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Robert Ragsac - Part 2 of 2

Interviewer: Yvonne Kwan, Ellina Yin, and Vickie Taketa
 Interviewee: Robert Ragsac (1931 - )

Transcript of Robert Ragsac

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Timeframe 0:00 >> 15:01

If you remember when I talked about graduating to become a rocket engineer, well, that was was my my life's work until about 1970. There was a big downturn in aerospace industry. And so I got laid off in and I was out of work for almost 13 months. And I got a call through EDD. I think there's a California employment development division that there was an organization looking for a a systems analyst. Well, in my my resume, I put down system analysis, but the system was aerospace systems. But I think the word systems got ahold of whatever that organization was. So I went to the interview, and it's called the Criminal Justice Pilot Program, and I says, I don't know anything about criminal justice, and I'm really an analyst for aerospace systems. But fortunately, the interviewer said, well, it's a system that we're looking at and it's record keeping for police departments. We want to upgrade them, but we need somebody to analyze them. They said, well, I think I could do that, of course, because I'm out of a job, so I want to take the job. So I became a consultant, a contractor, and my job was to interview all of the records, keeping organizations in police departments in the county. I think at the time there were 12. So I had to go interview each of the what they call R&I records and identification departments for each of the police departments. So I met each of the, the officers in charge and I interviewed them about their what the records they kept what records were they, how far they went, how they were kept, you know. And in 1970, those were paper files, most like paper files. And then they I asked them was, do they separate them by legal requirements? And the I guess the answer was, well, generally so I did this for the various departments, and I wrote up a report saying that there's a lot of ways that you could improve records. First of all, get rid of all the records that some of the departments had kept for very, very minor infractions, but yet they kept those records. So I said, you have to purge them. They've got to print those records. And then they came up with the concept of sharing records among the departments because they rarely shared the records about major crimes. So criminals. So there are various of changes that I recommended to the to the group that I reported to for the contract, and that was it. So that the contract was over.

And a few weeks later I got a call from another organization and and they were being formed under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. I think it was a act. Oh, yes, it was. They formed the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act 1968. And the idea was to funnel federal funds through the state to the counties to help improve the criminal justice system and reduce crime. That's the goal. And apparently this office was being formed and they called me and I said, I don't have any experience in law enforcement or any of the, things that you do with in the courts. And this is you are the only one who has experience interacting with the police departments. My contract did that. I said, Well, okay, sure, another job. So I became the assistant director of the Regional Criminal Justice Planning Board. And so my job was we we split up the office into what we call cops, courts, and corrections. The three Cs, the cops with the police department corrections, which is the county sheriff's jail and and the courts, of course, was the the district attorney and the public defender. So I was assigned because I had worked with the police departments before very superficially. I was assigned law enforcement. So I said, okay, I'll do that. So I got signed up by the county. I became a county employee, and I got a job about five light years away from being a rocket engineer. So I said, okay, I'll do that. So my job was to go through all the police departments and find out what kinds of things helped make them more effective in, in doing their job. And so I said, well, the only way we can do this is for each department, I'll find out what is the problems that they want to address and see if we can create a project for it and then have it funded through our office. So one of the very first was called burglary…burglary reduction. I think it was San Jose PD. So we created a project, it's called 459, which is a penal code section for burglary. And so we had create a project that I work with San Jose PD. We got the funds and that was a great one. There was another one which was called the Auto Theft. So when we want to recover auto automobiles and the people who were stealing them and it was called Project 10851, which is the California vehicle code section for stolen vehicles. And then we did one for narcotics, and this was for the California Narcotics Information Network. So I got involved in narcotics. And as I went along and I, in order to understand the police officers in the street, I rode with them.

Well, when you ride with a police officer, you're under suspicion because they don't know who you are, even though I'm an official observer yet they said, well, if we're getting into trouble, you're going to have to stay in the car, or we would prefer you not being with us when we get into problems. So I thought in order to be credible, with these officers, that I got to be a I got to have to get some kind of official status. So I went to the sheriff and and told the sheriff, but the problem says, oh, that's no problem. I’ll deputize you. I said, Sheriff, can you do that? Yes, sure, sure, I can do that. I said, well, I wouldn't be a little more credible than that. I'll go to the academy, to the Reserve Academy, he says. Okay, sure, that's great. So I went to the Reserve Academy, got sworn in, I got a badge and I told this the sheriff, the field officer, I said, well, you know, I am…the guys I ride with are armed with automatics and I have a an automatic browning high power I'd like to carry. First you need to show the the officer. The deputy in charge said, the rules are a revolver, no less than four inches, no less than 38 special. And I said, okay, I got one, a Colt Python 357 Magnum full house ammunition 125 grand jacketed hollow point. I went through the whole thing. He said, okay, that's good, you can carry that.

So here I am ready with these officers, the 2:30 in the morning. I'd prefer to do that because that's where a lot of the action occurs. I'm sitting in this car, we're riding around, I'm armed with a 357 magnum, handcuffs, flashlight, radio and a notebook like this. And as we're going through the the bit and a lot of the action was on the Eastside of San Jose. So there I am riding around two or three in the morning, arresting the bad guys and mostly drugs and sometimes juveniles, which brought me to another project, I think it was Gilroy PD wanted to create a juvenile diversion program. So I met with the officers and they we quickly created a project called the Juvenile Diversion. Gilroy reaching out, is actually an outreach program to the kids that are having a crisis. Drugs, parents, school, whatever it is. And we had we created a drop-in center. We had I think we rented a hall or some facility where the kids could meet. And we hired two local Latinas because they were all Mexicans. Most of them were Mexican. So we wanted to make sure we could communicate with the kids and the officer in charge was able to find two, two girls who were in their twenties, and they had the same ideas themselves about doing something with the kids who are suffering from a in a crisis. And it turns out that the two parts of that crisis was the drugs and home. There's one that was tough for us to handle was the home because the parents or there's a conflict at home of some kind. So the drop in center was supposed to help them work that through. This is my first introduction to community work with the kids.

