.

Ricardo Alvarado was a member of this community and also its chronicler. Despite working minimum wage jobs as a janitor, dishwasher, houseboy, soldier and cook, he bought himself a camera and took it everywhere the community was gathering.

Unlike posed photos reflecting only rebellions against the poses imposed by the photographer, Alvarado’s photos are an unchoreographed peek behind the curtain of a community’s life. The lens is a kindly uncle who has stopped by, or an observer so familiar that he does not interfere with the flow of events taking place.

The opening of the Alvarado exhibit at the Smithsonian on Nov. 20 brought together over 250 members of the local Filipino American and APA communities. Like the family picnics captured in the photographs, this gathering had delicious food and drinks, festive music and many animated conversations punctuated by spirited laughter. Local Filipino American television anchor Mil Arcega served as emcee, and remarks were made by Ariel Abadilla of the Philippine Embassy and Congressmen Lane Evans, David Wu, Mike Honda and Robert Underwood. Dr. Rayna Green spoke on behalf of the National Museum of American History’s Behring Center, which collaborated on the project, and representatives were present from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, which is organizing the logistics for the exhibit’s tour to several cities over the next year. Generous support by FedEx, Bank of America, San Miguel Beer and the Philippine Embassy made this a tasty break from the usual cheese, crackers and wine receptions on Capitol Hill.

As the crowd was thinning out and I was walking toward the door, I struck up a conversation with Barbara Hill, a middle-aged Filipina American woman who was just a girl in several of the Alvarado photographs. Her sister, in fact, was the lovely bride whose natural mixture of trepidation and excitement was captured in “Madeline and Bridesmaids,” one of most moving pictures in the show. Seeing this living link between the artistry of a man who died 26 years ago and a dynamic community that has grown and flourished in the intervening quarter-century made me grateful that a man with a vision had taken the time to document the details of his world.

Through My Father’s Eyes: The Filipino American Photographs of Ricardo Ocreto Alvarado (1914-1976) is currently housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, located at Twelfth Street and Constitution Avenues in Washington D.C. The exhibit, created by the Alvarado project, the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Program, and the National Museum of American History’s Behring Center, will run through March 31, 2003. For more information, call 202-357-2700. An online photo album can be seen at www.apa.si.edu/exhibitions/alvarado/alv11.html.