Joseph Silva: The Documentarian of Deported Veterans
Dr. Sofya Aptekar, author of Green Card Soldier, interviews photographer Joseph Silva, who spent years documenting the lives of deported veterans.
Joseph Silva is a California-based photographer who has spent the last eight years documenting the lives of deported veterans. In the 1980s, Joseph served in the US Navy and was stationed in Guam, the Philippines, Korea, and Japan. A lifelong student and artist, Joseph has taken classes at numerous colleges across California since leaving the Navy in 1990. I first met Joseph when he visited New York in 2019 alongside Hector Barajas, a deported veteran organizer. Joseph’s photographs of deported veterans appear in my book about immigrants in the military, Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat. In this interview, Joseph talks about his work with deported veterans.
When I started working on my book and Joseph was making his first visits to deported veterans in Tijuana, deported veterans were a largely unknown phenomenon. Many people reacted with incredulity that a veteran could be deported or even that a non-citizen could join the US military. Since then, deported veteran advocacy has significantly raised public awareness of their plight, although the deportation of veterans continues. The US government does not keep track of veteran deportations, and estimates vary between 3,000 and 30,000 deported. When non-citizens enlist, they are eligible to apply for citizenship faster than civilians. Yet, the process is not always easy, and there are many thousands of non-citizen veterans. Like other non-citizens with permanent lawful residency status, veterans can be deported if they are convicted of an aggravated felony, defined as any crime punishable by a year or more. Once deported, they struggle to receive veteran benefits and services. Less than one hundred of deported veterans have been able to return to the United States, either through a humanitarian parole or through a gubernatorial pardon.
Tell me how you got started with this project documenting deported veterans. What started you on that?
I saw an article on social media about veterans being deported in 2014 or 2015. I started following deported veterans on social media. I would look at their posts here and there, and I could believe it was happening because I knew a lot of veterans, a lot of people enlisted in the military who were not US citizens. They were green card holders. They weren’t born and raised in America. They were from the Philippines, or the Caribbean, or Latin America, somewhere. So I knew that it was possible that you could be in the military as a non-citizen. And I met people randomly in the 1990s who moved to America and wanted to be a marine.
So I started reading. I started to follow Hector [Barajas, the deported veteran organizer] and the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana. I live in Los Angeles, and I would go to San Diego to visit my friends who are DJs and musicians who play clubs or parties. Sometimes after the party or club, we would go down to Tijuana at like two in the morning after San Diego would close. So it wasn’t a big deal for me to go to Tijuana.
In 2016, I was taking a class at Santa Monica College, a photojournalism class, and I was in the school newspaper. There were cover stories, but they were all focusing on political stories because Trump and Clinton and Bernie Sanders were all running for president and having political rallies. That was the only thing getting published and I wasn’t getting anything published at all. So we went down to San Diego to photograph Trump. And I said, you know what? While I’m down here, I should contact the deported veterans.
I sent Hector a message. I said I am taking some photographs. I want to come down and hang out. And he says, sure, why not? So I went back to LA, rented a car, and drove back to the border the next day. I parked in San Diego at the outlets, and Hector gave me all the directions. He said I could walk across the border, and he gave me the information to give to the cab driver. So I did that. And that was the first day I was at the Bunker in Tijuana. [“The Bunker” is what deported veterans call the Deported Veteran Support House”]
When I got to the Bunker, it was just people there talking, hanging out. One veteran showed me where he stayed, his bunk. He is from East LA, so we talked about East LA and Boyle Heights, and I go, I live over there! I realized as I was talking to the vets there – because one was from San Diego, another from Compton, and another from Boyle Heights – I knew all those places! We talked about taco shops and burger shops and restaurants and places. We had something in common, plus we are all veterans. So we just talked and I was taking photographs at the same time. And I realized… I have to come back.
You kept going to Tijuana.
I started going back on a regular basis. Taking the train to San Diego and jumping on the trolley and coming across the border. I guess I was trying to make myself a story, create a photo project. I would use black and white film and work on this photo story. I didn’t know it was going to be continuous. The first day I was there, I realized, oh, I have to be here all the time. And they opened the door. They let me in. I kept on going back and kept on going back. Every time I went back, I met new veterans or new people coming over from the States, like advocates, church groups, students, filmmakers, lawyers.
I just kept going back and then I also realized that when I went over there, I could bring something with me. Like, what do the guys want? And I would go on the way. When I finally got a car, I could bring more things with me. I would go to Walmart and buy things that the guys wanted, like Cup-a-soup or chili beans, stuff they couldn’t get in Tijuana. Just running errands. I became part of the crew along with everybody else. I would go down for a couple of days. I would drive there and stay three or four days or a week. I just got more involved. Hector invited me to go to Juarez with him. And that just opened more doors, getting exposed to more veterans. That’s how the floodgates opened.
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