The second was WAR, you know, it was? Women Against Rape. So I got this hardcore WAR ladies coming to my office, sitting in front of me, and they want to create this rape prevention project. That's what the sounds sounds great. So I worked up a project with them, and what we came up with was that we will find an officer, train them, or find one that's already working rape cases and and go around and talk to the women's organizations. And so I attended one of the sessions. We hired an officer through the project. It was Los Altos PD, I think it was. And so the idea was to talk to various groups. So I attended one of them, and as I sat there I thought, Yeah, this is really doing something worthwhile because I never thought about rape prevention or the crisis that women are suffering. So there was number two, that's changing my perception from an engineer to not a community activist, but but through the Criminal Justice Planning Board, being able to come up with projects that help the community besides law enforcement. I liked law enforcement because it was exciting.

Like when I talked about my experiences with some of the other guys that they always ask, how many times did you pull out your gun? I said, well, yeah, twice. And we stopped, those that a car was exceeding speed limit. This was a San Jose PD; my partner says this guy's really nuts. So we called in the plate numbers and it's stolen. So put on the lights. We pulled the guy over and my partner comes up, we put the lights on him, I get the proper procedure. He got on the right side and put the spotlight on my partner, goes up to him and he starts talking. He looks back at me and does this, which means this is shaky. So which means this guy is is not cooperating. So I pull out at 357, they've put him at him. In the meantime, my hands are sweating, my heart is beating. What if this guy runs out? Start beating my partner. I've got to shoot him or stop him somehow. But. But finally is everything's cool. My buddy says it's okay. The guy gets out. He's a Black guy. He's about six foot six. I said, Holy smoke. How close did we come to having a real altercation here? But he was cooperative. And it turns out the dummy he took his sister's car without telling her. She reports it as a as stolen. Okay, so those are the kinds of things that get you excited.

The second time when was when it was what we call a 415 family, it was a guy who was beating up on his wife. And this is that's one of the most terrible things to go to because you go into the family and there is all this hypertension going on. They're screaming, yelling, their husbands beating on the wife or beating on the kids. And you try to separate it together, get calm. Well, by the time we got there, he had left. We talked to the woman. She's her husband had a gun. Well, that jacked up everybody. So we get it back in the car, we call it in. We start looking for this guy. They finally find him. We roar up. He's of course, he's got a gun. So we're all out there like this. And I'm thinking again, this is really nuts. You know, I'm an engineer. But then my hands were sweating, my heart was beating. If this guy comes out, start shooting. We're going to have a big gunfight. We didn't. It was okay was fine. So what all this means is that here's the two parts of my life going on. I'm an engineer, but now I have to change everything. My whole psychology, my psyche, my perspective has to change about people, not spacecraft—people.

Timeframe 15:01 >> 20:05

And so that I think was, as I mentioned earlier, as I became part of not, I don't think myself as activists. Curt Fukuda and I call it history detectives. So we look for information that help with their history. So we are we call ourselves a HD. So those kinds of experiences I just went through was was, I think, the foundation for dealing with the history, the people, our interactions among the people, and my projections as to what it must have been like for Chinatown in those days among the to the Chinese Japanese and Filipinos who being oppressed by this anti-Asian sentiment in those days. Well, that's a that's a fairly long story about my career with criminal justice. One of the things that I think I had learned quite quickly was that how do you deal with someone who's an ethnic minority or a white or not like you, but yet belligerent? So those are the kinds of things I learned being a reserve deputy sheriff, you know, we'd like to say that I enjoyed it. It was exciting. But I know enough about law enforcement that I don't want to be in law enforcement. It is a very, very tough job. And I got a lot of people I talked to nowadays who are interested in law enforcement. I said, think hard about that because it a really very difficult job. And and it truly is.

Well, no. So I like my notes here, though. One of the things that I thought was was revealing to me is that because you are in law enforcement, you do represent authority. A lot of people, of course, do not like authority. So how do you deal with that? I'm not sure I dealt with it very well, but it did give me an awareness about how people's perspective are towards you if you are in a position of some kind of an authority, or just being a manager or some kind of a leader, and you have these conflicts that that arise. So that that episode and that lasted maybe six or seven years. And then our, our, our, our office got disbanded. A lot of our work changed to other organizations.

