HOW'S YOUR TAGALOG ?

=| Not a 'real Californian.'

Not yet. I only live here part of the year, and that hasn't been going on all that long. I wasn't native to the Upper Great Lakes either, but have been there long enough to have learned of the Land and its Peoples, and the stories people spin about their long relationship.

There are pictographs in rock shelters near Ventura venerated by the Chumash. Are they two thousand years old? Five thousand? Does it matter ... it was not 500 years ago that the Europeans first arrived in the form of Cabrillo, a Spaniard. He sailed the Santa Barbara Channel, enjoyed Chumash hospitality, stayed among them and died here. This seems to have established a Pattern still in play.

More Spaniards followed and built a string of missions to save the heathen Chumash souls who welcomed them. Both the missions and the Chumash polity were gone within a century, each the other's victim. In the vacuum emerged the Mexicans, who took over and lived a Good Life as well ~ but not for long. Come the Americans ~ a trickle at first, then a great wave of them, coming for the gold washing down the slopes and back toward the sea from which it had traveled. Steady migrant streams have come ever since for land, fame, fortune, freedom, reformatting ...

It's really not a Happy Story. Kevin Starr's seven-volume "America and the California Dream" series is apparently the the definitive cultural history of the state. I'm slogging my way through his literary pastiche of state significa, trying my best to sop it all up. I'm both Stranger and Minority here, another Newcomer. The voices not-speaking-English that I hear most near my California home are Hispanic. The bottleshop where I get my NYT, the bakery, and the fruteria I visit most days, the people in the grocery, the gas station, and the theater ... they're Mexicans, most of them. Some of their families were were before the Americans. Long-time Japanese population here too, at least until their internment.

It has paled in this election year, but some of the things I've heard here about Immigrants and Immigration are as ugly as some of the things I heard in Mississippi about dark-skinned Peoples. The only people who think 'it' has gone away are those who never saw it in the first place.

In the home, I hear Tagalog. An older relative requires 24/7 care-taking, performed by a team of Filipina nurses. Yes it is expensive but health care isn't cheap, is it. They're also Really Good. C'est la vie. It's an extended family ~ two sisters and an in-law with an extended network of kindred emigre workers sharing rides, food, jobs, money, all kinds of mutual support. The center of the neural net is Erlinda. Not quite five feet tall, she's my #1, and it is she who runs the household. Ah-tay (Elder Sister) and she are from a northern island. They remember riding barefoot on the backs of water buffalo as young girls, and tales of the Japanese occupation. Their grandfather, and mine, built roads.

There's a lot of eating with your hands around here. Rice, crisp mango dipped in patis (fish sauce), whole boiled okra, papaya salad ... these Pinays don't like spicy food, but you better move fast for a fried tilapia fresh from their market which deep-frys their purchase. The heads, especially, go fast. The brain is sweet, and the cheeks lovely little pieces of meat, not a lot different from the crayfish of our southeastern bayous which find themselves spread on newspapers over tabletops crowded with Pearl and Dixie longnecks ... Adobo, however, requires a utensil, either a fork or spoon depending on how you want to serve it. Its a traditional sweet vinegar BBQ-stew that Old Men stand over on Sunday afternoons as their family swirls around. Northerners are among the Philipines earlier residents, I'm told, although not aboriginal. "We're Brown," says Erlinda. "Not Red, Not Black, not Yellow. We're Brown." And she is. Not American either, but certainly Californian.

Had they been born in this country, I suspect Erlinda would be running some kind of ship-shape care facility in some little patch of Good Earth. Ah-tay, on the other hand, would probably be nudging aside Jeffrey Immelt at GE (already told you they were Really Good, remember?). Erlinda came here after 30+ years of hospital work to earn enough to educate her kids because American dollars go a long,long way in the Philipines. "You could have four wives," she teases. "Maybe six." She got here within a week of 9-11. So did the Cambodian couple who run a nearby coffee shop.

Welcome to the real New Age America ~ tis a hell of a cultural exchange program we've got here.

So far Erlinda has chalked up an electrical engineer and a teacher. Her youngest is just starting college, a Navy wife married to Bett's son, Mark ~ he's got a beautiful wife, a nasty moon-walk, and is currently on the flight deck crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN-71] in the Persian Gulf. He's turns twenty-three today.

Happy Birthday, Mark !
Come home safely ~ ASAP

~

Weekends, especially, the house is awash in cooking aromas and a constant barrage of really crappy cell-phone ringtones. Interspersed with bursts of rapid-fire Tagalog, it sounds like a diner sometimes. English is the 'language of instruction' in the Philippines, and the resulting Philippinglish is certainly Good Enough, but default is Tagalog. Tis a mystery to me ~ I have no linguistic skills beyond my spoken language. I understand a handful of phrases, sort of, and can recognize some Food terms, but beyond that its all just pleasant background noise.

Probably just as well.



00:42 10/27/2008