Talking Hawai`i's Story: Oral Histories of an Island People

ALWAYS A REBEL

ALEX RUIZ ALWAYS A REBEL When I first came here, (laughs) I came under contract, see. I promised my mother after the contract, I’d come back. It was three years, three-year contract. Then you get a free passage [back home]. Come three years, my mother write to me, “When you coming home?” I said, “Oh, just a little more.” (Laughs.) Keep on going on like that until today. The second of ten children, Alex Ruiz was born in 1914, in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, Philippines. His parents moved to Manila when Ruiz was still an infant . Ten years later, the family returned to Laoag, where Ruiz continued his schooling. In 1930, at age sixteen, Ruiz immigrated to Hawai‘i. He weeded fields at Köloa Plantation on Kaua‘i and lived in the plantation’s Filipino Camp. He soon transferred to the sugar mill as a machine operator and later worked in the laboratory. Ruiz switched to order taking and delivery for Köloa Plantation Store in 1933. After a stint in the U.S. Army’s Filipino Infantry Regiment during World War II, he returned to the store. He married Janet Fukumoto in 1946. The couple had two children. In the late 1950s, he went back to the mill first as a steam-generator operator , then as a journeyman welder. Retired in 1978, he died in 1999. Chris Planas and Warren Nishimoto interviewed Alex Ruiz in 1987 for Köloa: An Oral History of a Kaua‘i Community, a project focusing on the historic town located near Kaua‘i’s southern shore, approximately ten miles southwest of Lïhu‘e. The site of Hawai‘i’s first commercial sugar plantation, founded in 1835, Köloa’s fields and mill continued to produce sugar for 161 years. Even before the plantation shut down in 1996, emphasis had shifted to 240 Talking Hawai‘i’s Story developing resort hotels, condominiums, golf courses, and upscale boutiques and restaurants catering to tourists and wealthy newcomers, bringing about large-scale and irreversible socioeconomic change to the Köloa-Po‘ipu area. FROM ILOCOS NORTE TO HAWAI‘I I was born in the city of Laoag, Ilocos Norte. I think I was an infant when my father, my family, moved to Manila. I went to school there in public schools. Schools in the Philippines, there were no dialect schools, only English. If they catch you speaking your dialect in the school grounds, you get suspended. At that time I speak only Tagalog. Then we moved to Laoag, nobody speak Tagalog there, only Ilocano. So we moved to Laoag, my father put up a bakery. Any kind [of goods] you see in the bakery, he makes it. And the amazing part of it is, no recipe. My mother was a jeweler. I think because one of her distant cousin, or something, was a jewelsmith. See, we don’t have a jewelry store, so she carry jewelry, she go house to house. Just like peddling jewels. In Philippines, we had maids, we had a cook. My father had a driver and he had horses. So our chores was we helped every one of these people. My mother used to always tell us that, “You folks not going to stay with us forever . You have to learn how to do that job.” When the maid wash dishes, you help wash the dishes. You help the yardman clean the yard. You help the guy take care of the horse. We help the driver wash the car. (Laughs.) Those days, you know, I think in that city that time, you can count how many cars there was. We lived right beside the river. Just one block away from the city market. Down there they build houses that’s always two story. It’s a big river. That river, when you flood, you flood the whole market. That’s why they built those two-story buildings. My mother’s cousin, he was a sea captain. He came back to Philippines to visit. And he told my mother that he wanted to take me with him back here [to Hawai‘i]. I was in school then. When I went home, that was a mistake my mother made by telling me that. So I say, “Oh, where is he?” “Oh, he went back.” So I says, “I’m going.” My mother said, “No, you’re not. You have to continue your studies.” “No, I think I better go.” My brother was here...