And so I left the, the, the, the Criminal Justice Planning Board. And I want to make sure that we create these projects. But the Criminal Justice Planning Board is made up of local politicians, community activists, so they approve of the projects just because we created it. And I thought this great idea still has to be approved by our board. And I was staff to that board. And that gave me another role, being staffed to a variety of people. We had lawyers, politicians, elected officials, councilmen and what I call street people that represent the community, right? So I had to work with those people. It was easy enough to work with the the folks who were who from the streets, real community. It was really difficult to work on politicians. And it's and I learned to do that. And by the way, Norm Mineta was one of those politicians on our board. Well, let's see. I was in 1971. I was 40 years because I was born 30, 40, 70. So the the actually it was in 72, I think that I got the first job, the consulting job. So I was 40 years old. (Interviewer) That's when you shifted and started your, I guess, interface and all of the community. Yes. Yeah. At that. In fact when I when I had to work with all the other police departments that that gave me a chance or I had the opportunity to see things in a wider perspective than just San Jose, say, in Morgan Hill at that time, 1970 was agricultural town, really small police department, in contrast to Los Altos, very risky area of Palo Alto. So the variety. Milpitas was different or Milpitas at that time was strictly agricultural. In fact, San Jose, of course, was just emerging out of the agricultural Valley of Heart’s Delight, being high tech hub.

Systems & Power Timeframe 20:05 >> 33:28

During the war, my dad worked for Mare Island in the shipyards there. So in the summers we would visit with the, the the our friends and stay with them. So we stayed the summer. So I got a summer job delivering newspapers. It was called the Vallejo Times, and so I would deliver them throughout the area on my route. But there was one boy that thought I was Japanese, and he would start yelling at me and screaming in Japanese that no, I, I'm Filipino, I'm Filipino. I go and deliver the paper. He'd be out there screaming at me. And then after three or four times I got tired of it and I said, I Filipino, I'm not Japanese, and you shouldn't be screaming like that anyway. And so he came up to me and I thought, this is it. I can't stand it anymore. And it went over the edge. So I punched him out and and he lay there and he was bleeding from the nose. And then I went away, and I thought, God, I'll teach him. But afterwards I really felt sorry that this kid probably learned it from his parents. Right? Or the newspapers. And I felt really badly about it. And so I thought, well, the next time I deliver the paper, if I see him, I'll apologize. You know, he never showed up, I guess, because of our fight. He thought it was better to not come around when I'm delivering the papers. So there there's a very first incident.

I think I told you about the incident. The very first was with Ed Kimura. I think I covered that, so I won't go to it. That was that was one following the incident with Ed Kimura at elementary school. So that was in 40. That would be at the height of the war. That's going to be 43 in Vallejo. So we fast forward. I graduate from San Jose High, and I go to college at San Jose State right right there. In fact, the campus the same as San Jose High School campus. And my friend was close engineering buddy of mine said, Hey, Robert, I'm going to get you into my fraternity. I said, Hey, cool. Yeah, I'd join this. So he he says, well, I'll get back to you. So he came back and told me that he can't. I said, I can't. What? What's wrong? Says my fraternity has to be all white. He apologized. He didn't know because he offered to have me join his fraternity. And I don't know the name of the fraternity. And in fact, I did, I would say. But so there's another point there. Now, here I am, college age and and I didn't care because I didn't want to be a frat boy anyway. But, you know, being a college kid, you want to be part of the college scene. Well, subsequent to that, I get a phone call from a guy representing a fraternity. Just telephone. He wants to know, he wants to know if I would be willing to join. I should say I didn't know it was a fraternity, but he says he has a club. I said sure. He says how can we meet? And I said, well, under the arch at the reserved book room between the arches, between the reserve book room and the library. In those days I'll be underneath the arch, an engineering student. I have a bunch of books, a binder and a slide rule and a black… So you can identify me that way and then you can talk. Of course I waited and waited with no one showed up and I told my buddy about that. He says, Yeah, I know that group. Same thing. I said, yeah, right to your college students they tell still have that idea white only right. Well that didn't bother me at the time, but that's a major incident number three.

So while I was in college in 1949, but all my friends were in the National Guard and they said, okay, can you go join the National Guard? Hey, this sounds cool. Yeah, we play soldier. So 1949 December, I signed up with the National Guard, and it was pretty great because there's about four Filipino kids there. And so when we formed up the in the organization, I found out aye, this is pretty neat and it seemed to be okay and didn't appear to be any kind of racial prejudice until I guess the first time we were in the field and we were in line for chow, or maybe it was in the chapel. And this cook kept looking, there's a Filipino guy, I'm sorry, we're not going to give you any fish heads and rice. No fishes and rice. So that went on several times. And first it was a joke. Hell yes, I love fish and rice. Yeah, I'll have that every day. Yeah. In fact, I prefer rice if you had rice instead of potatoes and that kind of thing. But after a while that's his attitude towards us. And it was not was it's not overt, but it's very subtle.

So, you know, there's a there's a prejudice or discrimination in a really subtle, nuanced way. Well, then I ran into I think I told you about the incident when we were in San Jose High School when I we were with Black kids. So I won't go into that. The one that really hurt a lot was that in 1955, I got a job at Rocketdyne because I want to be a rocket engineer, and my wife and I were looking for a place to stay. And it's almost a classic, as you know. Here's an apartment for rent, you know, phone number, address, it's available. And we show up in and immediately say, oh, that it's been rented, right? Oh, we showed up really quickly. So that happened two or three times. And you get the message, right. So before so from then on we said, okay, from now on we will go there and we'll say right away we'll look and say we're we're Filipinos. We would like to rent this place and be very forceful. So the next one that's for rent was a house in Woodland Hills. For rent. So we went to meet the the owner and we met she was a middle aged woman, a white woman. So as we went up, my wife would look at each other. And so we said we would just say we said, hi, I'm married to somebody, you know. And we also picture house and we're Filipinos and we'd like to rent your house. We just. Oh, yeah, well, come on, come on in there. There, she took the sails, the wind out of our sails. She was so nice and she, she let us rent the house for, for less than what she advertised. And she all the rules was taken place, you know, keep it clean, do the yard. “Oh yeah, we can do that.”

