Ricardo Alvarado: Capturing a Cultural Legacy

Ricardo Alvarado: Capturing a Cultural Legacy

In 1928, at the age of fourteen, Ricardo Ocreto Alvarado (1914–76) left his family in the Philippines to start a new life in the United States. Discriminatory US immigration laws prohibited most Asian immigration at the time. Because the United States occupied the Philippines beginning in 1898, many Filipino bachelors entered the country as US nationals and found work in agriculture and fish canneries. Alvarado first traveled by ship to Hawai’i before departing for the West Coast and joining his older brother Cirilo in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Dissatisfied with farmwork, Alvarado moved to San Francisco where his uncle Ciriaco, a World War I US Navy veteran, lived. A first-generation Filipino American, or manong, Alvarado lived in the city for nearly fifty years. He found employment as a domestic worker and janitor in Nob Hill for room and board and as a dishwasher in North Beach during the evenings. He later worked as a welder. In 1942, Alvarado enlisted in the US Army’s 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment and served in combat in the South Pacific during World War II as a medic.

After the war, Alvarado became a cook at the Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco’s Presidio and lived in a garage apartment in the Western Addition. The new position enabled him to purchase a Graflex Speed Graphic camera, commonly used by professional photographers.  He spent his free time mastering the large-format camera, which required 4x5-inch sheet film, resulting in high-quality prints that he developed in a small darkroom in his apartment. Alvarado photographed the local, multiethnic communities that surrounded him. Friends and relatives often asked him to shoot celebratory occasions such as weddings, baptisms, and birthdays. He also photographed house parties in the Fillmore and Bayview, his coworkers at the Letterman Army Hospital, and agricultural workers in nearby rural areas. Alvarado’s poignant photographs thoughtfully document these vital communities that might have otherwise never appeared on film.

The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 severely restricted immigration from the Philippines. After World War II, immigration expanded, and more Filipino women and families came to the United States. Alvarado began writing to Norberta Magallanes, his future wife, in 1958 after a mutual friend put them in touch. The two spoke different dialects, so they corresponded in English. In 1959, at age forty-five, Alvarado traveled to the Philippines to marry Norberta, one of the only times he returned to his home country. The couple then rented an apartment in Bayview before purchasing a home in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco. Shortly after marrying, Alvarado retired his Speed Graphic camera and devoted his life to his wife and two children, Janet and Joseph. When Alvarado died in 1976, he had amassed a tremendous archive of nearly 3,000 negatives and photographs. His daughter Janet discovered them in her parents’ garage several years later. Astonished that her father had never discussed his photography with her, she realized the important treasure she had uncovered. In 1998, Janet established The Alvarado Project to ensure the preservation of her father’s unique cultural record of Filipino American life in California. The Smithsonian first displayed an exhibition of Alvarado’s photography, Through My Father’s Eyes, in 2002. Since then, Janet has curated exhibitions throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Stanford University Libraries now permanently holds the collection of Alvarado’s work, and Janet continues to work tirelessly to share her father’s legacy.

Special thank you to Janet Alvarado and Stanford University Libraries for making this exhibition possible.

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[inset image]
Portrait of Ricardo Alvarado with his camera  c. 1950s
unidentified photographer
Photograph copyright Janet Alvarado
L2022.1601.017a,b

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