One of those inconspicuous places along Rte. 35 aka Airport Road in Saipan is the Herman\u2019s Modern Bakery with its Tita Marikita Caf\u00e9 that offers local gourmet.\u00a0Not frequently, but I go there to meet friends and colleagues. Their sweet bread will delight a tooth any day. The cost of their offerings beats the lagoon hotel restaurants and pantry hands down.<\/p>\n
Late January, I had reason to mosey over.\u00a0My intent to merge island touring with a language immersion program finally got to a flyer and a spiral bound that I can pass around to promote the addition to our visitors\u2019 menu so I sought first the one known simply as the \u201cchairman,\u201d father of a former 6th grade student at SVES, at the 75-year old bakery, named before its namesake, a forebear of our acquaintance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now with a branch in Garapan that I have yet to patronize other than ask direction from the staff, the family bread maker and native food server broadened its breadbasket to serve a more cosmopolitan clientele.\u00a0 My colleague\u2019s generation (my age, mas o menos) handed over management and operation to the younger ones though our friend and his sister remains in the board, and the sister still has her finger in the daily management of the business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We chose the bakery to title our reflection not because we want to tell folks more about their bread but that the establishment represents a local family concern deciding to take the needs of a local situation and proceeded to provide a local response to it.<\/p>\n
OK. Local family is a numinous term.\u00a0In Korea, between the Park and the Kim, you are halfway down the population.\u00a0It would be the Wang and the Li in China, though it would be more widespread in Japan, but not by much. In the Marianas, the indigenous families might find cohesiveness among Babauta, Camacho, and Tenorio families and their extended relations, then add Ogumoro and Tabuted into the stew and one might cover a substantial network of relationships on the small island of Saipan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like the leading families in many societies around the world, the pure indigenes are not the ones who preside over power structures; creoles do, mestizos and mix bloods.\u00a0 My daughter once hurled a banner at her university urging the \u201cMongrels of the World\u201d to unite.\u00a0On her mother side, she inherited German, Welsh, Scot, and English pedigrees and on her father side, Indo-Malay, Austronesia, Fujian, Spanish, and Mexican lineage. I am sure there are other breakdowns on categories like \u201cGerman,\u201d but never mind.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
What makes one local these days is not chromosome pedigree but the resolve to take one\u2019s location seriously and make it one\u2019s home regardless of the constitution of one\u2019s DNA make-up\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the bakery, the subject of genealogy and ancestry became a topic of discussion when another colleague came in, works on noting local stories of elders about their ancestry and record them for posterity.\u00a0The records of Chamorro-Carolinian ancestries were with the Spanish parishes when they kept them; the German administration briefly had a conscientious caretaker.\u00a0The Japanese and Americans were meticulous in keeping records especially at the time when both forbade the local population from speaking their language in order to learn the tongue of the occupiers.\u00a0It was not propitious to be indigene a century ago.<\/p>\n
Our colleague at the bakery, like my daughter, is a pure blood \u201cmongrel.\u201d\u00a0He\u2019s done extensive work on genealogy and says that he is stymied after the fourth generation, which is important to the Chamorro and Carolinian communities with their penchant to acknowledge relations, even by marriage, to as distant as recognizable.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The phenomenon of \u201cMain Street\u201d described by Sinclair Lewis novel of the same title might have been the source of my teacher\u2019s dynamical sociology phenomenon labeled with the same name, where folks from Appalachia warring against each other for ages, find themselves in NYC and are suddenly kin. This applies to Filipinos who would not bother to get to know each other in their hometowns but are suddenly \u201crelated\u201d in a foreign country.<\/p>\n
Herman\u2019s Bakery and Tita Marikita Caf\u00e9 are such a leveler of social relations, ignoring the social strata defined elsewhere, the drawing card being the croissant and the coffee, along with the servings of native and off-island dishes in an atmosphere that is not too ostentatious. In fact, it was subdued when I was last there, only occasionally raucous when there were too many young ones, but otherwise, convivial.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The issue of the indigene is where we started and this is up front in the legitimacy of ancient lands vs. public lands.\u00a0A friend at judiciary says that judges harbor automatic sympathies on claimants of ancient lands if they can prove utility, otherwise, he advises that claimants apply for Torrens titles.\u00a0Many new entities, with the connivance of local families, are incorporating and buying land in the name of the companies that have majority holdings from acquiescing indigenes.<\/p>\n
Cozy over, taste the bread!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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