So it worked out really well now that that went from being overtly discriminated against to a woman that didn't care, that's all she was worried about. Would take care of the house and don't damage it. Take care of the yard that I did as best we could for her. And her name was Barbara. And to this day we were both very thankful for her because that changed, however, when we told Barbara that, well, we get I'm taking a job with Lockheed here up in Sunnyvale, and so we're going to leave. And she looked at the house and she said, was she thanked for taking very good care of it. And she says, oh, well, I have a friend up in Santa Clara who might be able to help you. And I said, oh, okay, so we got his name. So the first thing we did was we came up here because we're staying with my family in the meantime and so we went to this guy and I said, Barbara sent us and she says, Oh yeah. So he called this guy and he called his name and he says, hey, there are a bunch of Asian filled people want to talk to you, not renters or people. We knew. And of course, the guy comes up and says, Oh, hi, Barbara and all this thing. I'm sorry we don't have anything available right now. Sure. So anyway, those are the bunch of things that, you know, they they develop in you this ability, this perspective that, you know, it's not always what it seems like, Barbara, and always not what she seems. But then this guy who's supposed to be a friend of Barbara knew all about us and yet still gave us the same deal, same old story. So those those are the kinds of racial prejudices, I guess, that got to me and again, formed a foundation about how you how do you handle that kind of thing. And in fact, when the recent anti-Asian fervor that's going on now, I call it Asian hatred, version two. Version one was the one that I experienced and my and my family and the Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese experiences twenties and thirties. This is a modern version of of anti-Asian hatred.

(Robert begins another story about his godfather)

This was it had to be in 1942, because we all know what happened in April 1942, under 9066, the area was vacated with all the Issei, Nissei. Well, mind you know, if you look at him, he just perfect looks like Japanese, you know, small guy with big glasses. And at first glance he looked like Japanese. So we were riding in Santa Clara. I was with my nino, which is Filipino for Godfather. And we went to we were going somewhere, and we got out of the car and he was going to go to the store. So my dad, as soon as we got a sharp police officer, jumped on him and started yelling and screaming, “Yo, yo, Jap, why are you doing here? We're going to get you out here.” And he kept saying, he's Filipino, it's for him, he's Filipino. So we start talking. He showed his driver's license. I'm here and finally, after a lot of work and I'm a little kid and I'm on the verge of crying because this guy, this big officers, great yelling at my nino, and he's a small guy, just popular, only about five feet tall, Filipino man. And finally, the officer was convinced. But this this one that scared me, just like Ed Kimura scared me. The the incident with him and was those kinds of… it's almost like I can see it. When did it happen? Yesterday. Is it set in place in my mind, all of those incidents that change your life, essentially, like they have in yesterday, last night, pulling my gun on these guys that happened last night.

It's so clear. My head and all of these incidents of racial discrimination, like most of you, who if you've ever experienced that, it's welded in your in your mind, unfortunately. And then you try to handle it, especially when you're dealing with some people who are screaming at you because you're Asian, Filipino or or the great one is, where are you from and why don't you go back? Well, what? Yeah, I'm from fourth Street. I was born in a house there. I can't go back to the house, isn't there? And anymore, you know, it's those kinds of things that you have to deal with and it's I don't know. So I guess part of being nonwhite.

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 33:28 >> 36:18

Well, the strangely enough, I was never with my parents. Whenever they they had this discrimination, they said they did. But I don't remember the incidents because it was just a comment. And I don't remember in Chinatown. But you have to remember in in the day, because we lived in a near Chinatown when I went to Chinatown. And it's the Sixth Street now where the what I call the cultural milieu Chinese, the Japanese, Filipinos. And there was no incident that I remember that that was racially biased, that affected any of the Filipinos or the Chinese or the Japanese. It was reasonably harmonized, I think reasonably, because there's a couple of incidences that that occurred. But those were the only ones that I know of the everything was at that time as, as as I like. As I reminded Connie [Young Yu] when we were at the at the banquet, I a Connie, I used your when I describe the relationship among the three ethnic minorities. I said they were all together because the three businesses and she says, yes, I the three Chinese businesses, the Chinese the laundry business, the restaurant business and the gambling business. And what's the one that that ties all three ethnic minorities together, which one? Gambling. And so in the day, there was a lot of that going on, illegal and legal. And so I don't see I have not seen anything that had that my peers had told me about, about being discriminated against. I'm afraid that when he lay in bed tonight, I was thinking of it. But right now I it's pretty clear that my parents were not affected by that. They may, except the only mind know was the only one that that were affected. The that I that I can recall…that I think my sisters did in a couple of instances incidents where they were, I guess, discriminated against. But I can't recall what the incident was.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 36:18 >> 45:18

Well, see, the one of the it just I guess lately that I'm a member of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) Museum Board of Directors. And there was a conference of FANHS conference, this biennial that was going to be held in Seattle and was just held there. The president of the board asked me to be a member of a panel that he's putting together, and it's called mestisos, which is children or people who are half Filipino and something else. Filipino, Mexican, Filipino, Native American, Filipino, white or Filipino, whatever. Indian. Okay. So I said sort of strange that I'm not mestiso. I'm both my parents are full blooded Filipinos. He said, yes, but we want a perspective from outside that. Well, I thought that's going to be a stretch for me because I'm going to have to think about what it was for mestisos relating to people like myself who are full blooded. So I came up with the idea that if you are a child of a parents, both of whom are Filipino, you're Pinoy or Pinay, but you marry a non-Filipino Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Mexican or even white. So now you're a mestiso, which is half in in Hawaii. It's called hapa and and it's mestiso. M-E-S-T-I-S-O or S-A.

