July 26, 2004
Day 3.
My talk goes well, even if everything starts almost half an hour late, and the registration booths are only just being set up. (FANHS conferences seem like seasonal miracles every time, especially for organizers who do this voluntarily.) The panel is top-heavy with anthropologists; Eric Casino (with a great paper on Worcester and the bifurcation of Filipinos at the fair) and Albert Bacdayan (who, as it turns out, worked with all the legends at the Cornell Southeast Asia Program). (I panic when I'm told, just before I get on, that I actually have 30 minutes, since it's a plenary session; I stretch my talk out to a little over 15.)
From then on, I cruise the hallways: I hang out with Annalissa Herbert, SFSU alum and historian; we gossip about governors-general of the Philippines in the early 1900s and a certain former employee of the University of Michigan.
I finally meet the legendary Mike Price, postcard and ephemera collector extraordinaire. He gives a disappointingly short but fascinating slide show (he thought he had only 15 minutes) and argues about the primacy of the commercial aspect of the Philippine Reservation. Mike is a friend of my folks, with a zillion connections with people in Los Banos. (He's one of three people I've met at the conference, actually; another person, Dick Solis, was the spitting image of his brother Dan who attended the Church Among the Palms in Los Banos.)
(Mike, as it turned out, was the person who jumpstarted my interest in oral history; back in the '80s, when I was still in high school, he gave my dad copies of photo postcards of Los Banos from the 20s. And so I, armed with a tape recorder, marched out and interviewed LB oldtimers, showing them the photos and eliciting their stories about them.)
So Mike, Annalissa, Jesse Gavilan (who is working on U.S. Navy families) and I pile into Mike's van and drive to the Missouri History Museum to check out the World's Fair exhibit.
And then we embark on our challenge: to find the spot where the Philippine Reservation stood, exactly a hundred years ago. The official LPE map is oriented upside down, from south to north, and almost all the buildings were demolished. But we find it: the Puente de Espana (built across the now non-existent Arrowhead Lake) is at the corner of Wydown and DeMun, in Clayton. Much of the Village land is now expensive residential homes; we wonder if there are any artifacts buried in people's backyards. A good chunk of the Concordia Seminary is also on Reservation grounds, so we stop at Concordia Park. The map tells us that it's probably the site of the Negrito (Ayta) Village; Mike recognizes the topography of the landscape -- covered with manicured greenness now, barren and dusty, with a few thatched huts a century ago. We walk to the oldest tree we can find -- something, anything that was there -- and touch it, perhaps for luck, perhaps to feel the ghosts inside.
(A sign on the lawn says "Clayton Leash Law Prohibits Dogs Running Loose.") We run into a guy walking his dog, and it turns out he was a former Wydown Igorot, the mascot of Wydown Middle School. Unfortunately, he has no T-shirts or pennants with the mascot (I would have bought them off him), which was apparently phased out only a couple of years ago. Then we head over for dinner at Jimmy's at the Park, a restaurant that would have been right at the Visayan Village. No dog meat on the menu, though.
Posted by the wily filipino at July 26, 2004 08:49 AM