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naagi · 4 years

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My Family’s Slave

By Alex Tizon

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said “please” and “thank you.” We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.

After my mother died of leukemia, in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs—the American dream. And then I had a slave.

At baggage claim in Manila, I unzipped my suitcase to make sure Lola’s ashes were still there. Outside, I inhaled the familiar smell: a thick blend of exhaust and waste, of ocean and sweet fruit and sweat.Early the next morning I found a driver, an affable middle-aged man who went by the nickname “Doods,” and we hit the road in his truck, weaving through traffic. The scene always stunned me. The sheer number of cars and motorcycles and jeepneys. The people weaving between them and moving on the sidewalks in great brown rivers. The street vendors in bare feet trotting alongside cars, hawking cigarettes and cough drops and sacks of boiled peanuts. The child beggars pressing their faces against the windows.

Doods and I were headed to the place where Lola’s story began, up north in the central plains: Tarlac province. Rice country. The home of a cigar-chomping army lieutenant named Tomas Asuncion, my grandfather. The family stories paint Lieutenant Tom as a formidable man given to eccentricity and dark moods, who had lots of land but little money and kept mistresses in separate houses on his property. His wife died giving birth to their only child, my mother. She was raised by a series of utusans, or “people who take commands.”

Slavery has a long history on the islands. Before the Spanish came, islanders enslaved other islanders, usually war captives, criminals, or debtors. Slaves came in different varieties, from warriors who could earn their freedom through valor to household servants who were regarded as property and could be bought and sold or traded. High-status slaves could own low-status slaves, and the low could own the lowliest. Some chose to enter servitude simply to survive: In exchange for their labor, they might be given food, shelter, and protection.

When the Spanish arrived, in the 1500s, they enslaved islanders and later brought African and Indian slaves. The Spanish Crown eventually began phasing out slavery at home and in its colonies, but parts of the Philippines were so far-flung that authorities couldn’t keep a close eye. Traditions persisted under different guises, even after the U.S. took control of the islands in 1898. Today even the poor can have utusans or katulongs (“helpers”) or kasambahays (“domestics”), as long as there are people even poorer. The pool is deep.

Lieutenant Tom had as many as three families of utusans living on his property. In the spring of 1943, with the islands under Japanese occupation, he brought home a girl from a village down the road. She was a cousin from a marginal side of the family, rice farmers. The lieutenant was shrewd—he saw that this girl was penniless, unschooled, and likely to be malleable. Her parents wanted her to marry a pig farmer twice her age, and she was desperately unhappy but had nowhere to go. Tom approached her with an offer: She could have food and shelter if she would commit to taking care of his daughter, who had just turned 12.

Lola agreed, not grasping that the deal was for life.

“She is my gift to you,” Lieutenant Tom told my mother.

“I don’t want her,” my mother said, knowing she had no choice.

Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the Japanese, leaving Mom behind with Lola in his creaky house in the provinces. Lola fed, groomed, and dressed my mother. When they walked to the market, Lola held an umbrella to shield her from the sun. At night, when Lola’s other tasks were done—feeding the dogs, sweeping the floors, folding the laundry that she had washed by hand in the Camiling River—she sat at the edge of my mother’s bed and fanned her to sleep.

One day during the war Lieutenant Tom came home and caught my mother in a lie—something to do with a boy she wasn’t supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, ordered her to “stand at the table.” Mom cowered with Lola in a corner. Then, in a quivering voice, she told her father that Lola would take her punishment. Lola looked at Mom pleadingly, then without a word walked to the dining table and held on to the edge. Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuating each one with a word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola made no sound.

My mother, in recounting this story late in her life, delighted in the outrageousness of it, her tone seeming to say, Can you believe I did that? When I brought it up with Lola, she asked to hear Mom’s version. She listened intently, eyes lowered, and afterward she looked at me with sadness and said simply, “Yes. It was like that.”

Seven years later, in 1950, Mom married my father and moved to Manila, bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom had long been haunted by demons, and in 1951 he silenced them with a .32‑caliber slug to his temple. Mom almost never talked about it. She had his temperament—moody, imperial, secretly fragile—and she took his lessons to heart, among them the proper way to be a provincial matrona: You must embrace your role as the giver of commands. You must keep those beneath you in their place at all times, for their own good and the good of the household. They might cry and complain, but their souls will thank you. They will love you for helping them be what God intended.

My brother Arthur was born in 1951. I came next, followed by three more siblings in rapid succession. My parents expected Lola to be as devoted to us kids as she was to them. While she looked after us, my parents went to school and earned advanced degrees, joining the ranks of so many others with fancy diplomas but no jobs. Then the big break: Dad was offered a job in Foreign Affairs as a commercial analyst. The salary would be meager, but the position was in America—a place he and Mom had grown up dreaming of, where everything they hoped for could come true.

Dad was allowed to bring his family and one domestic. Figuring they would both have to work, my parents needed Lola to care for the kids and the house. My mother informed Lola, and to her great irritation, Lola didn’t immediately acquiesce. Years later Lola told me she was terrified. “It was too far,” she said. “Maybe your Mom and Dad won’t let me go home.”

In the end what convinced Lola was my father’s promise that things would be different in America. He told her that as soon as he and Mom got on their feet, they’d give her an “allowance.” Lola could send money to her parents, to all her relations in the village. Her parents lived in a hut with a dirt floor. Lola could build them a concrete house, could change their lives forever. Imagine.

We landed in Los Angeles on May 12, 1964, all our belongings in cardboard boxes tied with rope. Lola had been with my mother for 21 years by then. In many ways she was more of a parent to me than either my mother or my father. Hers was the first face I saw in the morning and the last one I saw at night. As a baby, I uttered Lola’s name (which I first pronounced “Oh-ah”) long before I learned to say “Mom” or “Dad.” As a toddler, I refused to go to sleep unless Lola was holding me, or at least nearby.

I was 4 years old when we arrived in the U.S.—too young to question Lola’s place in our family. But as my siblings and I grew up on this other shore, we came to see the world differently. The leap across the ocean brought about a leap in consciousness that Mom and Dad couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make.

Lola never got that allowance. She asked my parents about it in a roundabout way a couple of years into our life in America. Her mother had fallen ill (with what I would later learn was dysentery), and her family couldn’t afford the medicine she needed. “Pwede ba?” she said to my parents. Is it possible? Mom let out a sigh. “How could you even ask?,” Dad responded in Tagalog. “You see how hard up we are. Don’t you have any shame?”

My parents had borrowed money for the move to the U.S., and then borrowed more in order to stay. My father was transferred from the consulate general in L.A. to the Philippine consulate in Seattle. He was paid $5,600 a year. He took a second job cleaning trailers, and a third as a debt collector. Mom got work as a technician in a couple of medical labs. We barely saw them, and when we did they were often exhausted and snappish.

Mom would come home and upbraid Lola for not cleaning the house well enough or for forgetting to bring in the mail. “Didn’t I tell you I want the letters here when I come home?” she would say in Tagalog, her voice venomous. “It’s not hard naman! An idiot could remember.” Then my father would arrive and take his turn. When Dad raised his voice, everyone in the house shrank. Sometimes my parents would team up until Lola broke down crying, almost as though that was their goal.

It confused me: My parents were good to my siblings and me, and we loved them. But they’d be affectionate to us kids one moment and vile to Lola the next. I was 11 or 12 when I began to see Lola’s situation clearly. By then Arthur, eight years my senior, had been seething for a long time. He was the one who introduced the word slave into my understanding of what Lola was. Before he said it I’d thought of her as just an unfortunate member of the household. I hated when my parents yelled at her, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they—and the whole arrangement—could be immoral.

“Do you know anybody treated the way she’s treated?,” Arthur said. “Who lives the way she lives?” He summed up Lola’s reality: Wasn’t paid. Toiled every day. Was tongue-lashed for sitting too long or falling asleep too early. Was struck for talking back. Wore hand-me-downs. Ate scraps and leftovers by herself in the kitchen. Rarely left the house. Had no friends or hobbies outside the family. Had no private quarters. (Her designated place to sleep in each house we lived in was always whatever was left—a couch or storage area or corner in my sisters’ bedroom. She often slept among piles of laundry.)

We couldn’t identify a parallel anywhere except in slave characters on TV and in the movies. I remember watching a Western called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John Wayne plays Tom Doniphon, a gunslinging rancher who barks orders at his servant, Pompey, whom he calls his “boy.” Pick him up, Pompey. Pompey, go find the doctor. Get on back to work, Pompey! Docile and obedient, Pompey calls his master “Mistah Tom.” They have a complex relationship. Tom forbids Pompey from attending school but opens the way for Pompey to drink in a whites-only saloon. Near the end, Pompey saves his master from a fire. It’s clear Pompey both fears and loves Tom, and he mourns when Tom dies. All of this is peripheral to the main story of Tom’s showdown with bad guy Liberty Valance, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Pompey. I remember thinking: Lola is Pompey, Pompey is Lola.

One night when Dad found out that my sister Ling, who was then 9, had missed dinner, he barked at Lola for being lazy. “I tried to feed her,” Lola said, as Dad stood over her and glared. Her feeble defense only made him angrier, and he punched her just below the shoulder. Lola ran out of the room and I could hear her wailing, an animal cry.

“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said.

My parents turned to look at me. They seemed startled. I felt the twitching in my face that usually preceded tears, but I wouldn’t cry this time. In Mom’s eyes was a shadow of something I hadn’t seen before. Jealousy?

“Are you defending your Lola?,” Dad said. “Is that what you’re doing?”

“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said again, almost in a whisper.

I was 13. It was my first attempt to stick up for the woman who spent her days watching over me. The woman who used to hum Tagalog melodies as she rocked me to sleep, and when I got older would dress and feed me and walk me to school in the mornings and pick me up in the afternoons. Once, when I was sick for a long time and too weak to eat, she chewed my food for me and put the small pieces in my mouth to swallow. One summer when I had plaster casts on both legs (I had problem joints), she bathed me with a washcloth, brought medicine in the middle of the night, and helped me through months of rehabilitation. I was cranky through it all. She didn’t complain or lose patience, ever.

To now hear her wailing made me crazy.