So that that mestiso has a Filipino connection or an other connection. So from the point of view that I was trying to bring up is that, well, as those generations get older, so that child who's mestiso marries another nonwhite. So the mestisoness or the Filipino ness of their heritage is diluted. And as you go through those subsequent generations, you're going to lose those children are going to lose their connection to the Filipino side of them unless you do some things. So part of my talk was, what do you do about that? First of all, you have to be aware of that, where that's happening. And then secondly, what do you really care? Does anybody really care? Now, some of those mestisos may not care. They may be one eighth Filipino or whatever and not care and or they favored the other side. Look, those are part of the social progress of that child or the person. And so I in my presentation, I said, you can if you are interested, then you can do two things. One, you create a family tree, and you show the real relationships. And then I should have brought the chart here to show you, but nevertheless.

I, so I said, you create the family tree so you control blood relationships so that people who are third generation mestiso can see their relationship to the Filipino side as well as the other side. So I called, if you are an M3 mestiso third generation, you can trace that. You can trace your relationship. So I use that example, a chart that I did for a family tree that shows my mom and dad from Santa Catalina Illoco Sur and my mom from La Paz, Abra, full blooded Ilocanos. My brother and I and my two sisters who are full blooded. My brother marries a Filipina Mexican. My sister, oldest sister marries a Mexican. My younger sister marries a Filipino. And I marry a Filipino. Now, my brother, who married a Filipino Mexican, their kids are part Mexican. Part Filipino. My son is Filipino, but he marries a beautiful white girl, blond, blue eyed, really beautiful girl, and she produces. My brother and I and my my son and my daughter-in-law have three, three kids. So I have three grandchildren, but they're mestisa. So I have two grandsons and a grand grandchild, a granddaughter. You know, from my perspective, I try to get keep alive reasonably as much as I can alive their connection. So when they were growing up or when they were first born, my daughter-in-law says my my son, Jacob is going to call her dad. Grandpa, what do you want him to call you? And I said, Appo, which is the Ilocano term of respect for an older person. It's not grandpa that's Lolo but for for in terms of my trying to keep the Ilocano side alive, I said use Appo. So as you were growing up, then I would talk about the heritage and I would say that my my dad is Appo Lakai, which is great grandfather. Right. But that's not exactly true. But Appo Lakai means it's a term of respect for an older Filipino person. Lakai is older and Appo is the term of respect. So I taught them that so they would know. But my dad as Appo Lakai. So so that was one of the things I told the audience that to keep that alive, to the extent that you can, you know, use the terms like I taught my grandkids, when they talk to my neighbors who are Filipinos, you address them as manongs, which is the Ilocano to respect for an older person, for older, it's actually for an older brother. So they would address my Filipino neighbors as manong or their wife as manang, so as manang. So that's just a little bit of a way to make sure that their connection with their Filipino side is alive. So that was one of the things I said to the audience. So and I said the other that's one do a family tree and in fact, do family history.

And the other is to to make sure that there is a chance or or an opportunity for the mestiso part of your family to talk to the Filipino side about what they did when in the Philippines. And so at the conclusion of my talk, I said, and this doesn't for my point of view, and for us here in the honest so the Filipino side that we're interested but is appropriate for any other mestisos mestisas of if you're you might be you might be German Mexican. Okay that's not weird combination. But I know that there are Irish Filipino from Korea, those kinds of things. Those guys, if you want your history, your legacy to be alive to do that. Well, as I was giving this talk, I was wondering, you know, that's all part of what we are doing actually in in what Curt [Fukuda] and I call HD. We’re history detectives; we’re finding relationships and how you keep those relationships alive for an ethnic group and I and I thought that yeah maybe that's what this is all about. I'm not really a historian as such. I don't consider my history myself as historian or a or an activist. But maybe that's what what is happening.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 45:18 >> 57:04

Well, here's probably one of the I guess the what are the things that one of the incidents that I thought that that was sort of related, that was if you are within a family and you find somebody else that has the same name, but you don't know if you're related, that happens many times to Filipinos. And I've I've talked to a lot of the the people I know of in various groups and they they give me their name, their last name, for instance, Corpus says, Oh, you're a Corpus. Well, we have a Corpus family in San Jose. Do you know that? No, we don't know. Oh, okay. Well, they have no connection. And same thing with say. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're Reclusado. You know, we have the Reclusado that was my uncle, and I said, no, we don't know them. Well, that's happened in my family, too. So my dad went to Kauai when you're with his second wife on a honeymoon, he went to Kaua'i and he met the Ragsac family, but he did not know the relationship.

