|
Making a Quiet Get-a-Way
Mom's and
Dad's marriage always seem to have
some problems. Unfortunately,
it escalated. By the time I had graduated out of
junior high, both the arguments, and unfortunately
dad’s drinking increased.
He was usually a reasonable, very intelligent man,
but the alcohol seem to be winning over logical behavior.
Violent outbursts were getting more frequent.
Sometimes Mom, my sister Tania and I, would hide in the high
grasses in the hills behind the house.
Sometimes we hid in the homes of neighbors, once we
hid in a neighbor’s closet. During these episodes, my
prayers were always hoping that Dad would go
away, pass out or go to sleep.
Unfortunately, Mom had had enough, and with the
financial help of a couple of her sisters, we made
arrangements for us to leave, quietly and unexpectedly.
All the time
we lived on Evergreen Street we lived across the street our
Chapa Abuelitos. I don’t think Mom wanted to
separate - leave Dad while
her Mom and Dad were living across the street. I think Dad's
anger could boil over on them.
However, the family
was slowly leaving Los Angeles and moving north,
to central California. Several aunts, had moved to
Sierra Madre. Grandma and Grandpa were living with
them. Dad did not know.
I don't know how I posed the situation to a playground
friend, but
the father of a
playground friend was kind enough to drive us over to Sierra
Madre. His name was BeBee, a strong shot putter, very kind
just as his dad was.
The day, we left, I remember pulling a little red wagon
filled with what we were able to place on it. We pulled it
along Evergreen Street sidewalk, past Evergreen Elementary
School over to our Bebee's house.
We left just before Thanksgiving.
That year our Thanksgiving bird was a few
stuffed squabs.
Aunt Estella was working at a squab
processing plant and brought some home for us to
prepare a memorable Thanksgiving dinner.
In addition to being the first time of tasting squad, I decided
I was going bake a mince pie, or at least something
that would look like the mince pies in the magazine photos. I had never tasted
a mince meat pie, but got created.
I made our mince meat pie with sliced apples walnuts
and raisins. It
came out pretty good.
The House
We did not get on the road to drive up to
Stockton immediately. I
think the delay was intentional. Tia Estella’s big
car would have been easy to spot. I
was eager to see what school we were going to be attending.
Tia Estella, had two small houses picked
out for possible purchase, one in Lodi and one in Manteca,
the two cities located on either side Stockton, where most
of the family was now living. We visited them both.
The Manteca house was selected. Manteca is a city in the
central valley of California, 76 miles east of San Francisco. We
stayed in a motel for a few weeks while the arrangements
were being made for purchasing the house.
Mom had carefully been saving some monies and eventually was able to
pay her sister back fully.
The Manteca house was a good investment, it
was a triple lot. The house itself was constructed in a
style that I believe they call “chicken coop”. One
long structure, divided into three
rooms, a front room. a bedroom, and a kitchen,with a
backdoor . The
bathroom shared a wall with the kitchen and had a window
that faced an ally.
The
bathroom had a shower and room for small washing machine.
Except for the bathroom door, but no door between the three
rooms.
It was comfortable, but however as I reflect on the location and the
vicinity of the house, and observe the remoteness and
potential danger of two teenager girls living by themselves,
(which quickly became the situation), I have concluded
that we must have had a crew of angels watching over us the entire two and a half years we lived
in Manteca.
In
a small town, everyone knows everything, and surely most
everyone knew we were alone, but
we never had even one little scare.
We were on the end piece of three lot parcel.
Next to the house on the other side was an alley.
The alley was behind a motel.
Behind our property in the back was the parking lot
of a church. Across
the street was a triplex with renters, and half a block away
was a main highway. We
had no neighbors.
There
were no sidewalks on our street, nor lights that I can
remember, but the grass was green and lush; and,
there was no arguing. One unique thing about the
grass, was the clover that dominated it. . . there
were many four leaf clovers. You could always
quickly find a four-leaf clover. I always felt we were
lucky.
Curiously, a very
popular song, revived in 1948 was "I'm Looking
Over A Four Leaf Clover…"
which I enjoyed
singing
them and now.
It
always reminds me
of lush our grass, filled with
4-leaf clovers
Lyrics:
I'm looking over a four leaf clover
That I overlooked before
First is the sunshine, the second is rain
Third is the roses that bloom in the lane
There's no need explaining
The one remaining is somebody I adore
I'm looking over a four leaf clover
That I overlooked before.
Registering for School
Circumstances, while registering, favored us with immediate
social acceptance.
We three were ushered in to the vice principal’s
office to fill out papers.
After filling out most of the pertinent information,
I paused at a line with Nationality written
underneath. I
wrote down American on the line and handed it to the Vice
Principal.
He looked at my mother who was morenita
with dark hair and brown eyes and my sister, with brown eyes
and hair. He said, no, what is we mean is . . . what
is your . .?
“I was born in San Antonio Texas, I said
loudly, so I’m an American.”
I knew what he was asking, but having gone to a very
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial junior high,
I also knew he was wrong in asking that question, that way
. . .
I
waited to see how he was going explained it further, but was
he was very uncomfortable in how to expraess what he was
trying to ask. I
decided to help him out. “If you mean ethnic
heritage," I said, "I will just cross this out”
which I did.
I wrote Ethnic where it had read
Nationality and wrote Mexican above it.
I told my sister Tania (also born in San Antonio) to do what
I had just done. She made the same correction and
handed it to the Vice Principal.
He was a bit stunned and my Mom was quite surprised at my
behavior. I was always the " rules follower"
and respectful of authority. But he was telling me to
write down that I was not an American. I could not do
that.