In the old country, my parents felt no need to hide their treatment of Lola. In America, they treated her worse but took pains to conceal it. When guests came over, my parents would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change the subject. For five years in North Seattle, we lived across the street from the Misslers, a rambunctious family of eight who introduced us to things like mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during football. Lola would come out to serve food and drinks during games, and my parents would smile and thank her before she quickly disappeared. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?,” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.

Billy Missler, my best friend, didn’t buy it. He spent enough time at our house, whole weekends sometimes, to catch glimpses of my family’s secret. He once overheard my mother yelling in the kitchen, and when he barged in to investigate found Mom red-faced and glaring at Lola, who was quaking in a corner. I came in a few seconds later. The look on Billy’s face was a mix of embarrassment and perplexity. What was that? I waved it off and told him to forget it.

I think Billy felt sorry for Lola. He’d rave about her cooking, and make her laugh like I’d never seen. During sleepovers, she’d make his favorite Filipino dish, beef tapa over white rice. Cooking was Lola’s only eloquence. I could tell by what she served whether she was merely feeding us or saying she loved us.

When I once referred to Lola as a distant aunt, Billy reminded me that when we’d first met I’d said she was my grandmother.

“Well, she’s kind of both,” I said mysteriously.

“Why is she always working?”

“She likes to work,” I said.

“Your dad and mom—why do they yell at her?”

“Her hearing isn’t so good …”

Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land and trying to fit in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were, what kind of place we came from. Whether we deserved to be accepted. I was ashamed of it all, including my complicity. Didn’t I eat the food she cooked, and wear the clothes she washed and ironed and hung in the closet? But losing her would have been devastating.

There was another reason for secrecy: Lola’s travel papers had expired in 1969, five years after we arrived in the U.S. She’d come on a special passport linked to my father’s job. After a series of fallings-out with his superiors, Dad quit the consulate and declared his intent to stay in the United States. He arranged for permanent-resident status for his family, but Lola wasn’t eligible. He was supposed to send her back.

Lola’s mother, Fermina, died in 1973; her father, Hilario, in 1979. Both times she wanted desperately to go home. Both times my parents said “Sorry.” No money, no time. The kids needed her. My parents also feared for themselves, they admitted to me later. If the authorities had found out about Lola, as they surely would have if she’d tried to leave, my parents could have gotten into trouble, possibly even been deported. They couldn’t risk it. Lola’s legal status became what Filipinos call tago nang tago, or TNT—“on the run.” She stayed TNT for almost 20 years.

After each of her parents died, Lola was sullen and silent for months. She barely responded when my parents badgered her. But the badgering never let up. Lola kept her head down and did her work.

My father’s resignation started a turbulent period. Money got tighter, and my parents turned on each other. They uprooted the family again and again—Seattle to Honolulu back to Seattle to the southeast Bronx and finally to the truck-stop town of Umatilla, Oregon, population 750. During all this moving around, Mom often worked 24-hour shifts, first as a medical intern and then as a resident, and Dad would disappear for days, working odd jobs but also (we’d later learn) womanizing and who knows what else. Once, he came home and told us that he’d lost our new station wagon playing blackjack.

For days in a row Lola would be the only adult in the house. She got to know the details of our lives in a way that my parents never had the mental space for. We brought friends home, and she’d listen to us talk about school and girls and boys and whatever else was on our minds. Just from conversations she overheard, she could list the first name of every girl I had a crush on from sixth grade through high school.

When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but the fact was that he deserted us kids and abandoned Mom after 25 years of marriage. She wouldn’t become a licensed physician for another year, and her specialty—internal medicine—wasn’t especially lucrative. Dad didn’t pay child support, so money was always a struggle.

My mom kept herself together enough to go to work, but at night she’d crumble in self-pity and despair. Her main source of comfort during this time: Lola. As Mom snapped at her over small things, Lola attended to her even more—cooking Mom’s favorite meals, cleaning her bedroom with extra care. I’d find the two of them late at night at the kitchen counter, griping and telling stories about Dad, sometimes laughing wickedly, other times working themselves into a fury over his transgressions. They barely noticed us kids flitting in and out.

One night I heard Mom weeping and ran into the living room to find her slumped in Lola’s arms. Lola was talking softly to her, the way she used to with my siblings and me when we were young. I lingered, then went back to my room, scared for my mom and awed by Lola.

Doods was humming. I’d dozed for what felt like a minute and awoke to his happy melody. “Two hours more,” he said. I checked the plastic box in the tote bag by my side—still there—and looked up to see open road. The MacArthur Highway. I glanced at the time. “Hey, you said ‘two hours’ two hours ago,” I said. Doods just hummed.

His not knowing anything about the purpose of my journey was a relief. I had enough interior dialogue going on. I was no better than my parents. I could have done more to free Lola. To make her life better. Why didn’t I? I could have turned in my parents, I suppose. It would have blown up my family in an instant. Instead, my siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly.

Doods and I passed through beautiful country. Not travel-brochure beautiful but real and alive and, compared with the city, elegantly spare. Mountains ran parallel to the highway on each side, the Zambales Mountains to the west, the Sierra Madre Range to the east. From ridge to ridge, west to east, I could see every shade of green all the way to almost black.

Doods pointed to a shadowy outline in the distance. Mount Pinatubo. I’d come here in 1991 to report on the aftermath of its eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century. Volcanic mudflows called lahars continued for more than a decade, burying ancient villages, filling in rivers and valleys, and wiping out entire ecosystems. The lahars reached deep into the foothills of Tarlac province, where Lola’s parents had spent their entire lives, and where she and my mother had once lived together. So much of our family record had been lost in wars and floods, and now parts were buried under 20 feet of mud.

Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds, and you can behold a scene like the one Doods and I were driving through, and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.

A couple of years after my parents split, my mother remarried and demanded Lola’s fealty to her new husband, a Croatian immigrant named Ivan, whom she had met through a friend. Ivan had never finished high school. He’d been married four times and was an inveterate gambler who enjoyed being supported by my mother and attended to by Lola.

Ivan brought out a side of Lola I’d never seen. His marriage to my mother was volatile from the start, and money—especially his use of her money—was the main issue. Once, during an argument in which Mom was crying and Ivan was yelling, Lola walked over and stood between them. She turned to Ivan and firmly said his name. He looked at Lola, blinked, and sat down.

My sister Inday and I were floored. Ivan was about 250 pounds, and his baritone could shake the walls. Lola put him in his place with a single word. I saw this happen a few other times, but for the most part Lola served Ivan unquestioningly, just as Mom wanted her to. I had a hard time watching Lola vassalize herself to another person, especially someone like Ivan. But what set the stage for my blowup with Mom was something more mundane.

She used to get angry whenever Lola felt ill. She didn’t want to deal with the disruption and the expense, and would accuse Lola of faking or failing to take care of herself. Mom chose the second tack when, in the late 1970s, Lola’s teeth started falling out. She’d been saying for months that her mouth hurt.

“That’s what happens when you don’t brush properly,” Mom told her.

I said that Lola needed to see a dentist. She was in her 50s and had never been to one. I was attending college an hour away, and I brought it up again and again on my frequent trips home. A year went by, then two. Lola took aspirin every day for the pain, and her teeth looked like a crumbling Stonehenge. One night, after watching her chew bread on the side of her mouth that still had a few good molars, I lost it.

Mom and I argued into the night, each of us sobbing at different points. She said she was tired of working her fingers to the bone supporting everybody, and sick of her children always taking Lola’s side, and why didn’t we just take our goddamn Lola, she’d never wanted her in the first place, and she wished to God she hadn’t given birth to an arrogant, sanctimonious phony like me.

I let her words sink in. Then I came back at her, saying she would know all about being a phony, her whole life was a masquerade, and if she stopped feeling sorry for herself for one minute she’d see that Lola could barely eat because her goddamn teeth were rotting out of her goddamn head, and couldn’t she think of her just this once as a real person instead of a slave kept alive to serve her?

“A slave,” Mom said, weighing the word. “A slave?”

The night ended when she declared that I would never understand her relationship with Lola. Never. Her voice was so guttural and pained that thinking of it even now, so many years later, feels like a punch to the stomach. It’s a terrible thing to hate your own mother, and that night I did. The look in her eyes made clear that she felt the same way about me.

The fight only fed Mom’s fear that Lola had stolen the kids from her, and she made Lola pay for it. Mom drove her harder. Tormented her by saying, “I hope you’re happy now that your kids hate me.” When we helped Lola with housework, Mom would fume. “You’d better go to sleep now, Lola,” she’d say sarcastically. “You’ve been working too hard. Your kids are worried about you.” Later she’d take Lola into a bedroom for a talk, and Lola would walk out with puffy eyes.

Lola finally begged us to stop trying to help her.

Why do you stay? we asked.

“Who will cook?” she said, which I took to mean, Who would do everything? Who would take care of us? Of Mom? Another time she said, “Where will I go?” This struck me as closer to a real answer. Coming to America had been a mad dash, and before we caught a breath a decade had gone by. We turned around, and a second decade was closing out. Lola’s hair had turned gray. She’d heard that relatives back home who hadn’t received the promised support were wondering what had happened to her. She was ashamed to return.

She had no contacts in America, and no facility for getting around. Phones puzzled her. Mechanical things—ATMs, intercoms, vending machines, anything with a keyboard—made her panic. Fast-talking people left her speechless, and her own broken English did the same to them. She couldn’t make an appointment, arrange a trip, fill out a form, or order a meal without help.

I got Lola an ATM card linked to my bank account and taught her how to use it. She succeeded once, but the second time she got flustered, and she never tried again. She kept the card because she considered it a gift from me.

I also tried to teach her to drive. She dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand, but I picked her up and carried her to the car and planted her in the driver’s seat, both of us laughing. I spent 20 minutes going over the controls and gauges. Her eyes went from mirthful to terrified. When I turned on the ignition and the dashboard lit up, she was out of the car and in the house before I could say another word. I tried a couple more times.

I thought driving could change her life. She could go places. And if things ever got unbearable with Mom, she could drive away forever.

Four lanes became two, pavement turned to gravel. Tricycle drivers wove between cars and water buffalo pulling loads of bamboo. An occasional dog or goat sprinted across the road in front of our truck, almost grazing the bumper. Doods never eased up. Whatever didn’t make it across would be stew today instead of tomorrow—the rule of the road in the provinces.