So when my dad came back from from Kauai, my dad, by the way, is they call him Sharky, but his real name is Sergio. His naturalized name is Sharky. I hated Sharky, but never was. So so he he told me about the family there. So the following year, my girlfriend and I went to Kauai on a trip and I looked in the phone book and there enough. Sure enough, there was the Dominador Ragsac, so I called the number. I get the Filipina that answered, and I told her about being a Ragsac and she said, I'll talk to, to my husband Dominador. Dominador gets on the phone and he's true Filipino. And I said, Dad, this guy, he must have just came to the islands. But he said, oh, let's meet. He's going to go to his nephew's for dinner. So once we come along. So he went to his nephews who's his name is Primo. Primo Ragsac. His father is Primo Senior, which is the brother to Dominador. So the two Filipino families are Dominador Ragsac, Primo Ragsac. So we went to Primo Ragsac’s sons house for dinner and we're talking about the Ragsac connections and we're trying to figure out how this how we're related.

So I said, well, I have a family tree that I did for my dad and and his brothers, Burnaby and Leonchio. Said and they're all three are from Santa Catalina. Well, they are from Isabella. There's no connection. So we sat around and actually owned the family and the dining room floor and they spread out the family tree. And I went through here. Well, I said my dad told me when he was a little boy that I have it marked here that his uncle Alejandro Ragsac moved but 19 when my dad was small. So it had to be like 1910, 1915 or so. The room got silent, and I look around and it okay, Uncle Dominador, he's now my uncle. But Dominador at the time says, I swear I got chicken skin which means is his skin was the hair in the skin. You know if you've been frightened or something really rouse on you and you feel the hair and rise on your arm, well, you know why they call it chicken skin. That's said what this is. That's his dad, Alejandro Ragsac is his dad. Right away, you can almost feel the family connection. Get warmer more closer. And I thought, this is. This is amazing. So when I got back to the mainland, I told him about uncle Dominador and Uncle Primo and they were already we got to go back. So the following year, the entire Rasac family here, including my cousins, went to Kauai.

We had a gigantic relationship, a family reunion. Now, how something like that could happen if the Corpus had some connection to link. So you can cement your relationship and keep alive that name or your family relationships. It, it I thought that was really important for our family because now when we go to Kauai, we're not tourists. We're coming back to we're coming home with a family, but that that could happen with other families. That's and I think that's important for for their like for not only the history, but their legacy, because their children, like my granddaughter, my grandsons, my granddaughter and my sister's grandkids and their great grandson, my oldest, my younger sister has great grandchildren, and their Filipino connection is alive because I have the family tree. So every time we have a family reunion, we have a Ragsac family reunion every year, I update the family tree and I and I go through a big speech and they say, and I make sure that everybody here and look around there, there's Mexican Filipinos, there’s a gal dating a Black guy, and there's are the the whites in the family but they're Ragsac, and we've got Mexicans and they’re Ragsacs. So I get up every reunion and I hold the family tree and I say, the only reason that we're here is three boys from the Philippines decided to migrate to the mainland. Uncle Leo Leonchio, Uncle Ben Burnaby, and my dad, Sergio Sharkey. Because of them, they got married, had children, and that's us. We're here if only because of them. So I want them to be aware of not only the fact that they're seeking a sequence of historical events that each of those boys decided upon, that we're here.

And I look out and I see there's almost 100 of us, 75 to 80. When we went where we were to the one and two reunion I, there was almost like 75 to 100 of us. So the connection, at least for the mainland, I want to keep alive that so that the mystique will level three on the Ragsac side can trace the relationship. So so when I gave this talk to about mestiso in Seattle I use the family tree that shows two Abigail's in our family. Abigail Ragsac and I put a picture up there. She's white. And there's Abigail Cornish. There's a picture of her. She is really white. But you look at the connection on this chart and the blood relationship to Santa Catalina, Illoco Sur and La Paz, Abra. Their Ilocano side is very clear, and I use that as an example when they get this talk to the audience. And surprisingly, several people came up to me afterwards who said they never thought of that, but they said, we're going to do that. And some came up and say, we do have a family tree.

And you're right, you can make that connection because it really works. And and and I feel really good about that. So here's was that activism? How was that developing community relationships or making sure that our Filipino community as is, but at least my families are closer. Maybe so. So I use that example for when they start thinking about, well, yeah, history detective. Yeah, maybe historian and activist nah, but yeah, maybe so. Not knowing the true definition of each one of those. It’s really great idea because that family tree that I wrote I wrote just before my dad went to Kauai, you know, just out of a whim when my sister said, we don't read the family tree. Yeah, rest. Good idea. So I dropped something or put on PowerPoint. How did we do this? Well, PowerPoint because I do PowerPoint at work. So that's easy. And that rough draft and it was only about three pages, four pages long. It is now 53 pages big, but it's three page at that time was only four pages and it was fortuitous. If I if and if I didn't record that and if my dad didn't tell me that oh yeah. Put down here that our cousins Racho and our cousins Reposado and all these others and then oh my uncle Alejandro and my other brothers and sisters of so I wrote those down on an aside. But Alejandro was there. If I had not caught that, how do I make that relationship work with the Kauai Ragsacs? We where if it's almost like the Taketa, right? There's a lot of Taketas that are not related. Right? Right. My theory is if you go back far enough, there's probably a province in Japan somewhere where one of the Taketas moved. Maybe it was a great, great grandfather. And that's that's that's always possible, especially if the name hasn't been changed, you know, variations. And even then, at least and here's one of those cases where when you try to do the family trees, when a lot of the Filipinos, when they got on board ship, they had to be part of the manifest.

