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1 The Adventure Begins SEVERAL FILIPINO CAMPS AND SMALL FILIPINO businesses operated in Oakdale, the place of my birth. Oakdale, a small rural town in central California, was a magnet for Filipinos who worked in the agricultural fields and in the nearby lumber mills of Sonora. Oakdale benefited from its close proximity to Stockton, the home base of Filipino farmworkers, who were the major source of labor at the time. Area farmers valued Filipinos for their industriousness and willingness to work for lower wages. Farmers also believed that the Filipinos’ generally short stature made them better suited to the backbreaking stoop labor of harvesting crops such as asparagus, onions, and sugar beets.This was a fiction—work was scarce,and Filipinos were just glad to have the jobs.They would never have admitted it to the white farmers, but their backs hurt as much as those of taller farmworkers from other ethnic groups. Sonora was where Papa and Mama married in 1929 and is the place they first called home. They spent their honeymoon in the picturesque gold-mining town of Twain Harte, named after Mark Twain and Bret Harte, the legendary authors and former residents. Papa was twenty-nine,light of skin,and handsome in his pinstriped navy blue suit.Mama was pretty,petite,and a picture-perfect pinay (Filipina) bride of twenty-four.Mama and Papa had known each other from childhood,when they lived in the town of Garcia-Hernandez, on theVisayan island of Bohol.They were also third cousins.Given the relative isolation of the seven thousand Philippine islands, it was commonplace for residents of these barrios (villages) to have such close biological ties. Papa, Ceferino Ladesma Jamero, was born on August 26, 1900, in the Lungsod Daan (OldTown) area of Garcia-Hernandez.He was the elder child and only son of a politically prominent family in Garcia-Hernandez. A sister, Erberta, was his only sibling. Papa was athletic and achieved some renown as a long-distance runner at his school. Although he was stocky in build, like other family members , Papa was decidedly different from the rest of the Jamero men. The extended Jamero family was quiet, serious, and civic minded. But Papa was not interested in school, often cut class, played the guitar in a rondella (a musical group featuring the banduria, a Filipino adaptation of the mandolin) that toured Bohol, and dropped out of school after the sixth grade. He was also pilyu (mischievous) and engaged in numerous pranks.Once,he led a group of boys underneath a nipa hut, elevated on stilts, where girls often gathered. In those days, girls did not always wear undergarments. In their hiding place,Papa and the other boys often played a game that involved guessing the girls’ identities by peering up their dresses. According to often-told stories, Papa usually won. Papa was also adventurous.When he was twenty-one,he became a sakada (one who climbs up, or rises), one of the thousands of Filipinos recruited as field workers for the Hawaiian sugar and pineapple industries. The Philippines was a convenient source of cheap labor.The country had an agrarian economy,and its people were used to hard work. Moreover, Filipinos were nationals rather than aliens and thus could avoid lengthy immigration procedures.This legal distinction came in the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War, which initiated more than forty years of American colonialism.Papa was part of the first wave of Filipino immigration to Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, when Filipinos, like the Chinese and the Japanese before them,were recruited by the thousands to perform difficult agricultural work. Filipino recruitment, however, unlike that of Chinese and Japanese,was focused on young single men.Recruiters targeted Filipino men from theVisayas and the Ilocos,regions with a tradition of working long hours in the fields.In examining potential workers, recruiters looked for strong young men with hands 4 campo life, 1930–1944 that were rough from hard work. Papa was a muscular five foot six, but he had relatively smooth hands,presumably because of his family ’s independent economic situation and his pampered lifestyle. Papa rubbed his hands for days against rocks,sand,and other rough materials so that recruiters would accept him. He was finally selected and set sail on the steamer Hawkeye on October 19, 1921. He worked in the sugarcane and pineapple fields on the big island of Hawaii and then on Oahu. Papa and other Filipino workers...

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