I took out a map and traced the route to the village of Mayantoc, our destination. Out the window, in the distance, tiny figures folded at the waist like so many bent nails. People harvesting rice, the same way they had for thousands of years. We were getting close.

I tapped the cheap plastic box and regretted not buying a real urn, made of porcelain or rosewood. What would Lola’s people think? Not that many were left. Only one sibling remained in the area, Gregoria, 98 years old, and I was told her memory was failing. Relatives said that whenever she heard Lola’s name, she’d burst out crying and then quickly forget why.

I’d been in touch with one of Lola’s nieces. She had the day planned: When I arrived, a low-key memorial, then a prayer, followed by the lowering of the ashes into a plot at the Mayantoc Eternal Bliss Memorial Park. It had been five years since Lola died, but I hadn’t yet said the final goodbye that I knew was about to happen. All day I had been feeling intense grief and resisting the urge to let it out, not wanting to wail in front of Doods. More than the shame I felt for the way my family had treated Lola, more than my anxiety about how her relatives in Mayantoc would treat me, I felt the terrible heaviness of losing her, as if she had died only the day before.

Doods veered northwest on the Romulo Highway, then took a sharp left at Camiling, the town Mom and Lieutenant Tom came from. Two lanes became one, then gravel turned to dirt. The path ran along the Camiling River, clusters of bamboo houses off to the side, green hills ahead. The homestretch.

I gave the eulogy at Mom’s funeral, and everything I said was true. That she was brave and spirited. That she’d drawn some short straws, but had done the best she could. That she was radiant when she was happy. That she adored her children, and gave us a real home—in Salem, Oregon—that through the ’80s and ’90s became the permanent base we’d never had before. That I wished we could thank her one more time. That we all loved her.

I didn’t talk about Lola. Just as I had selectively blocked Lola out of my mind when I was with Mom during her last years. Loving my mother required that kind of mental surgery. It was the only way we could be mother and son—which I wanted, especially after her health started to decline, in the mid‑’90s. Diabetes. Breast cancer. Acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She went from robust to frail seemingly overnight.

After the big fight, I mostly avoided going home, and at age 23 I moved to Seattle. When I did visit I saw a change. Mom was still Mom, but not as relentlessly. She got Lola a fine set of dentures and let her have her own bedroom. She cooperated when my siblings and I set out to change Lola’s TNT status. Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration bill of 1986 made millions of illegal immigrants eligible for amnesty. It was a long process, but Lola became a citizen in October 1998, four months after my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. Mom lived another year.

During that time, she and Ivan took trips to Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, and sometimes brought Lola along. Lola loved the ocean. On the other side were the islands she dreamed of returning to. And Lola was never happier than when Mom relaxed around her. An afternoon at the coast or just 15 minutes in the kitchen reminiscing about the old days in the province, and Lola would seem to forget years of torment.

I couldn’t forget so easily. But I did come to see Mom in a different light. Before she died, she gave me her journals, two steamer trunks’ full. Leafing through them as she slept a few feet away, I glimpsed slices of her life that I’d refused to see for years. She’d gone to medical school when not many women did. She’d come to America and fought for respect as both a woman and an immigrant physician. She’d worked for two decades at Fairview Training Center, in Salem, a state institution for the developmentally disabled. The irony: She tended to underdogs most of her professional life. They worshipped her. Female colleagues became close friends. They did silly, girly things together—shoe shopping, throwing dress-up parties at one another’s homes, exchanging gag gifts like penis-shaped soaps and calendars of half-naked men, all while laughing hysterically. Looking through their party pictures reminded me that Mom had a life and an identity apart from the family and Lola. Of course.

Mom wrote in great detail about each of her kids, and how she felt about us on a given day—proud or loving or resentful. And she devoted volumes to her husbands, trying to grasp them as complex characters in her story. We were all persons of consequence. Lola was incidental. When she was mentioned at all, she was a bit character in someone else’s story. “Lola walked my beloved Alex to his new school this morning. I hope he makes new friends quickly so he doesn’t feel so sad about moving again …” There might be two more pages about me, and no other mention of Lola.

The day before Mom died, a Catholic priest came to the house to perform last rites. Lola sat next to my mother’s bed, holding a cup with a straw, poised to raise it to Mom’s mouth. She had become extra attentive to my mother, and extra kind. She could have taken advantage of Mom in her feebleness, even exacted revenge, but she did the opposite.

The priest asked Mom whether there was anything she wanted to forgive or be forgiven for. She scanned the room with heavy-lidded eyes, said nothing. Then, without looking at Lola, she reached over and placed an open hand on her head. She didn’t say a word.

Lola was 75 when she came to stay with me. I was married with two young daughters, living in a cozy house on a wooded lot. From the second story, we could see Puget Sound. We gave Lola a bedroom and license to do whatever she wanted: sleep in, watch soaps, do nothing all day. She could relax��and be free—for the first time in her life. I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.

I’d forgotten about all the things Lola did that drove me a little crazy. She was always telling me to put on a sweater so I wouldn’t catch a cold (I was in my 40s). She groused incessantly about Dad and Ivan: My father was lazy, Ivan was a leech. I learned to tune her out. Harder to ignore was her fanatical thriftiness. She threw nothing out. And she used to go through the trash to make sure that the rest of us hadn’t thrown out anything useful. She washed and reused paper towels again and again until they disintegrated in her hands. (No one else would go near them.) The kitchen became glutted with grocery bags, yogurt containers, and pickle jars, and parts of our house turned into storage for—there’s no other word for it—garbage.

She cooked breakfast even though none of us ate more than a banana or a granola bar in the morning, usually while we were running out the door. She made our beds and did our laundry. She cleaned the house. I found myself saying to her, nicely at first, “Lola, you don’t have to do that.” “Lola, we’ll do it ourselves.” “Lola, that’s the girls’ job.” Okay, she’d say, but keep right on doing it.

It irritated me to catch her eating meals standing in the kitchen, or see her tense up and start cleaning when I walked into the room. One day, after several months, I sat her down.

“I’m not Dad. You’re not a slave here,” I said, and went through a long list of slavelike things she’d been doing. When I realized she was startled, I took a deep breath and cupped her face, that elfin face now looking at me searchingly. I kissed her forehead. “This is your house now,” I said. “You’re not here to serve us. You can relax, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. And went back to cleaning.

She didn’t know any other way to be. I realized I had to take my own advice and relax. If she wanted to make dinner, let her. Thank her and do the dishes. I had to remind myself constantly: Let her be.

One night I came home to find her sitting on the couch doing a word puzzle, her feet up, the TV on. Next to her, a cup of tea. She glanced at me, smiled sheepishly with those perfect white dentures, and went back to the puzzle. Progress, I thought.

She planted a garden in the backyard—roses and tulips and every kind of orchid—and spent whole afternoons tending it. She took walks around the neighborhood. At about 80, her arthritis got bad and she began walking with a cane. In the kitchen she went from being a fry cook to a kind of artisanal chef who created only when the spirit moved her. She made lavish meals and grinned with pleasure as we devoured them.

Passing the door of Lola’s bedroom, I’d often hear her listening to a cassette of Filipino folk songs. The same tape over and over. I knew she’d been sending almost all her money—my wife and I gave her $200 a week—to relatives back home. One afternoon, I found her sitting on the back deck gazing at a snapshot someone had sent of her village.

“You want to go home, Lola?”

She turned the photograph over and traced her finger across the inscription, then flipped it back and seemed to study a single detail.

“Yes,” she said.

Just after her 83rd birthday, I paid her airfare to go home. I’d follow a month later to bring her back to the U.S.—if she wanted to return. The unspoken purpose of her trip was to see whether the place she had spent so many years longing for could still feel like home.

She found her answer.

“Everything was not the same,” she told me as we walked around Mayantoc. The old farms were gone. Her house was gone. Her parents and most of her siblings were gone. Childhood friends, the ones still alive, were like strangers. It was nice to see them, but … everything was not the same. She’d still like to spend her last years here, she said, but she wasn’t ready yet.

“You’re ready to go back to your garden,” I said.

“Yes. Let’s go home.”

Lola was as devoted to my daughters as she’d been to my siblings and me when we were young. After school, she’d listen to their stories and make them something to eat. And unlike my wife and me (especially me), Lola enjoyed every minute of every school event and performance. She couldn’t get enough of them. She sat up front, kept the programs as mementos.

It was so easy to make Lola happy. We took her on family vacations, but she was as excited to go to the farmer’s market down the hill. She became a wide-eyed kid on a field trip: “Look at those zucchinis!” The first thing she did every morning was open all the blinds in the house, and at each window she’d pause to look outside.

And she taught herself to read. It was remarkable. Over the years, she’d somehow learned to sound out letters. She did those puzzles where you find and circle words within a block of letters. Her room had stacks of word-puzzle booklets, thousands of words circled in pencil. Every day she watched the news and listened for words she recognized. She triangulated them with words in the newspaper, and figured out the meanings. She came to read the paper every day, front to back. Dad used to say she was simple. I wondered what she could have been if, instead of working the rice fields at age 8, she had learned to read and write.

During the 12 years she lived in our house, I asked her questions about herself, trying to piece together her life story, a habit she found curious. To my inquiries she would often respond first with “Why?” Why did I want to know about her childhood? About how she met Lieutenant Tom?

I tried to get my sister Ling to ask Lola about her love life, thinking Lola would be more comfortable with her. Ling cackled, which was her way of saying I was on my own. One day, while Lola and I were putting away groceries, I just blurted it out: “Lola, have you ever been romantic with anyone?” She smiled, and then she told me the story of the only time she’d come close. She was about 15, and there was a handsome boy named Pedro from a nearby farm. For several months they harvested rice together side by side. One time, she dropped her bolo—a cutting implement—and he quickly picked it up and handed it back to her. “I liked him,” she said.

Silence.

“And?”

“Then he moved away,” she said.

“And?”

“That’s all.”

“Lola, have you ever had sex?,” I heard myself saying.

“No,” she said.

She wasn’t accustomed to being asked personal questions. “Katulong lang ako,” she’d say. I’m only a servant. She often gave one- or two-word answers, and teasing out even the simplest story was a game of 20 questions that could last days or weeks.

