U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and in the U.S. Southwest have seen the exclusion of Filipino veterans and Native American veterans from historical narratives. On April 9, 1942, after the Battle of Bataan, Japan’s Imperial Army forced approximately 70,000 U.S. and Filipino captive soldiers to march more than 75 miles on the Bataan Peninsula, located on the southern end of the island of Luzon in the Philippines. By May of 1942, those who had not died during this brutal journey reached Camp O’Donnell, the first of several Prisoner of War (POW) camps that survivors endured for the duration of the war.
Silences, Absences, and Counter Stories of the Bataan Death March from the Philippines and New Mexico
By Jordan Beltran Gonzales
This paper analyzes ways in which contemporary communities are memorializing the Bataan Death March of World War II. Through the concepts of silences, absences, and “archival power,” these examples show how the most lasting vestiges of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and in the U.S. Southwest have been the exclusion of Filipino veteranos and Native American veterans from historical narratives. On April 9, 1942, after the Battle of Bataan, Japan’s Imperial Army forced approximately 70,000 U.S. and Filipino captive soldiers to march more than 75 miles on the Bataan Peninsula, located on the southern end of the island of Luzon in the Philippines. By May of 1942, those who had not died during this brutal journey reached Camp O’Donnell, the first of several Prisoner of War (POW) camps that survivors endured for the duration of the war. Although published research portrays the Bataan Death March, the racialized experiences of Veterans of Color, especially the stories of more than 50,000 Filipino veteranos, have received less attention and critical analysis. In 2009, historical erasures of Filipinos persist at the annual Bataan Memorial March, near Las Cruces, New Mexico, while Native Americans are absent in the “Heroes of Bataan” statue. In contrast, the Equity for Veteranos coalition privileges Filipinos’ citizenship rights and financial compensations for military service, while it also critically addresses the context of exploitation, racism, and American imperialism.
Introduction
This essay focuses on present-day accounts and representations of the late 1930s and 1940s, and links the Bataan Peninsula of Luzon Island, Philippines to the mesas and deserts of New Mexico. World War II in the Philippines engaged several histories: Four centuries of imperialism and wars by Spain, an invasion and occupation by the United States, and then the invasion by the Japanese Imperial Army at the outset of the war in the Pacific. Just hours after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and two sites near Manila, Philippines, Japan’s Imperial Army then invaded the island of Luzon, located in the northern Philippines. This ground invasion and the ensuing Battle of Bataan were a prelude to a major WWII trauma, beginning April 9, 1942: an event subsequently known as the Bataan Death March. This infamous march of captive soldiers unfolded because the central geographic location of the Bataan Peninsula (accessible to both Japan and its recent conquest, China) made it strategically essential to both Japan and to the U.S.
While several published sources narrate significant details of the Bataan Death March, a critical analysis of race and imperialism remains lacking. To begin, archival records indicate the silences, absences, and marginal inclusion of both Filipinos and Native Americans. To address this void, I will analyze three ways in which contemporary communities are memorializing this event—the annual Bataan Memorial March, near Las Cruces, New Mexico; the statue, “Heroes of Bataan”; and Equity for Veteranos, the coalition advocating for Filipino veteranos’ justice through healthcare, financial compensation, and citizenship rights equal to other U.S. veterans. Each example represents a historical narrative, one influenced by “archival power” (a concept referring to the identification, collection, and retrieval of facts), as discussed by anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. These historical narratives of World War II, in general, and of the Bataan Death March, in particular, are shaped by archival power, a concept which, when critically analyzed, explains how legacies of inequality wrought by capitalism and colonialism persist across each example. The extent to which each narrative acknowledges, recognizes, and advocates for justice for Filipino veteranos and Native American veterans, if at all, highlights important issues at the nexus of capitalism and racism—the exploitation, colonization, and imperialism of the Philippines and the U.S. Southwest, past and present.
