Alaskeros

An excerpt from Alaska is in the Heart article:

Marcelo Quinto II of Juneau, Alaska, is Filipino.

He is also Tlingit Indian. "I'm Indopino," he declares. "That mixture didn't go over very well here in this town for a very long time. People didn't want to see a white lady marry an Asian or an Indian. To do so would be to cause yourself a whole lot of grief."

Quinto's Filipino father went to college but could only find work as a cannery worker or a bartender because of the color of his skin. His Tlingit mother, a proud member of the second largest indigenous Alaskan population after the Eskimos, banded together with other Native wives to raise money to build the Filipino Community Hall in downtown Juneau. Growing up a mestizo, Quinto wasn't welcome in the Alaskan Native Brotherhood, who recognized only full-blooded Indians. Mixed-bloods were not considered Indians until they turned 18. "That law did not change until 1962," he continues. "I was blown away by that. It even came to the point where my mother could not get services because she was married to a non-Native."

Now 64 years old, Quinto is one of the many Filipinos whose stories I have traveled to Alaska to see depicted on stage. He has come to the Perseverance Theatre in nearby Douglas to tell it like it is about the Alaskan manongs (Ilocano for "oldtimers") who have played a role in his life. "Because we are half-Filipinos, the oldtimers in this town were basically our uncles when we were growing up," he tells me. "It was quite an extended family in that sense. Those ties are here today, 65 or 70 years later. You can't break them."

After reading this, I looked up Marcelo Quinto in the phone book and found him. To make up for last Saturday's set-back at the community hall, I got a breakthrough. We're meeting this Friday for lunch, and I have work cut out for me. After pep talks from both the professor and my roommate, I feel like I have my grasp back and a better sense of direction. The prof's helping me set up a meeting with a woman from SeaAlaska, the Native corporation, and I asked one of the Filipina high school teachers on a lunch date next Monday. For a minute there, I got so scared that the research would not work out in time for the conference, and I'd have to scrap my presentation. Usually ethnographies take 2+ years. I'm trying to come up with it in 4 weeks, albeit a preliminary one.

why, oh why, did I come to the Land of the Midnight Sun
-Trinidad Rojo