Some of what I learned: She was mad at Mom for being so cruel all those years, but she nevertheless missed her. Sometimes, when Lola was young, she’d felt so lonely that all she could do was cry. I knew there were years when she’d dreamed of being with a man. I saw it in the way she wrapped herself around one large pillow at night. But what she told me in her old age was that living with Mom’s husbands made her think being alone wasn’t so bad. She didn’t miss those two at all. Maybe her life would have been better if she’d stayed in Mayantoc, gotten married, and had a family like her siblings. But maybe it would have been worse. Two younger sisters, Francisca and Zepriana, got sick and died. A brother, Claudio, was killed. What’s the point of wondering about it now? she asked. Bahala na was her guiding principle. Come what may. What came her way was another kind of family. In that family, she had eight children: Mom, my four siblings and me, and now my two daughters. The eight of us, she said, made her life worth living.

None of us was prepared for her to die so suddenly.

Her heart attack started in the kitchen while she was making dinner and I was running an errand. When I returned she was in the middle of it. A couple of hours later at the hospital, before I could grasp what was happening, she was gone—10:56 p.m. All the kids and grandkids noted, but were unsure how to take, that she died on November 7, the same day as Mom. Twelve years apart.

Lola made it to 86. I can still see her on the gurney. I remember looking at the medics standing above this brown woman no bigger than a child and thinking that they had no idea of the life she had lived. She’d had none of the self-serving ambition that drives most of us, and her willingness to give up everything for the people around her won her our love and utter loyalty. She’s become a hallowed figure in my extended family.

Going through her boxes in the attic took me months. I found recipes she had cut out of magazines in the 1970s for when she would someday learn to read. Photo albums with pictures of my mom. Awards my siblings and I had won from grade school on, most of which we had thrown away and she had “saved.” I almost lost it one night when at the bottom of a box I found a stack of yellowed newspaper articles I’d written and long ago forgotten about. She couldn’t read back then, but she’d kept them anyway.

Doods’s truck pulled up to a small concrete house in the middle of a cluster of homes mostly made of bamboo and plank wood. Surrounding the pod of houses: rice fields, green and seemingly endless. Before I even got out of the truck, people started coming outside.

Doods reclined his seat to take a nap. I hung my tote bag on my shoulder, took a breath, and opened the door.

“This way,” a soft voice said, and I was led up a short walkway to the concrete house. Following close behind was a line of about 20 people, young and old, but mostly old. Once we were all inside, they sat down on chairs and benches arranged along the walls, leaving the middle of the room empty except for me. I remained standing, waiting to meet my host. It was a small room, and dark. People glanced at me expectantly.“

Where is Lola?” A voice from another room. The next moment, a middle-aged woman in a housedress sauntered in with a smile. Ebia, Lola’s niece. This was her house. She gave me a hug and said again, “Where is Lola?”

I slid the tote bag from my shoulder and handed it to her. She looked into my face, still smiling, gently grasped the bag, and walked over to a wooden bench and sat down. She reached inside and pulled out the box and looked at every side. “Where is Lola?” she said softly. People in these parts don’t often get their loved ones cremated. I don’t think she knew what to expect. She set the box on her lap and bent over so her forehead rested on top of it, and at first I thought she was laughing (out of joy) but I quickly realized she was crying. Her shoulders began to heave, and then she was wailing—a deep, mournful, animal howl, like I once heard coming from Lola.

I hadn’t come sooner to deliver Lola’s ashes in part because I wasn’t sure anyone here cared that much about her. I hadn’t expected this kind of grief. Before I could comfort Ebia, a woman walked in from the kitchen and wrapped her arms around her, and then she began wailing. The next thing I knew, the room erupted with sound. The old people—one of them blind, several with no teeth—were all crying and not holding anything back. It lasted about 10 minutes. I was so fascinated that I barely noticed the tears running down my own face. The sobs died down, and then it was quiet again.

Ebia sniffled and said it was time to eat. Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench, and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where she’d been born.

----------

Alex Tizon was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. This article originally appeared in the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic and needless to say it was difficult to hold back the tears while reading this incredibly moving piece.

#alex tizon #slave #family #slavery #mother #maid

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interestingfactsquotes · 4 years

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Interesting Facts About Paraguay

Interesting Facts About Paraguay The water, trees, clouds, and ocean are just some of the natural treasures we have on this planet. Paraguay is a landlocked mass of land and country between Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. Much of the land is swampland and tropical forest. You probably can find a jaguar or two in there along with hummingbirds, toucans, and other creatures TBH. The capital is Asuncion and it is on the Paraguay River. As of 2018 the population was just under 7 Million. The climate in Paraguay is one of the most intriguing countries in South America. It is also one of the most important because of its mineral wealth. It also provides fertile land and an easy migration route to neighboring Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Because of the climate and the topography, natural disasters like floods, drought and earthquakes affect the Paraguayan population especially during the rainy season. Due to its diverse population, language and geography, Paraguay has the most diverse native language in the world. English is the most common native language of Paraguay, while Spanish, Tagalog, Lao, Creole, Lingala, Brazilian Portuguese and Haitivian are the indigenous languages. Most schools teach these languages in primary, middle and high school as part of the curriculum. This is in addition to the Latin American, English and other European languages which are commonly used in everyday life. While not many people in Paraguay speak English, there are a large number of foreigners living in the country. Paraguay Food When you consider what to eat in Paraguay, it can be tricky to narrow it down. With a variety of cuisines from Brazilian, Spanish, Peruvian, Cuban, and North American favorites, it can seem almost impossible to find one meal that satisfies all your cravings for variety. Fortunately, we are here to help. After researching the top meals and foods in Paraguay, we have put together a list of our favorite dishes from the country. In this article, we will examine the top 5 meals and foods in Paraguay. These foods are how the people get their protein, potassium, salt, magnesium, turmeric, cinnamon, and more for the day to day diet and living. While we were conducting our research, we saw that many of the culinary tours to the country would end up visiting one of the old trade markets in the capital of Asuncion. This is one of the must-see attractions in the country, and there is a reason why. The Market offers a great deal of local Paraguayan food, with a wide variety of Paraguayan fare and a few that has made it over to Brazil. Its food is hearty and is typically prepared on flat-top charcoal. On the way out of the market, we stopped for a coffee at a little cafe that sells world-famous coffee beans. Their coffee was so good that we ordered another one as soon as we returned to the hotel. Some of the top meals and foods in Paraguay include ethanol, which is a spicy soup made with beef and peppers. It is served cold and has a distinctive chile sauce. There is also a dish called mejiche, which is a bread pudding of pig's feet, served in a clay container. Lastly, churrasco, which means stew or broth, is also a popular South American dish. Its distinctive aroma, sweet and rich flavor, and high nutritional value make it very popular in the country. The last dish on our list is guinea pig with fried plantains and rice. These are our top five Paraguayan meals and foods. Because the infrastructure is very poor, most of the communications in Paraguay is through the mail system. It is possible to send letters or postcards across the country by using the postal service, with small offices called barramundis situated outside major cities. The majority of the population in Paraguay also has cell phones. Citizens do have some technology and internet, but the rate of penetration is not like that in the U.S. or South Korea or even Peru. Folks can access things like Youtube and Facebook, but it is not commonplace yet. Almost all families have two or three phones. It is important to keep in mind that communication in Paraguay is done mostly through the mail. This means that almost everyone uses the mail to receive and send packages, newspapers, magazines and other printed material. People use this method of communication primarily for social reasons, because people tend to keep their personal items in the house. It is amazing that this tiny South American country has emerged as one of the best tourist destinations in the world. As the capital city, it is considered as the "New Capital of South America" by the local authorities. The University of Chicago published research on the history of monetary and fiscal policy in Paraguay. As for the size of geography, Paraguay is a tiny territory that is divided into two regions - north and south. A peculiarity of the North and South districts is that they are not connected with each other. The people who live in both the districts are basically scattered throughout the country. Due to its small size, there are not so many tourists visiting Paraguay and hence the huge cities like Santa Cruz are very crowded. There are huge number of flights that connect Brazil and Paraguay. The majority of the flights are coming from Brazil, which is also the main destination of Paraguay's tourism. Another important fact about Paraguay is that the people here are very polite and courteous. Travelers from Europe and the United States come here to explore the beauty of the country. These tourists have experienced the culture of the country through the colorful festivals and the indigenous dances. The people here are very fond of visiting ancient cities such as Manizales and other intriguing places. A third important fact about Paraguay is that it is considered as one of the richest and most vibrant countries in South America. There is money and some residents even dabble with Bitcoin and Tezos. There are many well-known and prosperous cities that are home to some of the most progressive entrepreneurs and industries. You can get information about the major industries in the country through the local websites and news channels. Some of the key industry sectors include mining, textiles, food processing, electronics, machinery, automobile manufacturing, plastics, chemicals, forestry, construction, engineering, etc. All these industries are home to many big companies, which are supplying products to many countries all over the world. Among the interesting facts about Paraguay, you will come across that this country was founded by Spanish adventurers in 1531. The Englishman Roger Williams was among the pioneers of the colony. One of the most interesting facts about Paraguay is that this is one of the last three remaining indigenous nations that were formerly recognized by the United Nations. This has made Paraguay a member of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The country is also one of the few Latin American countries that did not secede from the United Nations after the American War of Independence. Another interesting fact about Paraguay is that the unique event that happened in this country was known as the San Borja disaster. This was a very major disaster that took place in the city of San Borja, the capital of Paraguay. The flood of the river Guarengu resulted in the death of thousands of people. Apart from its cities, Paraguay also has several mountains that are dotted with some of the finest resorts and urban development centers. Among the amazing features of the country, you will also find the Fazenda del Paraguay that is situated near the city of the same name. There are also some picturesque towns like Villa Todos Santos, Manizales, and Manizales. The tourism industry in Paraguay has blossomed, but it is the hospitality sector that has led the way. Many famous companies are based in the country, including Amharic Airlines, Domino Sugar, Abitibi-Monsieur de l'Ouest, Tierra y Mercado, REA Foods, and Tim Hortons. One of the most popular things about Paraguay is the absence of the prevalence of guns. Instead, the population has become much more aware of firearms due to the continuous existence of some of the deadliest forest fires in the world. As a result of this aspect, Paraguay has also emerged as a destination for vacationers. In case you are planning your next trip to Paraguay, read more about the most important fact about Paraguay! https://youtu.be/8wbNEJjBa0k https://youtu.be/0OCmMPVAc8o Read the full article

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top40gordy · 5 years

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https://getpocket.com/explore/item/my-family-s-slave?utm_source=pocket-newtab

This article was originally published on May 16, 2017, by The Atlantic, and is republished at https://getpocket.com/explore/item/my-family-s-slave?utm_source=pocket-newtab with permission. That is where this blogger viewed it on September 14, 2019 and shared it on Tumblr.com.

