Volume 1, Issue No. 10
OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /
. . . . . A community service of The Filipino Web Channel (TheFilipinoWebChannel@gmail. com) and the Philippine Village Voice (PhilVoiceNews@gmail.com) for the information and understanding of Filipinos and the diverse communities in North America . . . . . .
Our latest as of Wednesday, November 6, 2019
~ From the cruise ship's top deck, California beckons with its magical sunrise and golden waters. After an overnight sailing from Astoria, Oregon, the distinctive mountainous features of the Pacific coast are slowly taking shape, highlighted by the rising sun. I could feel the hot temperature and the salty air. This is San Francisco. The next day, it would be Los Angeles. And from there, the drive to my hometown San Diego is just a matter of two hours.
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BUT IT'S FALL IN THE WEST
San Diego's Endless Summer
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
“And how deeply, the passing moods of weather affected our own.” ―
The merciless heat and the balmy salt air are the inextricable weather twins that distinguish my old hometown, San Diego, from the current one, Toronto, the lakeside city I've resided in for almost a decade now.
It's fall (actually mid-autumn now) in all Western countries, I know, but this one place in the United States, San Diego, seems oblivious to the changing seasons as if it's permanently trapped in summer. The summery weather all-year-round makes it a delightful place to settle in.
On Monday, October 21, 2019, San Diego had its hottest day of the year with the temperature soaring to a high of 88 degrees Fahrenheit (or 31.11 degrees Celsius). It's San Diego's "endless summer," the regional newspaper San Diego Union-Tribune reported a day later.
The climate of San Diego is classified as a Mediterranean climate, according to Wikipedia. The basic climate features hot, sunny, and dry summers, and cooler, wetter winters. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk-2dCAzGps).
As I was finishing this essay in Toronto, news reports showed some areas in California ablaze due mostly to the hot weather. Santa Ana winds made the situation worse.
Though now living in Canada, the fact is I still hanker for California, especially the southern part, not because I had stayed there longer, actually 16 years, but due to the many challenges I had faced, and overcome. They were personal and professional successes, if I may boast.
But I am not to celebrate those. My cause for celebration is in being in California again, for the third time actually since I left in 2010. This latest visit had given me time to do a little exploration of the cities of Monterey, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
I had spent time in those places before, notably in San Francisco and Los Angeles, mainly because of the writing job I had done for a number of Filipino publications there.
Los Angeles, for example, was and still continues to be, a big market for community journalism. The city had one of the largest Filipino communities in Southern California. LA County accounts for over 374,285 Filipinos, according to official statistics.
The most contentious community characters, Filipinos or Filipino-Americans, of course, lived and worked in Los Angeles. I knew that for a fact even if I was based in San Diego, which is at least a two-hour drive by the Interstate 5 freeway, only because I exposed and wrote about them in my newspapers, the now-defunct Diario Veritas and the Philippine Village Voice.
That's quite a long time ago. Recalling the experience now just adds to the spice of life of the journalist in me. I should say my San Diego experience was more colorful, stimulating, livelier, and audacious than my almost two decades reporting for two international news networks. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik0AXXyPXaE).
That is because writing about the community has a different face, actually more personal and intimate since it involves friends, neighbours, relatives, people in the same village, etc. than reporting on the national and international levels.
My exposure to community journalism took shape in California. There, I met and interacted with the best and brightest Filipinos around; same way I reached out to the worst of them - the crooks, the scammers, the fakers, and their ilk.
In practice, community journalism may look benign if one's reportage is limited to social events and day-to-day happenings. But once one engages in its investigative aspects as I still do, the difficulties are greater and the risks to life and limb considerable. I know. I've been there, done that in San Diego.
I had my first break in community journalism in San Diego in 1993, thanks to Simeon Silverio, publisher and editor of Asian Journal. (I actually called on him in his office but he wasn't there). Several months later, I moved to the Filipino Press where the late Ernie Flores, publisher and editor, hired me as an associate editor.
Then, the real break came when I was offered the position of editor-in-chief of Philippine Mabuhay News, then owned by the couple Danny and Nette Bungay. I accepted on the condition that I would have full management control of the editorial department.
Some years later, I had to quit. My principals had refused to publish my story about how the Philippine hero Jose Rizal was, in my view, being disrespected by erecting his bust monument in front of a supermarket, which was the paper's major advertiser. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf8TM-Ff_iI).
My resignation led me to put up my own broadsheet paper which I named Diario Veritas. Its first banner story was an exposé about the Rizal bust and how it ended up in a market through the connivance of the Filipino community's foremost organization.
So being in California is like reconnecting with both my professional and personal roots. Admittedly, my affinity has grown wide and apart. San Diego is my second home after Manila, and after San Diego, it's Toronto now. Except that I can't relate much to this city as I do with San Diego. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be5lXUvHUl4).
There as in Toronto, there are friends and there were friends. I had wicked, mean, and abusive friends; former friends who believe they can buy their way into one's mind and character.
There as in Toronto, I lent my friendship to a few, but my selectiveness did not spare me from being taken advantage of. The few people who I had thought would stand by me are the very same ones who stabbed me behind my back.
Perhaps this is the reason Toronto has lost its appeal to me. Some people are so engrossed with money, influence, and prestige that they tend to forget that it's human relations that matter after all. (Copyright 2019. All Rights Reserved).
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