Right. So here's a Filipino trying to spell his name or say his name and here's a white stevedore or a white merchant trying to write the name. So he may spell it phonetically. You pronounce it. It's close, but you look at it, it's not. But it's the same that same guy, same family. And those mistakes happen and that and I've seen that when I've looked at the manifests. Now look at the name of the kid that that's the that's that's pretty close, you know, like, like Corpus. How do you spell corpus C, C, o r PUS or BUS, Z? But it's the same name when you pronounce it. But somebody can look and see what has a different family that's part of history, Detecting, by the way.

Timeframe 57:04 >> 58:19

The board of directors of the the museum the Filipion Museum in Stockton's I told you about the Pinoytown tours and so they said, we'd like to do that. Do you like to come by there? So we had a session where they all came down right in the midst of the Hidden Histories Project. So when they came here, we gave them the tour, and I said, well, let's we're in the midst of the hidden histories of something that I think you ought to look at. So I had Tom Izu give a talk to the group. So when subsequent to that, that event, two things came out of it. And one was that they would like to do a Little Manila tours up there. They're a little more organized. They've been doing tours, but they didn't have the booklets. But now they're trying to do that. So that came out of it. And the other was somehow in the future, use the, the augmented reality, virtual reality that came up through the Japantown Hidden Histories project. So there's a connection there that helps, like you say in developing this community closeness and hopefully that will work out.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 58:19 >> 1:02:28

I use my grandkids as an example. And by the way, the grandkids are Jacob, Jordan, and Abigail and I tried. It's difficult, actually. So when when I when my generation growing up, our parents were Filipinos. So they we could hear their stories, we can hear the way they talk and they could see the interactions. We go to those parties and and events to see the first communion things, the birthday celebrations and national holidays and things like that. Well, we experienced that firsthand. So now how do I impart that to a subsequent generation like my grandkids or my sister's grandkids or my buddies and their grandkids? How do we how do we impart that and not lose that, that kind of feeling? And and it's is really difficult because if you're like my grandkids, like Abigail, she's 18 and she's off to college and Jordan is 22 and he's in college. Same thing with with Jacob. Well, when you're that age, you're in college. And what do you want to do? You want to study, get to the class. You've got to get good grades. So the relationship to your ethnic history that you had been exposed to when you were toddlers or pre-teens, you know, that's way back in your for your life history.

Right now, what's important is, you know, get through the finals or find a job or get married. And maybe later on in your life, when you start thinking about your life, you'll wonder about those things and what little that I've done. Maybe that helps. I really don't know if that would affect any specific family, but in general, and I think the only way I can address those kinds of issues is do what I can as and as often as I can, just like giving the talks and conducting the tours. If you don't do that, of course, as far as you're concerned, that is lost. And it's not only Filipinos. I would hope that. Well, I'm sure that that the Chinese groups and and organizations have something similar to that same thing, like keep like Curt's book we did for the Issei and the Nisei. Right. So those kinds of things I the analogy I use is Asian American history is like a beach, right? Guy like me is taking that one grain of sand and putting it in the beach. Guys like they Curt, a teaspoon of sand and putting it on the beach right. So and and as much as I can do this and as often as I can, maybe that's addressing the question you have. I don't know if it's solving it or answering it, but like anything else, where it's overwhelming, you do what you can. That little grain of sand is part of the Asian American history. And not only that, it's not just Asian American history that's embedded in the United States of America’s history. And unfortunately and here's a part to that that part of the American history is not really a major part of the American history, like the Black history is or the Indians. Well, maybe we're getting there.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 1:02:28 >> 1:07:20

You know, when I give a talk, I've done this several times with the college kids and and then at the end of the talk, I say, I tell them, and I did this at the conference, too. And for those of you who have in history that want are interested in your history, you’re Filipino or otherwise, if you're Filipino and I use a Filipino example to talk to your parents, talk to them about why they left the Philippines, what life is in the Philippines, and what they did when they came here, and what the things that that I get in their responses that they don't want to talk about it, they won't say anything about. I said, well, there's a difference between interrogation and talking story. So and I use an example instead of saying, Hey Ma, what did you do when you were living in the village, don't do that. That's interrogating. But you can say, Hey, Ma, you know that recipe for your pancit. It is also where did that come from? Now they're talking about something that's manageable. Well, maybe they got it from their sister. Who? Your sister in the Philippines. Or was your auntie in the Philippines or where she from? Or what did she do or who she is? So you build that connection, otherwise you're going to lose them because sometimes, they’re not going sit down. I had to do that with my dad, who was fortunate enough to get to the the my dad's history. And over several sessions, of course, now he was a little bit more compliant. But a lot of the the kids, the Philippine kids especially said, well, my dad and mom don't have time. I said, well, did you actually talk to him? Wow, we know not about those things. Maybe talk about school or the education or the car or whatever else. But to talk about something that's personal because you're talking to a parent, you know, that's a different set of interrelationships.

And the level is quite different, especially if they are first wave Filipinos like in in the day they came in 1920s, the education level was fifth and sixth grade. But you look at the current generation, say those that came in about the sixties or 1970s, that generation, they're lawyers or doctors or nurses or or shopkeepers, businessmen. 1920s, those Filipinos were laborers. Most of them were laborers. So if you and I always say if you don't do that, if you don't talk to your parents or you'll get develop a family tree, then you will lose it. And one day your kid, you're 20 and 20, 25 years old. Now you're in college, you're going to get married, you're going to go to service or you're going to go someplace else. So you get a great job. And pretty soon, you’re 45. You got kids now. So one of them was going to say, mom or dad, what did grandpa do then in a war in the Philippines? If you haven't done that, then you now have lost a good part of your your history, your family history. And we all should do that, every one of us.