Pocket Worthy·

Stories to fuel your mind.

My Family’s Slave

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The Atlantic | Alex Tizon

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family.

After my mother died of leukemia, in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs—the American dream. And then I had a slave.

***

Early the next morning I found a driver, an affable middle-aged man who went by the nickname “Doods,” and we hit the road in his truck, weaving through traffic. The scene always stunned me. The sheer number of cars and motorcycles and jeepneys. The people weaving between them and moving on the sidewalks in great brown rivers. The street vendors in bare feet trotting alongside cars, hawking cigarettes and cough drops and sacks of boiled peanuts. The child beggars pressing their faces against the windows.

Lola agreed, not grasping that the deal was for life.

“She is my gift to you,” Lieutenant Tom told my mother.

“I don’t want her,” my mother said, knowing she had no choice.

Lola Pulido (shown on the left at age 18) came from a poor family in a rural part of the Philippines. The author’s grandfather “gave” her to his daughter as a gift.

My mother, in recounting this story late in her life, delighted in the outrageousness of it, her tone seeming to say, Can you believe I did that? When I brought it up with Lola, she asked to hear Mom’s version. She listened intently, eyes lowered, and afterward, she looked at me with sadness and said simply, “Yes. It was like that.”

Lola at age 27 with Arthur, the author’s older brother, before coming to the U.S.

***

My parents had borrowed money for the move to the U.S. and then borrowed more in order to stay. My father was transferred from the consulate general in L.A. to the Philippine consulate in Seattle. He was paid $5,600 a year. He took a second job cleaning trailers, and a third as a debt collector. Mom got work as a technician in a couple of medical labs. We barely saw them, and when we did they were often exhausted and snappish.

L: Lola raised the author (left) and his siblings and was sometimes the only adult at home for days at a time. R: The author (second from the left) with his parents, siblings, and Lola five years after they arrived in the U.S.

“Do you know anybody treated the way she’s treated?” Arthur said. “Who lives the way she lives?” He summed up Lola’s reality: Wasn’t paid. Toiled every day. Was tongue-lashed for sitting too long or falling asleep too early. Was struck for talking back. Wore hand-me-downs. Ate scraps and leftovers by herself in the kitchen. Rarely left the house. Had no friends or hobbies outside the family. Had no private quarters. (Her designated place to sleep in each house we lived in was always whatever was left—a couch or storage area or corner in my sisters’ bedroom. She often slept among piles of laundry.)

“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said.

“Are you defending your Lola?,” Dad said. “Is that what you’re doing?”

“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said again, almost in a whisper.

To now hear her wailing made me crazy.

***

In the old country, my parents felt no need to hide their treatment of Lola. In America, they treated her worse but took pains to conceal it. When guests came over, my parents would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change the subject. For five years in North Seattle, we lived across the street from the Missler's, a rambunctious family of eight who introduced us to things like mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during football. Lola would come out to serve food and drinks during games, and my parents would smile and thank her before she quickly disappeared. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?,” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.

When I once referred to Lola as a distant aunt, Billy reminded me that when we’d first met I’d said she was my grandmother.

“Well, she’s kind of both,” I said mysteriously.

“Why is she always working?”

“She likes to work,” I said.

“Your dad and mom—why do they yell at her?”

“Her hearing isn’t so good …”

Lola at age 51, in 1976. Her mother died a few years before this picture was taken; her father a few years after. Both times, she wanted desperately to go home.

After each of her parents died, Lola was sullen and silent for months. She barely responded when my parents badgered her. But the badgering never let up. Lola kept her head down and did her work.

***

For days in a row, Lola would be the only adult in the house. She got to know the details of our lives in a way that my parents never had the mental space for. We brought friends home, and she’d listen to us talk about school and girls and boys and whatever else was on our minds. Just from conversations she overheard, she could list the first name of every girl I had a crush on from sixth grade through high school.

***

Rice fields in Mayantoc, near where Lola was born.

***

My sister Inday and I were floored. Ivan was about 250 pounds, and his baritone could shake the walls. Lola put him in his place with a single word. I saw this happen a few other times, but for the most part, Lola served Ivan unquestioningly, just as Mom wanted her to. I had a hard time watching Lola vassalize herself to another person, especially someone like Ivan. But what set the stage for my blowup with Mom was something more mundane.

She used to get angry whenever Lola felt ill. She didn’t want to deal with the disruption and the expense and would accuse Lola of faking or failing to take care of herself. Mom chose the second tack when, in the late 1970s, Lola’s teeth started falling out. She’d been saying for months that her mouth hurt.

“That’s what happens when you don’t brush properly,” Mom told her.

“A slave,” Mom said, weighing the word. “A slave?”

Lola finally begged us to stop trying to help her.

Why do you stay? we asked.

She had no contacts in America and no facility for getting around. Phones puzzled her. Mechanical things—ATMs, intercoms, vending machines, anything with a keyboard—made her panic. Fast-talking people left her speechless, and her own broken English did the same to them. She couldn’t make an appointment, arrange a trip, fill out a form, or order a meal without help.

I thought driving could change her life. She could go places. And if things ever got unbearable with Mom, she could drive away forever.

***

L: Lola and the author in 2008. R: The author with Lola’s sister Gregoria.

***

I gave the eulogy at Mom’s funeral, and everything I said was true. That she was brave and spirited. That she’d drawn some short straws but had done the best she could. That she was radiant when she was happy. That she adored her children and gave us a real home—in Salem, Oregon—that through the ’80s and ’90s became the permanent base we’d never had before. That I wished we could thank her one more time. That we all loved her.

***

Lola was 75 when she came to stay with me. I was married with two young daughters, living in a cozy house on a wooded lot. From the second story, we could see Puget Sound. We gave Lola a bedroom and license to do whatever she wanted: sleep in, watch soaps, do nothing all day. She could relax—and be free—for the first time in her life. I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.

It irritated me to catch her eating meals standing in the kitchen, or see her tense up and start cleaning when I walked into the room. One day, after several months, I sat her down.

“I’m not Dad. You’re not a slave here,” I said, and went through a long list of slave-like things she’d been doing. When I realized she was startled, I took a deep breath and cupped her face, that elfin face now looking at me searchingly. I kissed her forehead. “This is your house now,” I said. “You’re not here to serve us. You can relax, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. And went back to cleaning.

She planted a garden in the backyard—roses and tulips and every kind of orchid—and spent whole afternoons tending it. She took walks around the neighborhood. At about 80, her arthritis got bad and she began walking with a cane. In the kitchen, she went from being a fry cook to a kind of artisanal chef who created only when the spirit moved her. She made lavish meals and grinned with pleasure as we devoured them.

“You want to go home, Lola?”

She turned the photograph over and traced her finger across the inscription, then flipped it back and seemed to study a single detail.

“Yes,” she said.

She found her answer.

“You’re ready to go back to your garden,” I said.

“Yes. Let’s go home.”

L: Lola returned to the Philippines for an extended visit after her 83rd birthday. R: Lola with her sister Juliana, reunited after 65 years.

***

And she taught herself to read. It was remarkable. Over the years, she’d somehow learned to sound out letters. She did those puzzles where you find and circle words within a block of letters. Her room had stacks of word-puzzle booklets, thousands of words circled in pencil. Every day she watched the news and listened for words she recognized. She triangulated them with words in the newspaper and figured out the meanings. She came to read the paper every day, front to back. Dad used to say she was simple. I wondered what she could have been if, instead of working the rice fields at age 8, she had learned to read and write.

Lola at age 82.

During the 12 years she lived in our house, I asked her questions about herself, trying to piece together her life story, a habit she found curious. To my inquiries, she would often respond first with “Why?” Why did I want to know about her childhood? About how she met Lieutenant Tom?

Silence.

“And?”

“Then he moved away,” she said.

“And?”

“That’s all.”

“Lola, have you ever had sex?,” I heard myself saying.

“No,” she said.

None of us was prepared for her to die so suddenly.

Her heart attack started in the kitchen while she was making dinner and I was running an errand. When I returned she was in the middle of it. A couple of hours later at the hospital, before I could grasp what was happening, she was gone—10:56 p.m. All the kids and grandkids noted but were unsure how to take, that she died on November 7, the same day as Mom. Twelve years apart.

The site of Lola’s childhood home.

***

Doods reclined his seat to take a nap. I hung my tote bag on my shoulder, took a breath, and opened the door.

“Where is Lola?” A voice from another room. The next moment, a middle-aged woman in a housedress sauntered in with a smile. Ebia, Lola’s niece. This was her house. She gave me a hug and said again, “Where is Lola?”

Lola’s gravesite.

Ebia sniffled and said it was time to eat. Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where she’d been born.

Alex Tizon passed away in March. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. For more about Alex, please see this editor’s note from The Atlantic. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/a-reporters-story/524538/)

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/my-family-s-slave?utm_source=pocket-newtab

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socialjusticeartshare · 4 years

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COVID-19 Cases at One Texas Immigration Detention Center Soared in a Matter of Days. Now, Town Leaders Want Answers.

Coronavirus infections continue to rise at migrant detention facilities in towns with limited resources. Some local governments want details on what’s being done to safeguard the public.

It was a historic occasion for the South Texas town of Pearsall when officials broke ground in 2004 on what would become one of the country’s largest immigration detention centers.

Not only would it help improve border security, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said then, it would also bring employment to the small rural community, about 60 miles from San Antonio. Hundreds of good jobs for a region that desperately needed them.

But now, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread inside immigration detention centers, local leaders here in an extraordinary move have called on the company that runs the center, the GEO Group, to publicly explain itself. They say the company has not been transparent, and has failed to respond to emails and letters seeking answers to a simple question: What is the GEO Group doing to prevent the virus outbreak inside the privately owned facility from creeping into their community?

The leaders have invited company officials to attend the Frio County commissioners meeting Monday and sent a list of 20 detailed questions, ranging from what safeguards are in place to protect employees and detainees to how it can make the information more readily available to the community.

