Growing Up Brown: Memoirs of a Filipino American

Afterword by Fred Cordova

Afterword THEY SAY YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. It must be so with one Peter Madelo Jamero,who was born and raised in a rural California town called Livingston.But the navy snatched Pete from the byways of Highway 99 and made a man out of him before academia took over to mold him, degreed and certificated as a social worker, via San Jose State, UCLA, and Stanford. Transformed into a top-level government executive—by way of federal, state, and county bureaucracies—the country boy, now referred to as “Mr. Jamero,” did his darnedest to help change a turbulent world for the better.His career progressed at a dizzying pace, as he traveled to metropolises like Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Francisco, where he directed a variety of health and human services programs and became a university faculty member. Not bad for a country boy from Livingston.A Filipino boy at that! A brown boy whose growing-up values centered around family, agricultural farm life, friends, and a tightly knit Filipino American community. Has he changed throughout his career? Not to many people’s knowledge. Of course, Terri, his loving wife, makes him stay on the straight and narrow. In his own words,Pete has said,“I have never forgotten my roots.” He is still called “Pete,” the name everyone has used since his boyhood. He is still entrenched in the same values, believing in family, farm life, friends, and community, particularly his Filipino American community across the nation, which has developed into an emerging force within American society. Pete’s story has a literary tilt because the country is still in the boy,who is now a man of achievement.His fine reputation not only centers around the countryside in central California but is known throughout the whole U.S.A. In his “retirement,” Pete has returned to the Livingston environs in the byways of Highway 99. Nope, you can’t take the country out of the boy. dr. fred cordova Filipino American National Historical Society January 2005 320 afterword ...