And I was fortunate enough to do that early enough for my dad to get his history. Now, after I said all this, my mom, we tried to get her history. She unfortunately, straight out, she said she hated her family. She ran away when she was 14. So we tried to get their story. She would not talk about it. I guess it's it was such a psychological despair that she would not talk about it. All she said was she hated her family. She ran away. She was 14 years old. She ended up in Kauai. That's where she met. Well, here's another case. Well, if she didn't run away, she wouldn't have been in Kauai. She wouldn't have met my dad. They wouldn't have got married and we wouldn't be here. So there's another one of those sequences of events of what ifs. And you look back, well, maybe it's fortunate that my mom hated her family, otherwise she wouldn't have been in Kauai to meet my dad and me. I'm sure if you look back in your history, you're going to see those kinds of things for for your families. And I hope you do that.

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 1:07:20 >> 1:11:26

I think I should mention this is way off the subject. Though not quite off the subject. In the 1940s, see, my dad worked in the defense plant during the war. After the defense plant shut down, they laid off a lot of people. So the what he did was they worked on the fields. That's when I worked in the fields, too. And my brother and I described that before. But my brother and my brother, Ruben and I, when we work in the fields, of course, we were very concerned about having our jobs when we grew older. Well, that there was a period there where my dad could not find a job. And so we're getting real problems. And I remember distinctly he was really concerned because you had to support the family so he couldn't find a job anywhere. But when his reference somebody says, oh, well, go see Mr. Kawahara, who owns a ranch off First Street. And we remember the Kawahara family, my sisters and I, and their house, because we knew their kids. But that's all. But Kawahara told my dad just, oh, yeah, you can work for me. He saved us. What about that? When I didn't know how badly it was, but all I know is that I could see in my father's eyes that he's got to get a job, Mr. Kawahara, Kawahara-san saved us. Well, I feel that he saved this.

That's my my feeling. Well, I don't know if it's economically saved us or what, but when you see something like that in your father's eyes about how concerned he is, you know, it's important. Very important. And and and it's I, I told my sister about that and I'm sure. Yeah, I remember Kawaharas; they had this big estate house on First Street. Yeah. Well beyond the Shell station on just beyond 101. That, by the way, that house still exists, but it's been restored and it's sitting there in one of the businesses areas off of First Street. It's called the Kawahara. Kawahara Building. So I think I should I want to mention that because that was that. Of course, again, if he did not help my dad, where would we be? Maybe we still existed. You know, we would have struggled and got through. But that was one of the traumatic points in life for that he was taken care of. So and there's probably others to that and I'm sure I'll think about when I start laying in bed tonight and I think I look at my notes, I say, Oh my God, you forgot that. In fact, when okay, yes, I and and I'd like to thank everybody here, by the way, for sending you for taking the time. You know, I know one must be liked to set up your equipment and, and to bring this and to use it for this purpose. I really thank you. I appreciate that, because I feel like what we're doing here is capturing some an important part of at least the history of the Filipinos here. And I thank all of you for doing this really right. Okay.

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 1:11:26 >> end

Yeah. You know, this is the Heinlenville Sixth Street Chinatown, Nihonmachi in Japantown has a you know, has a history that I think is only partly talked about in Japantown in the book. And Curt and Ralph Ralph’s book. There's a lot of other things that are going on, you know, that that that are unique for the Japantown. And, you know, when I when I look back on what I did for for the Filipino history in this and Sixth Street Chinatown and I see what happened when I was a kid and my sisters and my brother remember all. This is, we have a unique history here. I mean, a really unique history. It's probably same in other Japantown or Chinatowns, but for me, this is really personal. But, you know, with that gigantic project going on and Curt, Tom and Sue, you know, you you're facing gentrification here. And I can see where if well, it's almost like it's a wave and a momentum that that building there, when it was fully occupied and whatever businesses happened to be there, you know, is not the Japantown that we knew. It's not the Chinatown that I knew is it would be still a Japantown destination for people to come to have sushi, you know. Is it Roy's right? But it's not the same. I don't feel it's the same. And we did. I don't know what you do about that. And it it may not be as important to people who are currently living here or experience Japantown when it became a formal Japantown.

But for us that lived it in the 1930s and 1940s, you know that part of it has already vanished as I tried to describe, you know, relationships here. You know, like Connie Young Yu’s dad and my uncle, you know, the laundries or the Ken Ying Low, the Chinese restaurant, the gambling houses, you know, gentrification. This is is a big monster, and it can wipe out. It's already happened in Stockton. And they're trying to keep alive, too. But what they what they can, but and it and every time I come here I go to Roy's and that I make it a point to walk down the street and look at the Filipino Community Center. It's still there. And look at Surokawa Laundry, the building is still there. And it and then look across the street and there's this gigantic six story building that wiped out everything. Part of which I you know it's in the Pinoytown book. There's there's some pictures, but we've lost a lot. And I wonder if the same thing here, you know, so it's it's totally I don't know it's just it's almost like a part of my history. My personal history is, you know, it's almost like a dream is fading away. And yet and you're trying to hold on to it and it's going to disappear, so. Well, okay, I don’t want to go on on this. Anyway, that's my feelings. Thank you again. Thank you very much.