This story is part of a collaboration between ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. Learn more

“We did our part, we financed their construction. Now it’s time to hold them accountable, to help us,” said Jose Asuncion, a recently elected county commissioner who over the years has been pushing for more transparency in the for-profit detention industry.

“For many of us, this could be a matter of life and death,” a group of nine area elected officials and a candidate, including Asuncion, wrote in the open letter to the GEO Group on May 5.

The letter was drafted before the number of confirmed cases inside the South Texas ICE Processing Center jumped from seven to 31 detainees, as of Friday. Seven employees have also been infected.

ICE said there were 900 detainees in custody in Pearsall last week.

Outside the center, Frio County, with a population of about 19,000, reports only two confirmed COVID-19 cases.

“This is an example of how things can quickly get out of hand if the virus gets transported into our community,” Frio County Attorney Joseph Sindon said. “We were at zero cases two weeks ago.”

The GEO Group says that it has been in communication with local leaders, although it didn’t specify who, and that it has taken steps to mitigate the risks. “We take our responsibility to ensure the health and safety of all those in our care and our employees with the utmost seriousness,” the company said in a statement Friday, adding that it would continue to work with the federal government and local officials to develop COVID-19 emergency plans and testing policies and to procure supplies for staff and detainees.

Nationwide, there are nearly 800 confirmed cases inside immigration detention centers. More than 1 in 4 of those cases are in Texas.

But the number is likely higher as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has tested only about 5% of its detained population. More than half of those have tested positive.

Most detained migrants are held in privately owned facilities, which have come under fire for allegations of poor treatment and conditions. Among those owners is Florida-based GEO Group, which generated $2.4 billion in revenue in 2019 and has been a big donor to federal, state and local candidates, primarily Republicans, and GOP political action committees, records show.

In response to the pandemic, ICE says it’s taking steps to minimize the spread of the virus. It has limited some arrests, suspended social visits and released more than 900 detainees since March who might be vulnerable.

Transfers between immigration facilities and from local jails, many dealing with their own outbreaks, continue, though, contrary to CDC recommendations. Between March 1 and April 25, ICE reported more than 3,300 immigrants arrested by local law enforcement were then turned over to the federal agency, including some sent to Pearsall, according to detainees and lawyers.

Advocates, elected officials and medical professionals say what ICE is doing hasn’t been enough, and cite the agency’s poor track record containing infectious disease. They continue to call for the release of migrants in custody, especially those with underlying health conditions.

The first death due to COVID-19 inside an immigration detention center was reported Wednesday. The victim was a 57-year-old Salvadoran man held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in California, where 139 detainees have so far tested positive, by far the largest cluster across the country.

Asuncion said he decided to make the letter to GEO public in response to constituents’ concerns that the county government was not giving them answers.

He expected to be the only leader to sign the letter, Asuncion said last week. “By the time I emailed the draft of the letter, everybody had a sense that the situation was only going to get worse, and they didn’t want to seem like they didn’t do or say anything early on.”

“We can no longer sit back and wait for tragedy to occur, action must be taken now! What we want is simple answers and to be proactive as a whole,” Ramiro Treviño, a candidate for the Frio County Commissioners Court, posted on Facebook May 6 after learning of 15 additional cases inside the center. “Please pray for each and every individual affected by this.”

His post was followed by an “Amen,” from Davina Treviño Rodriguez, a Pearsall City Council member, who offered her own prayer.

One of the Better Employers

When GEO’s predecessor, the Correctional Services Corporation, got the contract for the Pearsall center in 2004, officials sold it as a way to bring jobs. The 230,000-square-foot facility built on a former farm field would employ 300 people and have an annual payroll of about $6.2 million.

A prospective applicant needed only to be at least 21 and have a high school diploma or GED and no serious criminal record. Entry-level security wages would be in the $12-an-hour range, they said.

The center would also generate hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for the school district. Frio County issued a $49 million bond to finance construction, reported the local newspaper, the Frio-Nueces Current.

For the company, it meant annual revenues of about $21.7 million, according to news reports.

The center opened in 2005 with a capacity of about 1,000 men and women. A year later, it added 884 detainees and another $11.3 million annually in operating revenue.

Under a 2011 contract, GEO expected annual revenue of $45 million with a 75% occupancy guarantee from ICE, a news release from the company said.

Frio County is about 80% Hispanic and has a median household income of $42,000, about 30% below the national median, according to the U.S. Census. About 1 in 5 people live below the poverty level. Very few have a college degree. The economy revolves mostly around agribusiness, oil and hunting.

The South Texas ICE Processing Center became one of the better employers in the community, said Sindon, the Frio County attorney.

“You can hardly find a family that doesn’t have someone that works there,” he said.

Frio County, like many communities in Texas, is the type of place where prisons are seen as the solution “to most, if not all of our problems,” said Asuncion, 39, who lives in Dilley. That town also has a large detention center, run by CoreCivic, another giant in the for-profit detention business.

“We look at them for safety, we look at them as economic saviors,” he said.

Asuncion was raised in Chicago and lived in Los Angeles before moving to Dilley to take care of his grandmother eight years ago. Immediately he became interested in the for-profit detention center visible from his home and started asking questions. He even did a short stint as a local reporter, and said he was stonewalled in his efforts to get information.

He said he’s tried reaching out to officials at the Pearsall facility directly about the outbreak, leaving messages and sending emails to the addresses he has. “But at a certain point you say I shouldn’t be chasing these guys down in this situation, I’m a commissioner.”

Other large ICE detention centers in the country are operated by LaSalle Corrections, Management & Training Corp. and Immigration Centers of America. Nine of the 10 facilities in Texas with positive cases of COVID-19 are owned by one of these corporations.

The GEO Group grew from a division of a private security firm to an international giant operating detention centers in several countries, including 67 in the United States with about 75,000 beds.

Over the years, these for-profit companies have given millions to candidates and groups that support them.

The GEO Group spent over $1.5 million on lobbying in 2019, according to lobbying disclosures. About a quarter of their business went to Ballard Partners, which continues to lobby the White House and the Department of Homeland Security on GEO’s behalf to promote the use of private prison and detention centers.

So far in the 2020 election cycle, the GEO Group’s PAC has given $100,000 to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee for the Trump campaign and other Republicans. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the number of immigrants in detention had reached an all-time high under President Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-immigration platform.

Texas politicians are also among the beneficiaries. During the current cycle, the GEO Group’s PAC has given $5,000 to Sen. Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and $9,700 to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo.

While its last inspection in February by an ICE contractor found it to be in compliance, as with other detention centers across the country, the South Texas ICE Processing Center has had a checkered history.

Detainees have complained and sued after claiming that staff repeatedly placed them into isolation. Human rights reports have documented allegations of sexual abuse and cited the facility in reports documenting the high number of recent deaths inside ICE detention facilities.

On its website, the GEO Group emphasizes one of the company’s core values is that “every human being should be treated with dignity and that his or her basic human rights should be respected and preserved at all times.”

Hunger Strikes by Detainees. Confrontations with Guards.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread in March, so did confrontations between detainees and guards.

Inside the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, migrants clashed with guards over what they called unsafe conditions, demanding to be released. The unrest led to a standoff in which guards shot pepper spray at the detainees. Nine immigrants were held on disciplinary charges.

There weren’t any reported COVID-19 cases then, but soon they started trickling in and the more positives were reported inside the detention centers, the more detainees feared they would be next.

Over the last couple of months, half a dozen asylum seekers have told ProPublica/Texas Tribune about not having enough cleaning supplies, masks and gloves, their inability to stay the recommended six feet apart, holding those who test positive together in rooms with poor ventilation and hygiene they say have helped spread the virus.

Kathrine Russell, an attorney with the immigrant legal services group RAICES, said GEO has recently started to take additional steps at the South Texas center, including issuing detainees masks. “Measures that they should have taken from the beginning,” she said. “If they had, we might not be in the situation we are now.”

There have been at least five hunger strikes inside the Pearsall facility, detainees say — some to demand more information, others to call for more testing as migrants in their units came down with the virus.

In a city besieged, undocumented New Yorkers have been left outside public measures to help those impacted by the spread of the coronavirus. Instead, they weigh impossible choices: medical help and exposure, safety or sustenance.

A man who was transferred from the Bexar County jail said he believed the outbreak at Pearsall began with someone who had been taken there from the jail. More than 300 inmates and 55 staff members there have contracted the virus since March.

“My question to the officers is why did they keep bringing people from Bexar if they knew they were infected?” said one detainee, who asked that his name not be used fearing retaliation. Between March 1 and April 25, 174 people were transferred from Bexar County to ICE facilities.

Detainees in Pearsall said they at times were given false information about positive cases. On one occasion, staff had said they had nothing to worry about, before returning days later to confirm that one of the men in their unit had tested positive.

In an April earnings release, GEO’s CEO, George Zoley, said that his company has worked to procure safety supplies, do temperature checks and follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, and that all of its facilities have “access to regular hand-washing with clean water and soap, round-the-clock healthcare, and typically have approximately double the number of healthcare staff, compared to state correctional facilities.”

But this is contrary to what multiple detainees and their advocates from facilities across the country continue to report, including in lawsuits and complaints.

“It’s been horrible,” said Yanet Cabrera, whose 54-year-old mother was recently transferred from Pearsall to another detention center in Laredo. “I can’t stop thinking that she can get sick, that I can lose her in there and I have no way of helping her.”

There are no known cases in the center where her mother is now, but Cabrera said she wasn’t tested before leaving the South Texas facility.

Disappointment. Fear. Concern.

Even with claims of precautions in place, Pearsall and Frio County officials and residents say they remain concerned.

“Anybody following this and listening to experts knows large groups of people in close proximity creates the possibility for a firestorm of cases,” said Sindon, the county attorney.

He sighs when asked about the latest number of confirmed cases inside the Pearsall facility. He feels “disappointment, fear, concern for our community,” he said. “The detainees can’t leave, but the guards certainly can. We have to hope GEO is taking appropriate steps.”