Historical Background: From the Battle of Bataan to the Bataan Death March
On December 8, 1941, just one day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese air forces began bombing Clark Air Field and Fort Stotsenberg, located just north of Manila, on the southern end of Luzon.[1] On that same day, Japan’s Imperial Army landed its first regiments in northwest Luzon and began their trek toward southeastern Luzon and the Bataan Peninsula. Japan’s ground invasion prompted U.S. and Filipino soldiers—then numbering more than 75,000 in the Philippines—to begin mobilizing in preparation to slow the Japanese Imperial Army through pitched battle. General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the Allied troops in the Pacific throughout World War II, ordered U.S. and Filipino soldiers to slow these Japanese forces until more reinforcements could arrive from the already-depleted U.S. reserves and war chests.[2] Thus, the last weeks of 1941 involved anti-aircraft defenses against strafing Japanese planes and exchanges of gunfire on the ground.
Within two months, though, the greater numbers of U.S. and Filipino troops had still not weakened the Japanese military, which continued southward, toward Manila and the Bataan peninsula. By the middle of February of 1942, the Battle of Bataan had begun, with U.S. and Filipino forces backed against Manila Bay by the encroaching Imperial Army.[3] This battle encompassed intense, prolonged fighting between Japan’s army regiments and several thousand soldiers from the U.S. Army Forces of the Far East (USAFFE), joined by many thousands more troops from the Philippine Scouts and the Philippine Army. In addition to the military zeal that propelled Japan’s invasion efforts, it is important to note that the U.S. lacked troop reinforcements, supplies of ammunition, and other war materiel.[4] In fact, despite Luzon’s strategic location for U.S. foreign policy, during the two months of the Battle of Bataan, from February to April of 1942, additional soldiers and replenished resources never arrived.
On April 9, the Japanese Imperial Army forced the surrender of U.S. Army Commander Jonathan Wainwright, General Edward King, and approximately 70,000 U.S. and Filipino troops under their command. Immediately, Japan’s troops began forcing the U.S. and Filipino captives to march approximately 75 miles on the Bataan Peninsula toward the camps that would become the survivors’ home for the duration of the war. Conditions during the Death March were brutal: without food, forced to march rapidly through jungle, punished if they faltered, more than one-third of these soldiers—over 30,000—died in April and May of 1942 alone. Once at Camp O’Donnell (or at other POW camps set up in Japan-occupied China) thousands more perished. The terrors and atrocities of these events make history’s name for them, the Bataan Death March, both accurate and indeed, understated. From the first moments of these events, survival — hour-by-hour, footstep-by-footstep—was neither certain nor free from torture. The following discussion merges three historical narratives that represent the Bataan Death March in the context of World War II.
Although direct U.S. involvement in the Pacific War began only after Pearl Harbor, thousands of young men and women in the U.S. National Guard had been stationed in the Philippines in recent years. In particular, one regiment of National Guard troops from New Mexico had been stationed in Luzon by 1941, the 200th Coastal Guard Artillery Unit, which specialized in anti-aircraft weapons and featured many Spanish-speaking soldiers who were Native American, Hispanic and Mexican American, and White.[5] Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and invasion of the Philippines thrust these National Guard troops directly into the war. Their participation – first as combatants, then as prisoners of war – continued until the war ended, nearly four years later, in August 1945, when Japan surrendered after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since the New Mexico National Guard participated in the Bataan Death March in larger numbers of personnel than any other U.S. state—representing more than 1,800 of the 12,000 U.S. soldiers captured—their death tolls are also the highest in proportion. More than half of these 1,800 New Mexicans died during the death march and as POWs in the Philippines, a fact that has compelled efforts to historicize and to memorialize these events with poignant results.
Theoretical background
Power and imperialism shape how historians, or, simply, human beings who interpret the past, have constructed three present-day narratives of the Bataan Death March: a memorial march, a statue, and activists mobilizing for the political, economic, and symbolic rights of Filipino veteranos. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History presents a theory of historiography, or the process of narrating history, that is applicable in each example. Trouillot advocates our analysis of historical narratives, which inherently commit silences, such as the exclusions of Filipino veteranos and Native Americans from New Mexico:
History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility: the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.[6]
Trouillot explains how power influences the creation of historical narratives, from the categorizing of sources, to their selection, to the writing and interpretation of narratives. Most importantly, Trouillot not only deconstructs the biases of historians, he also highlights ways to identify and privilege the silences that have been excluded from narratives. The fact that voices are continually obscured from archives, Trouillot contends, points to the inherently subjective process of creating and selecting archives. To expose the roots of “archival power,” Trouillot promotes a critical analysis of how facts and archives are created: a process perpetuating which narratives are produced and, in contrast, which are obscured.
