Stories from the diaspora

ST. PETERSBURG – A bust of Jose Rizal stands at the entrance of 14301 Nine Eagles Drive in Tampa, where an arts center sprawls across 10,000 square feet of a 10-acre spread owned by the Philippine Cultural Foundation Inc. (PCFI).

In a room where a gaudily painted Pinoy dirty ice cream cart is on display, 38-year-old music composer and arranger Nhick Ramiro Pacis is preparing 25 Filipino volunteers for their upcoming concert. The volunteers, from teenagers to senior citizens, are playing Sa Libis ng Nayon on the bamboo instrument called angklung.

Three years ago Nhick was “imported” by the PCFI from the University of the Philippines in Diliman to serve as the musical director of Tampa Fil-Ams’ very own Pangkat Kawayan. He has since made Florida his home.

PCFI chairman Rudy Bautista, 61, knows the feeling. One of 12 siblings, Rudy joined the US Navy in 1966 as a cook and moved to San Diego, leaving the service to join Amtrak in Jacksonville, Florida in 1973. He returned to his hometown of Morong in Bataan in 1976 to marry a local girl. They started their family in Florida and have no plans of returning to their native land.

Now a realtor, Rudy and his wife Lucy live in a one-acre farm in Seminole City with a fishpond and a nearby lake where alligators occasionally peek out.

He has returned to the Philippines twice in the past three years, and was always dismayed by what he saw. The river where he used to swim and fish is now heavily polluted, and Ugong Falls has dried up. Squatters have invaded his hometown. He discussed the problem with the mayor but got no action.

“It’s very frustrating,” he told me. “The government is part of the problem, not the solution.”

Last year he and Lucy joined seven other Fil-Am families from Tampa in a visit to Boracay, where they were disappointed to find the island overdeveloped and crowded.

“It’s a shame because we really have a nice place if we could take care of it,” Rudy said. “We have a long way to go.”

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There are 12,000 Filipino-American families in the Tampa Bay Area, which includes about 14 cities including St. Petersburg.

Many of the Filipinos have stories of hardship to tell in settling in a foreign land, but like Rudy, few intend to return for good to the Philippines.

“People think we’ve got it made here,” Rudy said. “I worked two jobs for seven years. You work very hard.”

Lucy’s cousins Benneth Lakilak and Maria Matawaran know. Over a sumptuous lunch of adobo, pinakbet and bangus sinigang prepared by Benneth in her home here, the sisters related that at one point in their early days in Cleveland, Ohio, their family had to repack latex gloves, bought in bulk, in a damp basement, manually sorting out the gloves by size, to earn about $70 a week for their grocery money.

Trudging through knee-deep snow for their daily train ride to work, Maria, now 47 and a payroll coordinator at the St. Petersburg Times, says she cried and longed for home.

But life in Morong was no paradise either. Growing up, Maria, Benneth and their eight other siblings sold banana cue and manned their sari-sari store to make ends meet.

Their father Julio Dolores, a survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II, earned a pittance as a councilor and school security guard. One of his sons decided to try his luck in the United States, starting the family’s exodus in the 1970s. As the son of a member of the US Armed Forces of the Far East, US citizenship came easy.

These are what we have lost in this family’s departure: three accountants, 2 teachers, a nurse, an engineer, a mechanic and a criminologist. A third teacher opted to stay behind in Morong.

Benneth, 52, has an MBA from Tampa College and is a notary public. Now working for an HMO, she and her husband Alex, a native of Leyte, own townhouses and other pieces of real estate, which they rent out. Benneth drives a Mercedes-Benz; the family has three other cars.

They are big fans of Manny Pacquiao. During his recent fight, the siblings held a “Pacquiao party” and were thrilled to learn that their sister-in-law in Las Vegas had prepared lumpia for the prizefighter. There are a million Filipinos, I was told, in Las Vegas alone.

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Benneth and Maria have not lost their distinctive Morong accents. Richard Martin, whose father is from Bulacan, speaks flawless American English.

Richard, the 40-year-old associate metro editor for education of St. Pete Times, is part of the second generation of the Pinoy diaspora.

His father was a cook in the US navy, and Richard, born in Pensacola, moved around a lot. With a degree in mass communication from the University of Guam, he became a sports writer for the Pacific Daily News in Guam.

Richard was with The Seattle Times when he was invited to join St. Pete Times last year. By that time he had three children with his Okinawa-born Filipino-Japanese wife. They began dating after they played together in a tennis tournament against the International School at the US Air Force base in Clark Field.

America is home to this couple. Millions of other Filipinos may no longer return to their native land, settling in countries as exotic as Aruba and Curacao. A stockbroker has fond memories of a Filipino who was his favorite Spanish teacher in Ohio in the 1970s.

On Saturday afternoon I went with Benneth and Maria to their father’s grave at the veterans cemetery. Julio Dolores died at 82 in Florida in December 2001; his wife went home to Morong and died in her sleep six months later.

Their children have found a new home.