The entire county only has three ventilators and 48 hospital beds. A model from researchers in the U.S. and Canada, including Traci Green, an epidemiologist at Brandeis University, estimated that the South Texas ICE Processing Center could have up to 1,345 detainees contract the virus over 90 days under the most optimistic scenario. In a yet to be published article in the Journal of Urban Health, a peer-reviewed publication that focuses on urban health and epidemiology, the group’s model projected that between 72% and nearly 100% of ICE detainees could contract the virus in a 90-day period given conditions inside the centers and average populations.

“The real challenge is that once it starts in a closed space, it’s likely to spread very quickly,” Green said, “and will advance where a certain portion of the population will need hospitalization and ICU admissions,” a local community hospital will need to accommodate.

The other county and city leaders who signed the letter didn’t return calls, emails or requests for comment via social media, including the mayor of Pearsall, where the center is located.

Frio County Judge Arnulfo Luna also wrote a letter to the GEO Group administrator who runs the Pearsall facility “to implore” him to keep workers and detainees safe, especially given the county’s inability to regulate the center’s employees and contractors.

“As you know the employees and contractors who work at your facility live in the surrounding Frio County communities of Pearsall, Dilley, Moore and Derby,” Luna wrote. “The citizens that make up these communities are increasingly concerned that the high risk of exposure to those inside of your facility will lead to an outbreak outside of it, and our communities will be put at greater risk.” As of Friday, county officials said they had not received a response.

GEO Group said it will provide a “comprehensive response to the county detailing the steps we have taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a responsible community partner, we make ourselves available to provide information to the communities we serve.”

“This is the first time I really ever noticed the city and county taking a critical view of the detention center,” said Russell, the attorney with clients in Pearsall. “Which I think in some ways is probably good.”

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#immigrant children #detainment centers #covid-19 #coronavirus

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phgq · 5 years

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Oplan TABANG hauls gov't services to far-flung Asuncion communities

#PHinfo: Oplan TABANG hauls gov't services to far-flung Asuncion communities

Governor Jubahib (standing fourth from right) at the Oplan Tabang Carvan in Asunciom town.

DAVAO DEL NORTE, October 2 (PIA) - The Provincial Government of Davao del Norte through the Oplan TABANG hauled various government services particularly medical check, dental care, legal services, agriculture services including fruit tree seedlings and fish fingerlings, among others to far-flung communities of the Asuncion town. Said local government pushes Oplan TABANG as its primary initiative in pursuit of local implementation of Executive Order No. 70 to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (ELCAC).

Noting the wide land areas in KAMADI District, Davao del Norte Governor Jubahib informed residents of his drive to make use of idle lands for planting of high value crops such as coffee, cacao, abaca, banana and even corn and vegetables.

Jubahib has started this drive in the domains of Ata-Manobos in the municipality of Talaingod. He is providing the necessary seedlings.

“Ang tanang kayutaan atong tam-nan unsa ang pwede matanom. (We will make us of all lands whatever we can plant.) ” he said. “Basta may itanom naa tay anihon. (We would something to reap if we have planted.)” he said expressing the scenario of having such idle lands stay useless along with the aging of the owners.

Aside from direct services, Jubahib informed the public of the on-going road works that the Provincial Engineering Office is undertaking to open access roads down to puroks in all barangays.

He shared his optimistic projection that the barangay road to Sonlon would soon be converted to provincial and eventually to national road as this leads to the Municipality of Laak in Davao de Oro province and Sonlon connects to nearby towns of Kapalong, New Corella, San Isidro going to the City of Tagum.

However, Jubahib banked on the cooperation and support of all local government chief executives from district Congressional offices down to barangay level under the one call for “One Team, One DavNor”.

Aside from hauling services from provincial offices and national line agencies, Provincial Governor Edwin Jubahib reminded people in the peripheral areas of Asuncion Municipality of their responsibilities as citizens.

Jubahib reminded his audiences during the Oplan TABANG opening programme in Barangay Sonlon in the KAMADI District of Asuncion, to pay their taxes citing that these are sources of free services that the government is delivering to them.

“Mao nay balik sa inyong taxes; pero nagbayad ba mo sa inyong taxes? (These are the returns of your taxes but have you paid your taxes?),” he raised the question while citing free government services particularly medicine and hospitalization which he made them aware of during the Oplan TABANG sortie for the barangays Kamansa, Binansian, Buan and Sonlon in KAMADI District of Asuncion.

He urged them to also pay the necessary taxes to sustain the free medicine and hospitalization program run in the three Provincial District Hospitals of Kapalong, Carmen and Island Garden City of Samal, including the salary of government doctors, nurses and employees of the district hospitals.

He cautioned the public from paying drivers of government ambulances as this would run contrary to the policy that his administration is pushing to unload the poor and underprivileged from the burden of paying hospital bills.

“Ingna si Kapitan, si Mayor. Isumbong nako kung naay magpabayad. (Tell Kapitan, the Mayor. Tell me who are those asking charges.), ” he said. (PIA XI/Jeanevive Duron Abangan)

***

References:

* Philippine Information Agency. "Oplan TABANG hauls gov't services to far-flung Asuncion communities." Philippine Information Agency. https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1028188 (accessed October 03, 2019 at 05:04AM UTC+08).

* Philippine Infornation Agency. "Oplan TABANG hauls gov't services to far-flung Asuncion communities." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1028188 (archived).

#Philippines #News #Filipino #Pinoy #Tourism #Politics #Culture #Editorial #Environment #Society #History

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touromania · 2 years

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Don't Do This In Asuncion | Paraguay

Don’t Do This In Asuncion | Paraguay

BEST HOTEL DEALS IN ASUNCION Understanding Asuncion Asuncion is located in South America’s biggest city. It is home to more than half a million residents. During the weekend the city center is deserted. It is the capital of South America’s biggest city. It is located on the eastern bank of the River Paraguay, near the confluence of the Pilcomayo River and the Occidental Region’s Bay. The city…

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trekwithtaylor · 7 years

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Country #30 - Paraguay

Relaxing

It was a good thing that I went to sleep so early last night because I had another early morning today. I took an exorbitantly expensive hourlong Uber to the airport, so I don’t recommend using Uber in Montevideo or in Uruguay in general. The airport itself was really modern and had cool seating inside. I waited a short while before boarding and then had a painless flight to Asuncion, Paraguay. Upon my arrival, I took an official airport taxi for the thirty-minute drive to my hotel, Hotel Le Moustier.

I was really excited for my stay at Hotel Le Moustier because I was able to meet my first "fan," Meli! She wants to work in travel and to travel more, and she emailed me when she heard about my journey. It was so great and exciting to meet her in person! I can't thank Meli enough for reaching out to me so early in my planning process - it was so encouraging! I got to meet her upon my arrival which was really exciting!

Meli helped me to my room where I was excited to shower and rest for a bit. My room was really nice and next to a balcony overlooking the heart of Hotel Le Moustier. I spent my day a bit differently than I had wanted to, no thanks to LATAM airlines. After my first bad experience with the airline where they stole $100 from my luggage flying from La Paz to Santiago and not caring, they were now charging me twice for my flight tomorrow. And it is a pretty expensive one, so I had to spend unfortunately a few hours sorting that out. Thanks to LATAM for again being the worst!

It was nice, though, once I decided to stay in Hotel Le Moustier for the day to just have a day to relax. And Hotel Le Moustier was a great place to do so. I cannot thank Hotel Le Moustier enough for sponsoring this night of my stay! It’s a picturesque place and it was really enjoyable to spend the day there. I had a really yummy lasagne for lunch out on the patio which was really nice with the perfect sunny weather. Afterwards, I headed to my room to spend some time working on things. Another thing keeping me from the heart of the city was the lack of transportation options. I would have been able to take a taxi from my hotel, but I was a bit apprehensive about then being able to find a reliable taxi back to the hotel from town.

While I definitely wish I could have seen more of Paraguay and Asuncion specifically, I had a really great day anyway. I loved being able to enjoy Hotel Le Moustier and also getting to know the people who worked there. It was really great finally meeting Meli too! Sometimes you just need a day to catch up on things, and while I wasn’t really planning on that being today it was definitely a welcome change of pace for a day. Especially before my busy day tomorrow. I cannot wait to visit Iguazu Falls!!!

30 countries down, 167 to go.

For more information on Paraguay click here to read my guide.

To learn more about Hotel Le Moustier click here.

#Asuncion #Paraguay #Le Moustier Suites #Country 30

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zillowcondo · 7 years

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The Vintners’ Vision : The Burbank Ranch Estate Vineyard and Winery

To those who have lived and worked in Southern or Northern California, and traveled by car to or from San Francisco, Los Angeles or San Diego, there is a stretch of coastline halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco called the Central Coast. And somehow, very much like any quiet stretch between big cities, the Central Coast was left alone for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. What WAS there, and what made this area somewhat better known in the 1920s, was the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, built by William Randolph Hearst, for his lady friend, Marion Davies. Oh, the scandal. Watch Citizen Kane to discover more.

Hearst Castle, near the town of San Simeon, Central Coast California

But even back then, and for years after, the quiet of the hills, the sound of the surf and the Elephant Seals was not interrupted by the sound of tractors and concrete mixers, except for the construction of gas stations, diners and maybe a motel here and there. Today, though, this area is more populated with beach towns, but still, not metropolises.

Vineyard/Winery Signs near Templeton, California

Yet, east of Highway 1, over the first range of central coast mountains, is an area that feels like Tuscany – full of olive trees, aromatic lavender, and now, a lot of grapes. The vineyards wineries in and around the larger city of Paso Robles, and the smaller town of Templeton, have seduced many connoisseurs to take the 2-3 hour drive down from San Francisco, Napa and Sonoma, and up from Los Angeles to see the vineyards, taste the olive oil, and drink the wines of this area.

Burbank Ranch Winery & Bistro, near the Tasting Room

One of the youngest and most awarded is the Burbank Ranch Estate Vineyard and Winery. Though a young vineyard, the land and soil was part of a larger land grant holding, Rancho La Asuncion, that had been subdivided through a survey back in 1886.

Sunrise At The Vineyard

Traveling through the gates of Burbank Ranch Estate Vineyard and Winery, up the drive, there is a sense of quiet, balance, and harmony. Eucalyptus, Pampas grass, white and live oak, olive trees and lavender all surround the silent, yet green, nearly tangible growth of the 45 acres of grape vines.

