The Record - July 6, 2003

A city kid, I left my fog in San Francisco. But my roots, literally, have always been in Stockton — home of my onions, asparagus, eggplants, green peppers and bitter melon.

In the summer, my family came here to beat the cold and because the vegetables were better than Safeway’s.

We’d pile like migrants into my Uncle Joe’s unairconditioned Impala and trek over the old Altamont. I was just 8 years old and along for the ride. But for my dad and uncle, it was like going home.

Our destination was cousin Vicky’s place in French Camp. Her father, Mariano Ramos, sported a straw hat and a work tan — labor’s deep brown. From the Philippines, he married my Aunt Eleanor, a Mexican-American, in a scandalous union considering the anti-intermarriage laws of the time. Aunt Eleanor went to Yolo County and said she was an American Indian in order for them to get hitched.

We’d visit the Ramos’ several times in the summer, especially during the fair. The horses were running, and it’s nice to win back the gas money. But the really special times were the birthdays or fiesta days, because it meant we would kill a pig.

The men would tie the pig and hang it upside down from its hind legs. The men cut the jugular for the pig blood, used in a stew Filipinos call “chocolate meat.”

The pig squealed and flailed, then emptied its bladder and splattered my dad.

Clearly, it marked me more than my father. Later in life, I became a vegetarian.

The pig, then the farm

When I came to The Record, I had to see that farm again. If I could only find it.

Last weekend, I saw Vicky for the first time in years at a cousin’s graduation party, and she told me a few things.

“That wasn’t our farm,” said my cousin, now Vicky McElyea. “Our house was in French Camp, we worked a farm in Lathrop.”

The farm belonged to two brothers who came to the United States in the ’20s from the same province in the Philippines as my dad. We all called Lucio and Pete Dawang “Uncle Nino” and “Uncle Pete.” We were their family. The anti-intermarriage laws created a surplus of bachelors. They never married.

Instead, they were married to the land, 80 acres off Harlan and Squires roads, by I-5.

Southern Pacific wouldn’t sell to them but leased them the farm for a buck a day. It put Nino and Pete a step up from sharecroppers. Nino died 10 years ago at 93. Pete died eight years ago at 94. They had no heirs. And the farm?

“You know that big mound in the Stonebridge subdivision,” Vicky said. “That was their farm.”

Entombed, subdivided

Squires Road is renamed Slate Road to match the Stonebridge motif. But the dirt is all the same, and the surplus is piled high in a whalelike shape — 50 feet high, 700 feet long. “It’s 100,000 yards of dirt,” a foreman said.

Make that 100,000 yards of world-class soil.

The leveled lots are being graded, readied to be curbed, guttered and sidewalked. The raw land is being tamed, civilized. Next, they’ll dump base rock on top of the dirt.

“It’s sterile, though it could grow weeds at some point,” said a hard hat. And when they pour the concrete on top of it all, the soil will be officially entombed, its power stripped, its life force gone.

Just houses will grow here now. No one comes for the vegetables anymore.