By exposing the archival process as “the fruit of power,” Trouillot sets up this analysis of how present-day narratives have silenced the voices of Filipino veteranos by neither telling these stories in context nor problematizing more than 100 years of U.S. imperialism of the Philippines. The annual Bataan Memorial March affects this outcome of absolutely silencing the voices of Filipino veteranos. In this example, no resistance to U.S. military imperialism is reached. Uncritical historical narratives that do acknowledge Filipinos, moreover, perpetuate representations of Filipino veteranos in essentialized ways, such as military veterans only through their continued, lifelong participation in U.S. military forces after World War II and as racialized “Others” who have been exploited through colonial relationships. Although the “Heroes of Bataan” statue does present Filipino veteranos, there is no portrayal of Native American soldiers. The outcome is that this memorial neither transforms nor resists top-down narratives of U.S. imperialism. Instead, “Heroes of Bataan” continues to overlook U.S. colonization of the Philippines and neglects analysis of how imperialism has continued far beyond the war.
Furthermore, both the Bataan Memorial March and the “Heroes of Bataan” statue avoid any discussion of the epochal 1946 Rescission Act, in which U.S. Congress had denied Filipino veteranos their U.S. veteran status, as well as all accompanying benefits, which President Franklin Roosevelt had promised during World War II. On the other hand, community-based coalitions that are rooted in a critical framework of racism and imperialism do privilege Filipinos in a transformative way. Through the political goals of U.S. citizenship and veterans’ benefits, the Equity for Veteranos coalition provides historical context and analysis of the inherently devastating effects of U.S. military on the Philippines, in general, and on Filipino veteranos, in particular. These platforms of the Equity for Veteranos coalition forge an urgent level of transformative resistance to institutional racism and U.S. imperialism, especially for the justice of the 12,000 Filipino veteranos still alive who seek restitution for broken promises.
For each example, Trouillot has provided a critical framework for how we analyze the influences of exploitation, militarism, and imperialism in the making of historical narratives. In his first chapter, Trouillot untangles ambiguities between the dual-sided definitions of history—“what happened?” and “that which is said to have happened?”
The first meaning places the emphasis on the socio-historical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process.[7]
Trouillot is most concerned with how we, as historians and narrators in our own ways, situate our knowledge and our stories of the socio-historical process. He argues that silences and erasures in historical narratives expose the subjective biases of historians. Critical historical consciousness, which is Trouillot’s intended outcome of this attention to history and narrativity, directs our attention to the ambiguity inherent in “our knowledge of that process” and in each “story about that process.” Each silence, erasure, and distortion of “what happened” is an outcome of “archival power.” Most importantly, “archival power” shapes how each narrative represents the Bataan Death March, and, in turn, represents the Filipino veteranos as historical subjects. This representation ultimately reifies or challenges capitalism and imperialism.[8]
In particular, Trouillot explores a historian’s subjective and interpretative project through the terms Historicity1 and Historicity2. For this paper, the concept of historicity exposes “the play of power in the production of alternative narratives” through multiple “meanings.”[9] Without exception, each narrative in existence features traces of historicity; our challenge is to identify agendas, ideologies, and the role of power contributing to each story retold. While working within the discipline of history, Trouillot argues, uncritical historians do not adequately acknowledge how subjectivity and biases influence their selection of archives and their interpretation of data. For Trouillot, the material products of the socio-historical process represent Historicity1, or, the basic sequences of events that we often refer to as “the past.” In other words, Historicity1 refers precisely to “what happened?” For example, the events and chronology of World War II that includes the Bataan Death March, as well as the participation of Filipino veteranos, comprise Historicity1. The tangled process of writing, telling, and representing these historical accounts, moreover, is Historicity2, or “that which is said to have happened?” The existence of Historicity2 necessitates that historians select and interpret—as well as exclude and silence—sources and data, such as veteranos’ own voices, in attempts to represent Historicity1. Amidst the backdrop of Historicity1 and Historicity2, lies the inclusion and exclusion of Filipino veteranos, subjects embodying past narratives and present-day struggles to be recognized and heard.