Pampas Grass and Vineyard Grapes at Burbank Ranch

Burbank Ranch is an 83.5-acre parcel located in the El Pomar District of Templeton (within the Paso Robles AVA.) The property has panoramic views of the Salinas Valley, the Santa Lucia Mountains, and oak-lined seasonal creeks. The gently rolling hills of Templeton can be viewed from every vantage point on the ranch. The nearby Templeton Gap in the Santa Lucia Mountains – between the Pacific Ocean and Templeton – allows cool Pacific Ocean air to flow nightly into the Ranch, which is approximately 26 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and between 1020 and 1125 feet above sea level.

The Peace Of The Land and the Vineyards, Burbank Ranch

We were here a week before harvest, when Fred and Melody Burbank were riding their Kubota RTV between grape blocks in the vineyard, assessing their growth and health, deciding which to pick first.

Fred Burbank In His Kubota RTV, In The Vineyard

The soil is well fertilized and watered, and the grapes, picked in small bunches have a wild, vivid taste. At harvest, all the fruit will be hand-picked, and picking starts long before sunrise, as the pre-dawn light is enough for the workers, often including Fred and Melody, to see the grape clusters. Then, after picking, the fruit is immediately taken to the winery for hand sorting, crushing, and fermenting.

Freshly Picked Fruit

This commitment to creating something living, personal, and meaningful are the root systems of the Burbank Estate Wine brand. And the wines themselves have been honored by multiple awards, those that take other vineyards decades to win. We met and discussed these and other issues that contemporary vintners often face when we interviewed Fred and Melody:

Fred And Melody Burbank, In the Tasting Room, Burbank Ranch

Pursuitist: As regards you both, this was not your first profession. I am curious as to how you made the transition from medical doctor and marketing professional to successful vintners. Burbank Ranch Estate Vineyard and Winery is the culmination of a vision that both that you and Melody had. How did that vision emerge?

Products Of The Original Vision

Fred: I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska – a medium sized Midwest city surrounded by farmland. That countryside always seemed peaceful to me. Furthermore, the seasonal cycle of planting, growing, harvesting, and winter dormancy was a natural clock, one that ran at a human pace. Reflecting this environment, by 3rd or 4th grade children in Omaha had all learned many of the principles of farming: crop rotation, contour plowing, aquifers, and the like. After leaving Nebraska, I lived exclusively in cities or suburbs – with no surrounding farmlands. I missed open spaces, farms, and seasons.

Fred In The Vineyard.

Melody: Five generations of my family lived on small farms in the San Joaquin Valley. My grandfather retired from the Los Angeles police force to a little ranch in northeastern San Fernando Valley. Grandpa grew fruit trees and vegetables. I loved that country life and wanted a return to it.

Pursuitist: What made you choose the Central California area in contrast to the more popular Napa/Sonoma area? What attracted you to the Central Coast region?

Fred: When I made the transition from clinical practice to full-time medical device development, Melody and I had a bit of free time. We used that time to visit the two well-known wine grape-growing regions in California: the Napa Valley and Sonoma. Although Napa and Sonoma were charming they were a bit overdeveloped and fancy for me. For whatever reason, they did not feel right.

Melody: When we went to dinner in Napa at a well-known high-end restaurant, Fred showed up without a proper tie and jacket. He had to borrow both from the restaurant. You can picture how much he liked that. Then the food came. He maintains that his dinner consisted of one pea on a huge white plate with a drizzle of purple something or other splashed around it. I think he asked the waiter for additional bread a dozen times. Maybe more. The restaurant was definitely not our kind of place. We were seeking something, like what Napa and Sonoma were 40 years ago, not now.

Pursuitist: How did you find the land that was to become Burbank Ranch?

Fred: When our youngest child, Noah, started college at Stanford in Palo Also, we began driving up to the Bay Area from Laguna Niguel to visit him. To break up the drive, we often stopped in Paso Robles – a good halfway point.

When we arrived there in the early afternoon, we toured wineries. Unlike Napa or Sonoma, Paso still had a country feel to it. It was possible to drive by a ranch and find a pickup truck up on concrete blocks with someone crawling under to fix a leak or replace an oil filter. It reminded me of rural Nebraska.

The Vineyard In Pacific Coast Fog

Melody: The rolling hills on the eastern side of Paso Robles captured me. Vineyards were present, but undeveloped ranch land was everywhere. Rather than purchasing an existing vineyard, we decided to build our own from the ground up. I had looked at many vineyards and lots of land and when we saw our property I knew it was the one. I felt peaceful and serene and I knew we had arrived.

Pursuitist: How did development proceed?

Fred: We chose a property on El Pomar Drive. El Pomar means “orchard” in Spanish, reflecting the past when orchards had been planted in our area.

I wish I could say that we planned it all oh-so-carefully in advance, but we didn’t. Each step led to the next, and here we are today with 45 acres of planted wine grapes, an estate home, and a guest house, a barn, a working winery and tasting room.

Main Residence In Front With Lap Pool, Winery And Tasting Room Behind.

Pursuitist: What are your favorite times of the day at the Vineyard?

Melody: I like early mornings and late afternoons best because the lighting is best for picture taking. I never tire of seeing the sun come up, shining light across the vines. Similarly, each sunset over the Santa Lucia Mountains seems more beautiful than the last. I never miss the sunset. I also like the nighttime because you can see so many stars.

Fred: I like midday. In the summer it is generally hot at noon, just perfect for swimming laps in the pool.

Pursuitist: As regards the Central Coast area, it is becoming a popular wine, and olive growing area now. When you bought the land that would eventually become Burbank Ranch, could you see the growth possibilities of the region? Or was this a surprise?

Fred: By the time we purchased our property in 2008 wineries in Paso Robles had already proven that they could produce world-class wines from grapes grown in Paso. In fact, in 2013 Paso Robles was named the “Wine Region of the Year” by the Wine Enthusiast magazine. The award was given to Paso because it exhibited positive “…spirit and can-do positivity … it’s the region to watch.”

Veraison Early Grapes

Melody: In reflection, I guess I could see the growth possibilities because there’s so much land available and the wines coming from Paso are really good. Furthermore, because the Paso wine scene is relatively new, it’s not gotten stuck in a niche like Napa Cabernet. Paso lends itself to Bordeaux style grapes, Rhone style grapes and many others. That aspect of the area is very appealing for someone who wants to get into the wine business.

Did I anticipate that it would grow with more vineyards and olive orchards? I didn’t think about it. But I’m not surprised. It’s a lovely area and people are attracted to it.

Pursuitist: Burbank Ranch produces Estate Bottled wines – what does that mean?

Fred: “Estate Bottled” means that 100 percent of the wine comes from grapes grown on the Ranch and those grapes are crushed, fermented, finished, aged, and bottled on the Ranch. With the completion of our 19,000 square foot crush pad, tank room, underground barrel storage vaults, offices, and tasting room building, we now produce estate bottle wines.

Burbank Ranch Tasting Room, Sunset

We hand pick grapes either at night or at first light, transport them to the crush pad, hand sort the bunches, de-stem, hand sort berries, must pump grape berries to temperature controlled fermentation tanks, ferment, store in barrels, rack, filter, and bottle all on the ranch. Consequently, our wines are now “Estate Bottled.”

Pursuitist: Burbank Ranch has won multiple awards, and the Vineyard is still young. What are your thoughts on these accolades? And which one was the most surprising to you?

Interior Tasting Room, Burbank Ranch

Melody: Our intention from the beginning of this adventure was to produce high quality grapes that lead to producing excellent wines. While Fred and I have both earned London-based Wine & Spirit Educational Trust (WSET) Level II Sommelier Certification, and we knew our farming practices were top notch and we thought our wines are fantastic, I still wanted outside evaluation of our initial wines to feel confident that we could produce world-class wines.

Four Winning Burbank Ranch Wines

Our first vintage was 2010. My favorite wine, our 2010 Cabernet Franc, won “Best in Class” at the six-county, Central Coast Wine Competition in July of 2012. It went on to win a “Double Gold” award at the 2013 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the largest competition of American wines in the world. This recognition confirmed my confidence in our wines.Since then, our wines have won awards at competitions across the country.

A Few Recent Burbank Ranch Wine Wins

Pursuitist: Where do you see Burbank Ranch in the next few years? Is there room for expansion?

Melody: Through wine competitions we have shown that we can produce high-quality grapes and from these grapes produce high-quality wines. The next step for the Ranch is breaking into commercial sales. Showing our wines in the tasting room and selling wine from that facility is pleasant and rewarding. And, in a sense, it is relatively simple. Customers have self-selected themselves as interested in a new wine experience. They have traveled some distance to reach the Ranch. And, generally, they are not in a hurry.

Tasting Room Table, Set For Private Tastings

Commercial sales are an entirely different process. Picture a busy mother, with her 3 year-old child in the shopping cart, pushing rapidly through the supermarket. She is planning an evening dinner, gathering the items needed. She reaches the wine aisle. Ugh! How does she choose wine to match her dinner? Does she do it by country of production, grape type, or wine maker style? Or does she just buy on price? Maybe label look? Unlike the tasting, room, no one is standing in the aisle ready to talk her through the maze.

Consequently, the next step is the commercialization of the sale of Burbank Ranch wines.

Pursuitist: Finally, what are a few lessons you have learned in this process of owning and building a successful vineyard and winery? Has the Vineyard created different priorities for you, in some way or ways?

Fred: We were very fortunate to have excellent consultants for phases of Ranch development that were foreign to us. I have learned about soil and water evaluation, irrigation planning, root-stock and grape clone matching, plant spacing, and vine training systems — each required expert help. None of this was a surprise. And each phase had time boundaries. We knew when the phase would begin, and we knew when it would end.

Melody:

One of the simple fascinating things that I’ve learned is that farming depends a lot on Mother Nature. Of course I’ve always heard that but experiencing it over the last eight years has been eye opening, interesting and fun. Though we love rain, we can also get stuck in the mud. Though we love sun, it can also be too hot. Our grapes love balance, just as we do.

Freshly Picked Grapes From The Vineyard.

Our Ranch manager, Ruben, often says that working in the vineyard, and keeping all the 78,573 grapevines happy is like having 78,573 children. We feel that way also – each day, we care for them, and their nurturance. We know they are living things, and if we are good to them, they will be good to us. And they have.

The Fruit Of The Burbank Vines at Sunset

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