What we didn’t know that sitting outside
the Vice Principal’s office was one of the frequent campus
troublemakers. He
had heard the whole exchange.
By the time we had our schedules set, the whole school had
heard by word of mouth about how the new girls in town had
stood up to the vice president.
We were heroes, and apparently heroes among all the
different social groups.
Manteca like Boyle Heights (Russian Jewish)
and many other cities, have been settled by an ethnic group
with similar traditions, language, etc. This was true
in Manteca. There were the city kids and the farm
kids. The city
kids were mostly of Anglo heritage whose parents ran
businesses in town.
The farm kids seem to be mostly of Portuguese and
Italian background with older roots in California. The
city kids were Protestant and the Portuguese and other
Latino kids were Catholic.
We didn't quite fit in to the
right ethnic religious group based on our heritage, but we
were accepted by both. We were invited to join Rainbow
Girls, attended the Methodist Church, but thoroughly enjoyed
festivities and attending midnight mass on special occasions
with our Catholic friends.
December 1948 was an unusual
Christmas. We registered just prior to Christmas
vacation. We knew no one in town. We were just
beginning to learn the names and meet our classmates.
Mom installed a telephone, which we had never had in our
home in Los Angeles. It was interesting, it was a
shared line. The phone installation was in preparation
to stay in touch with us as she returned to Los
Angeles to file the divorce papers.
We were told to stay off the highway, not to make contact
with the family in Stockton, and not to allow anyone in the
house. She said she would call us frequently,
which she did, and left to Los Angeles before Christmas. I
was 15 and my sister Tania, 16 and half.
We had two weeks of absolutely nothing to do during
Christmas vacation, no television at that time, so we
fell back on our experience of spending carefree days at the
Wabash playground. Each of us had saved a little money
to buy a Christmas gift for each other. We decided to
put our money together and buy a basketball. It was a three
dollar purchase. We jumped a nearby grammar school fence
with our newly purchased basketball and spent the next
two weeks, our Christmas vacation enjoying our gift to each
other, together.
Holy Ghost Celebration
Another very special early
memory of Manteca was attending a Holy Ghost Celebration,
whose history I only learned in the process of trying to
learn about this unusual
event hosted by some California Portuguese communities.
Its history is explained in the following history of the
celebration as found on the web concerning the traditions of
observing the Holy Ghost Celebration in the city of Modesto,
California. I did not know the spiritual foundation nor
the meaning beyond the generous uniqueness of the
experience.
What I
remember in Manteca was the main street being closed down to
traffic, and a straight line of tables being set up in the
middle of the street, and huge bowls of SOPA
placed for guests to eat heartily. Being a kid
from East LA it was hard to grasp the community aspect of
it. It was soon after we moved to Manteca.
Fortunately some of our classmates advised us to go downtown
and not to miss it. All were welcomed. We
did, and I'm still awed by the vision and the SOPA.
The chunks of meat were huge and very tender.
People sitting shoulder to shoulder, strangers or neighbors,
the atmosphere was different. Learning that the
celebration is called the Holy Ghost Celebration seems to
embody the special atmosphere
| The Holy Ghost
Celebration involves many traditions
including parades, feasts, candlelight processions,
the crowning of fiesta queens, and concludes
dramatically with a bloodless bullfight. My
focus, however, was on the sopa! Although sopa
is just a very simple soup-like dish, it embodies
the spirit of the entire celebration.
When Portuguese people immigrated to the U.S.
(mainly the Central Valley of California, San Diego,
and the New York area) they brought many of their
customs and traditions. Among those traditions
was fiesta. The story of its origins go
like this… (Appropriated from flyer about the
festivities)
It all began hundreds of years ago
in 1296 when Queen Isabel of Agagao, wife of King
Diniz of Portugal, saw her subjects suffering from
the effects of a devastating drought followed by a
long famine. Thousands of people died during those
years. Wells ran dry, and food began to get
scarce.
Portugal’s Queen Isabel did all
she could for her people during that time. There
is a tradition that shows her, always with red
roses in one hand and a small loaf of bread in the
other. This stems from her habit of taking bread
from the palace and secretly passing it to the
poor and hungry. One day the king found out about
it and confronted her. When she opened her apron
to reveal the stolen bread, a miracle had
occurred. For instead of bread, a bunch of red
roses fell to the floor. Her generosity and love
for her people had been honored by God.
Masses were said continuously
during a nine-day novena until the day of
Pentecost when the people witnessed three ships
sail up the harbor and docked in Lisbon. These
ships were filled with grain. Their hunger was
finally at an end. It also began to rain, after
several years of drought. This was considered to
be a major miracle.
In thanksgiving to the Holy Spirit
for this miraculous deliverance, the day of the
Pentecost was declared to be a national holiday.
This holiday persisted in Portugal for several
centuries before being exported to the Azores
Islands, and onto our community in Modesto.
When Portuguese people migrated to
California and the East Coast, they brought the Holy
Ghost Celebration with them, introducing it
to their American neighbors. Queen Isabel was
canonized by Pope Urban the Eighth in 1625. Her
devotion to her people was symbolized by the
promise she made to the Holy Spirit that if her
people were delivered from the famine and drought,
she would lay her jeweled crown on the altar as a
gift to the church.
In
order to honor Queen Isabel’s
generosity, the community makes sopa for three
meals a day, for duration of the fiesta
weekend–Friday through Sunday. These meals
are provided for free to everyone who wants to
attend. On the day I was there the local
Portuguese-American association served over 5,000
people throughout the course of the day.
|
|