The 20th Anniversary of the Bataan Memorial March
The most lasting vestige of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines has been the exclusion of Filipinos’ lives and the denial of this colonialism itself in accounts of American history. This pattern of institutional racism and imperialism situates Filipinos within a matrix of U.S. Empire, especially through seemingly compulsory service in U.S.-led military forces. Trouillot’s careful distinctions between Historicities1 and 2 invite an analysis of a widely known World War II memorial event in New Mexico, the annual Bataan Memorial March. At the core of this event, a historical narrative perpetuates imperialism because it relegates the Philippines and Filipinos to secondary, liminal status by failing to acknowledge Filipino veteranos, all the while championing New Mexicans as heroes. Indeed, the New Mexico honorees self-identify as the “Battling Bastards of Bataan: No Mama, No Papa, and No Uncle Sam,” a moniker that underscores their survival in the face of extreme adversity and isolation. The term “bastard” refers to the fact that General MacArthur himself had departed for Australia during the Battle of Bataan, abandoning the Philippines in March of 1942 and leaving every person’s fate to only luck and circumstance. Ironically, in this narrative about New Mexico, Filipino veteranos are absent, yet perhaps most deserving of the claim, “No Uncle Sam,” because of such U.S. exploitation and subsequent historical amnesia. At the Bataan Memorial March, Filipino people are included only on the condition of assimilating into the U.S. military after the war; Filipino veteranos who did not join the U.S. armed forces are excluded.
First, a breakdown of the Memorial March weekend activities is necessary. The setting is the last weekend of March, 2009, at White Sands Missile Range, a U.S. military base with historic ties to the development and testing of weapons and training of troops throughout the twentieth century. White Sands Missile Range is located twenty miles north of Las Cruces, in the southern part of New Mexico. Ceremonial events, including educational workshops, an honoring ceremony, and either a half marathon or full marathon, were officially sponsored and organized by the U.S. Department of Defense. Of approximately 5,000 participants in this year’s march, ranging in age from teenagers to elders, more than 4,700 were actively or formerly involved in the armed forces, spanning ROTC to retired officers and enlistees.
On Saturday, March 28, participants registered in person for the following day’s memorial march. Saturday’s afternoon program consisted of hundreds of audience members sitting in the military base’s classrooms to hear testimonials of the Bataan Death March from New Mexico National Guard veterans, survivors from the 200th Coastal Guard. To its credit, the array of speakers included New Mexico veterans of color, though the majority of speakers are White. Their ages ranged from mid-80s to mid-90s, and health issues, as well as the trauma of war’s memories, prevent them from speaking for more than 45 minutes. These veterans spoke mainly of their service during World War II through sacrifice amidst dire circumstances during the Bataan Death March and in the subsequent POW camps in the Philippines and China. While their shared struggles were major topics of each presentation, individual experiences of race, ethnicity, and racialized differences were not topics of discussion. Details include the family inspirations that helped them persist amidst horrible violence, malaria, dengue fever, and nearly fatal starvation and dehydration, as well as their gratitude for eventually returning home. The tone in these classrooms is of reverence for veterans’ lives; audience members’ questions pique interest in the many survival stories, but overwhelmingly with scene is one of awe and fascination. Indeed, current U.S. foreign policy, including wars, torture, and water-boarding, are not discussed.
On Sunday, March 29, 2009, more than 6,000 people participated in the 20th Annual Bataan Memorial March, following a trail route that traverses several sides of the mountains of the missile range. Sunday morning began with a sunrise ceremony at approximately 6:30 a.m. Participants gathered for a “roll call” of ten surviving Bataan veterans, all of whom were either 200th Coastal Guard Artillery of the New Mexico National Guardsmen, or, in just one case, a Philippine Scout who then joined the U.S. Army to become a career officer after the war. Though U.S. Army Captain Menandro Parazo had served in the 26th Cavalry Regiment of the Philippine Scouts, classifying him as a Filipino veterano, it is important to note that Captain Parazo is consistently introduced through his career affiliation with the U.S. Army. In fact, Captain Parazo is the only ethnically Filipino veteran who is acknowledged during this roll call. Through this momentary tribute, his identity is recast as a U.S. Army veteran, first and foremost. There is neither reference to nor recognition of Filipino veteranos who had not joined the U.S. military after the war, regardless of their sacrifices during the Battle of Bataan, the Bataan Death March, or during World War II at all.
