My grandfather: a first generation migrant worker

My grandfather, Antonio Suarez Marin, died 25 years ago at the age of 95.  Born on May 10, 1892, he would have been 120 years old today. For us, grandkids, he was simply, ‘Lolo’. He was the only grandfather I knew, as I never met my maternal grandfather (and that’s a story that I am still clueless about till this day). 

Lolo was a first generation migrant worker who toiled in the sugar cane plantations in Hawaii, braved the stench of seafood canning factories in Alaska and endured heavy industry work in Seattle in the 1920s and 1930s. He also served in the US Army in Texas during World War I.

In between working abroad, he would come home to his family in Iloilo on a periodic basis. Like a typical husband separated by distance from his wife, my grandmother, his departures were marked by subsequent arrivals of children nine months later. Just before World War II commenced, my grandmother finally admonished him to settle in the Philippines for good, as she no longer fancied the thought of raising their children by her lonesome (at that time, communication was even slower than snail mail). In between those comings and goings, my father was born in 1934, the fourth of six children. 

In 1940, the Marin family moved from Iloilo to Mindanao to become homestead pioneers in Dadiangas, an emerging settlement in the shores of Sarangani Bay. As the city’s history reveals, the first set of immigrants who came a year before were 62 “Christians” from Luzon led by General Paulino Santos. Soon after the move, World War II broke out. The Japanese Army, who had forcibly occupied Manila and some parts of Luzon and the Visayas, also used Dadiangas as their base for ground defense in Mindanao. My father can still recall the terror that gripped the island during those four tenuous years of Japanese occupation.

In 1954, through Republic Act 1107, the city was formally named General Santos City. Now you know from where the city got its name. Yet, the name-change took a while to catch, because as kids growing up in the 70s and 80s, my friends and I still referred to our beloved city as ‘Dadiangas’. ‘Gensan’ caught on as a moniker in the 90s, when many from my generation had left to become migrants in imperial Manila and elsewhere.

My Lolo and I, December 1976

 

In his retirement in the 1970s, my grandfather was able to reap the benefits of being a US war veteran with a generous pension, which he would occasionally apportion to his children and grandchildren, including myself. I remember receiving crisp P50.00 bills on every Christmas Day, until I moved to Manila for college in 1984. That was big money, waaaay back then. Lolo also rewarded me (or more precisely, my parents) if I got good grades, as he would shoulder my tuition fees for the incoming grading period. One time, he asked me to accompany him to the barbershop. As a reward, he treated me to a half-pint of strawberry ice cream and a packet of barquillos.

In his later years, Lolo would be buried deep in his books and newspapers (which he read with the aid of a magnifying glass). He would also buy volumes of PIMS (Philippine Index of Medical Supplies) and self-diagnose whatever ailment he was feeling. Days after my grandmother died in 1987, he took 10 milligrams of valium, which knocked him out for more than a day.  Understandably. Even just 2 mg could send one to dreamland in a jiffy. My parents and aunts rushed him to hospital because he was not responding. When he woke up two days or so later, he was seriously pissed off to find himself confined in the hospital.

So that’s a short account about my Lolo. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if he did not come back to the Philippines and just decided to move the entire family to the US. Would I have even been born at all? And then again, I probably would have ended being one of those lost third-generation Fil-Ams in perpetual search of their identity and cultural roots.

Strangely, I got involved in migrants’ rights advocacy, way before I knew about my grandfather’s life as a first generation Filpino migrant worker. It figures.