A Family Finds Closure for Long-Ago Sacrifices

The family of Rita Duarte, who lost two sons in different wars, has recently found the peace of mind that long eluded their mother.

They have claimed eight military honors that Rita never knew her eldest son, David M. Gonzales, had earned during World War II and have corrected an officially recorded error over his military service.

Their painful family memory of the circumstances surrounding the military burial of Rita’s other son, Philip Duarte, has eased. Back in 1952, Rita had to pawn her furniture to pay for her son’s gravesite because an oversight left the mother without a $75 funeral benefit payment, according to the family.

And posthumously, Rita Duarte, a longtime San Fernando Valley resident who died in 1977, has become a gold star mother.

“She was brokenhearted,” said family member Beatrice Gonzales of Sylmar. “I don’t think she ever got over both her sons’ deaths.”

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Rita Duarte was born in 1905 in Arizona. Her father was a farm laborer and her mother was a midwife who took in sewing, said Carmen Amper of Sylmar, Duarte’s eldest daughter. Duarte settled with her family in Pacoima around 1920. As a teenager, she had two children with farmworker Alfred Gonzales, who left her. She married Juan Duarte, another field laborer. Together they had 12 more children.

Her eldest son, David M. Gonzales, enlisted in the Army during World War II. Before he was shipped overseas in early 1945, he said goodbye to his family, including his wife, Stephanie, and his baby son, David Jr.

He told relatives, “Take good care of my son, because I’m not going to be coming back,” said Beatrice Gonzales, David Jr.’s wife.

On April 25, 1945, just as the war was ending in Europe, Pfc. David M. Gonzales of Company A, 127th Infantry, 32nd Infantry Division was killed fighting in the Philippines. After rescuing three companions buried under debris from a bomb attack in the battle of Luzon, he was hit by enemy gunfire and died at age 21.

A few days later, in the middle of Rita Duarte’s 40th-birthday party, the family received a telegram from the War Department: “We regret to inform....”

“She was devastated,” Beatrice Gonzales said.

David Gonzales was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. Dead soldiers’ bodies were returned to their families in the years after the end of the war; his was shipped back in 1949.

The family buried him with military honors at Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until members of the Gonzales-Duarte family attended a Veterans Day celebration for Mexican American war heroes at Santa Ana College in 1998 that they discovered a mistake. The nonprofit Latino Advocates for Education had sponsored the commemoration of Latino contributions to the military. “Nearly 40 photographs of Medal of Honor winners were displayed alongside their citations,” Beatrice Gonzales said.

The family found the correct citation for David Gonzales, but the photograph above it was of someone else.

“We were shocked to see the wrong picture on display,” Beatrice Gonzales said.

Even more disappointing to the family was that the same mistake was made in historic displays in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and on a website. An Army recruiting exhibit of Latino Medal of Honor winners also had the error.

The family complained to Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Valley Village), whose field representative, Fred Flores, investigated and confirmed the mistake. He also discovered Gonzales’ service entitled him to eight more medals, including two Bronze Stars and a gold star his mother never received.

Those medals were awarded posthumously to Gonzales in 2002. In addition, the incorrect photos have been replaced.

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But the loss of her eldest son was not the only source of grief for Rita.

Another son, Philip Duarte, had enlisted in the Army and began training as his brother’s body came back home. On Sept. 16, 1950, Philip Duarte, 19, a combat infantryman in the 82nd Division of the 8th Army, was killed in the Korean War.

“Philip only came home on one furlough before going to Korea,” Amper said. “All we know is that he was marching into a town with a large group, and they were caught by surprise” by enemy fire. “It was a massacre.”

Two years later, Philip Duarte’s body was shipped from Korea to San Francisco and from there to a mortuary in San Fernando, with an Army sergeant as the military escort. He was supposed to remain with the family through the burial, but after meeting the family at the mortuary, he left. “I have [my] relatives to visit,” the sergeant told the dead soldier’s mother, according to her account in The Times in 1952.

“We heard later that he was court-martialed or disciplined somehow,” Amper said.

Duarte wanted Philip to be buried next to David in the East Los Angeles cemetery. The military promised to give her a check for $75 to help with the cost.

It never arrived, according to family members. Duarte did not understand how two men who both died for their country could be treated so differently.

The family was so strapped for money to pay for the gravesite and marker that, after the funeral Mass in Pacoima, her son’s coffin was stored for two days while they came up with $247 for the plot at Calvary Cemetery. Rita Duarte used her furniture as collateral for the loan.

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Rita Duarte died in 1977. Her family was awarded her gold star in 2002 at Los Angeles Mission College in Sylmar, the same time they received David Gonzales’ medals. Berman and other elected officials, including then-Assemblyman Tony Cardenas, now a Los Angeles city councilman, officiated at the ceremony.

Mothers of slain servicemen came to be called gold star mothers during World War I, and the gold star pin is awarded to family members, including fathers, by the Defense Department. American Gold Star Mothers is a nonprofit organization and support group of women whose sons and daughters died in the line of duty.

In the last decade, Duarte and Gonzales family members have attended dedication ceremonies where David Gonzales’ name appears: a Pacoima park, a county probation camp in Calabasas and an Army recruiting center in San Fernando.