Immediately following this roll call, moreover, the master of ceremonies requested a moment of silence as he read the names of all veterans of the 200th Coastal Guard Artillery who passed away in the previous year. Again, the New Mexican veterans, heroes, and memories were validated, while no other late Filipino veteranos’ names were read in memoriam. Again, only those Filipinos who joined the U.S. armed forces after World War II received public acknowledgement; Philippine Scouts and Philippine Army soldiers—ones who had both survived and died in Bataan—did not receive recognition. Not only in their living, but also in their dying, Filipino veteranos are willfully denied. The result of this morning ceremony is that the Philippines is neither identified nor acknowledged beyond merely its geographic setting: its human participants either fade into that which is forgotten and purposefully excluded, or they are absorbed into American hegemony through a lifelong military sacrifice, such as Captain Parazo. Based upon Trouillot’s call for our attention to archival power, the de-politicized treatment of the Philippines and of Filipino veteranos reifies imperialism because this historical narrative occludes the vestiges of war and colonialism.
Following the roll call and moment of silence, more than 5,000 runners, clad in outfits ranging from lightweight running gear to full military fatigues, approached the starting line of the Memorial March. The course at White Sands consists of either a 15-mile honor march or a full-length, 26.2-mile marathon. There is an ultra-patriotic atmosphere surrounding the Memorial March events, evident particularly in the participants who run with 35-pound backpacks and full military fatigues in order to re-enact the sacrifice and endurance of the Bataan honorees. Each participant’s presence suggests that the Bataan Death March is a narrative in which we ourselves can participate through re-enactment, a result that indicates the stark role of imperialism in historicizing these traumas of war. The Bataan Memorial March merits greater attention in a future research project about memorials, narrativity, and myth-making: its purpose here is simply to exemplify an uncritical portrayal of historical exclusion.
Historicity perpetrates a particular violence, one rooted in empire and exploitation, namely, the exclusion of Filipinos even from the Philippines. This event serves as an unequivocal assertion of U.S. imperialism. It does not unseat power nor shift resources away from the status quo. The U.S. military portrays itself as legitimate, valorous, honorable, both historically, as a protector of the Philippines against Japanese invaders, and in the present, as a nation still fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Counter Stories and Social Movements: The Equity for Veteranos Coalition
On February 16, 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which U.S. Congress approved the previous week. This bill features the Filipino World War II Veterans Legislation, a carefully written series of compensations, including a one-time lump-sum payment of $15,000 to Filipino veteranos who are U.S. citizens and $9,000 to Filipino veteranos who are Philippine citizens. This legislation was in response to the Rescission Act, which U.S. Congress passed in February of 1946. During World War II, over 200,000 Filipinos defended the U.S. against the Japanese in the Philippines, where more than half died. As a commonwealth of the U.S. before and during the war, Filipinos were legally American nationals, yet not citizens. With American nationality, Filipinos were promised all the benefits afforded to those serving in the armed forces of the United States. The Rescission Act stripped Filipinos of the benefits they were promised. Of the 66 countries allied with the United States during the war, moreover, only Filipinos were denied military benefits. This is the context for the Equity for Veteranos coalition.
Despite President Obama’s unprecedented government recognition in February of 2009, the Filipino-American community remains divided because this measure is not “full equity”— benefits, compensation, and healthcare are not equal with other U.S. veterans. Nonetheless, this is a significant step toward justice and recognition, especially considering the previous 63 years of unacknowledged sacrifices of Filipino veteranos.
Complementing a national regime change sparked by the Obama administration, which has undoubtedly received veteranos’ claims more openly than previous presidential administrations, a major force demanding justice and recognition of veteranos has been the Equity for Veteranos Coalition. This coalition includes numerous organizations: Justice for Filipino American Veteranos (JFAV), Student Action for Veterans Equity (SAVE), Filipinos for Affirmative Action (FAA), the Coalition for Filipino Veterans Equity, and more.
As an example of one group’s campaign, Student Action for Veterans Equity (SAVE), credits its formation to a “tradition of listening and learning from our elders.” SAVE identifies the role of youth as “a younger generation continuing a fight of over ten years to correct the injustice brought on by the passage of the 1946 Rescission Act,” which “deemed the Filipino veterans’ military service as inactive, stripping them of their entitled benefits and recognition promised at enlistment.” In 2003, with the goal of amending Title 38 of the Rescission Act, SAVE initiated the Brown Ribbon Campaign both to spread awareness and to encourage all communities to lobby Congress to pass the full Equity Bill.[10] Despite previous roadblocks and congressional opposition, SAVE and its allies have persisted in this social movement for implementing full equity for Filipino veteranos.
The Equity for Veteranos Coalition signifies transformative resistance. Its organized activism indicates a mobilized, united front challenging the imperialism, racism, and injustice inherent in the Rescission Act. This consciousness-raising effort highlights the devastating effects of U.S. military on the Philippines, in general, and on Filipino veteranos, in particular. With a concrete action plan to demand benefits and recognition of veteranos, Equity for Veteranos analyzes the legacy of imperialism and exploitation that has followed hundreds of thousands of Filipino veteranos to their graves. Fortunately, approximately 12,000 veteranos remain to reap these overdue promises.
Concluding Discussion: A Case for Oral Histories
The intention behind discussing these examples of silences, absences, and counter stories is to show that the most lasting vestige of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines has been the exclusion of Filipinos’ lives and the denial of this colonialism itself. With each example, from the Bataan Memorial March to the “Heroes of Bataan” statue to the Equity for Veteranos Coalition, the issues of marginalizing or centering Filipino veteranos and Native American veterans emerge. From exclusion to conditional inclusion to full inclusion, Filipinos’ and Native Americans’ lives and struggles gain differential recognition in each historical narrative. Across the Equity for Veteranos Coalition, moreover, an anti-imperialist framework shapes historical narratives of World War II, in general, and of veteranos, in particular. As a result, this Historicity2 validates veteranos’ claims for justice and recognition in progressive and transformative ways, with the coalition representing meaningful, ideological resistance to imperialism. Trouillot would seemingly find agreement and synergy with these allied groups’ critical analysis of historic silences and denials of the exploitation and colonialism of the Philippines and the U.S. Southwest.
More research beckons at several archival collections throughout New Mexico. In contemporary World War II news publications, the role of race in representations of the Bataan Death March, both for U.S. veterans of color and for Filipino veteranos, urges further analysis. For both Filipinos and Native Americans, nearly all acknowledgements of race function as minimizing and colonizing tools, while a blanket of silence further excludes Filipino veteranos’ roles and agency from the archives. Based on this preliminary research, however, it seems that confronting such erasures and absences in traditional historical archives is limited; the very process of categorizing traditional archives has excluded Filipino veteranos and Native American veterans. This built-in exclusion and silence will now lead me to conduct oral histories of survivors. Only through their firsthand testimonials—of life before the war, of the war itself, and of readjustments to the Philippines and to the U.S. after the war—will narratives emerge that challenge the archival power that has excluded Filipinos and Native New Mexicans for so long. In Critical Race Theory, the concept of counter story can achieve transformative resistance because it centers the very voices and stories that have been marginalized, both in archives and in historical narratives. Despite the difficulty of employing a mixed, alternative methodological approach to this work, compelling reasons urge me to take on this project. The very answers I seek are unavailable and inaccessible otherwise.
Sources Used:
Bartlit, Nancy R. and Rogers, Everett M. Silent Voices of World War II: When the Son of the Land of Enchantment Met the Sons of the Land of the Rising Sun. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Sunstone Press, 2005.
Groups Discussing Filipino Veterans Equity Bill. https://groups.yahoo.com/phrase/filipino-veterans-equity-bill,Yahoo! Groups.
Karnow, Stanley, 299. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
Matson, Eva Jane, It Tolled for New Mexico: New Mexicans Captured by the Japanese, 1941-1945. Las Cruces, New Mexico: Yucca Press, 1994.
Philippine Scouts Heritage Society, newsletter, Fall 2008.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
[1] Bartlit, Nancy R. and Rogers, Everett M., 40.
[2] Ibid., 43.
[3] Karnow, Stanley, 299.
[4] Bartlit, Nancy R. and Rogers, Everett M., 44.
[5] Matson, Eva Jane, 17.
[6] Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, xix.
[7] Ibid., 2.
[8] Ibid., 26-27.
[9] Ibid., 29.
[10] Groups Discussing Filipino Veterans Equity Bill, 1.
Bataan Death March; Colonialism; Philippino Veterans; Native American Veterans; World War II and New Mexico