Immigrant Stories in Newspaper

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Ron Gonzalez
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Immigrant Stories in Newspaper

Post by Ron Gonzalez »

The Charleston Gazette has a three page article on growing up in Spelter WV. It is a very well done article, I'm proud to have been a small part of it. To read it go to: http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Series ... 2005082729
[the full text of the article is also shown four messages down below this one]

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trans. Art

El periódico Charleston Gazette ha publicado un artículo de tres páginas sobre criarse en Spelter, Virgina Occidental. Es un artículo muy bien hecho y so orgulloso de jugar un papel pequena en este. Para leerlo, irse aquí:
http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Series ... 2005082729
[el texto completo tambien se ve cuatro mensajes más abajo]
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Terechu
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Post by Terechu »

Thanks, Ron! That was a beautiful article, very sensitive to the yearnings of those who once made up the Asturian community of Spelter, WV.
Unfortunately, Asturias's own mining industry is slowly dying, as well, and the family culture and values of the mining communities are becoming a thing of the past.
The close-knit families, the family-like neighbourly relationships, the children brought up to respect and obey their elders (regardless if they were family or not) and face up to their adversaries, the drive to excell in whatever you did, whether you were a miner, a sweep or a neurosurgeon, all that is about to vanish, leaving a generation of utterly disoriented youngsters.

By the way, you can buy Asturian chorizos on the Internet, now :lol: :lol:
Gracias Ron. Qué artículo tan guapo y tan sensible con las añoranzas de aquéllos que en su día formaron la comunidad asturiana de Spelter, Virginia Occidental.
Por desgracia la propia industria minera de Asturias también está muriendo y con ella la cultura y los valores familiares de los mineros se están convirtiendo en cosas del pasado. Familias unidas, vecinos casi como familia, niños educados para respetar y obedecer a sus mayores (aunque no fueran parientes) y plantar cara a sus adversarios, la búsqueda de excelencia en tu profesión, tanto si eras minero, barrendero o neurocirujano - todo eso está desapareciendo, dejando atrás a una generación de chavales desorientados.

Por cierto, ya se pueden comprar chorizos asturianos en Internet. :lol: :lol:

Cheers
Terechu
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Xose
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Post by Xose »

I'm actually the one who tipped off the reporter to include our little batch of heritage in his series on WV's nationalities. I have been sick of being left out in all of these kinds of roundups for quite some time now.

I think the main PR problem Asturian-Americans in WV (and elsewhere) have is that we, as a people, assimilated too well, in a way.

P.S. You can get home-made and home-smoked chorizo in my fridge, too! We make it every fall....
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Art
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Post by Art »

Xosé, so you're being a good rabblerouser, are you? Great! You're right about our having assimilating too well. That's certainly the case in my family. I didn't know anything about Asturias (not even the name of the place) until I was 30-something. And I didn't realize that Asturian culture was different from Spanish culture until I was 40-something. Now I hear other family members saying they're Asturian, too. That tells me that our little activism does do some good.

Hey, we'll be down for some chorizo! Sounds great.

----------------

Xosé, pues haces un agitador muy bueno, verdad? ¡Estupendo! Tienes razón que hemos asimilado demasiado bien. Esto es seguramente el caso en mi familia. Yo no sabía nada sobre Asturias--ni el nombre del lugar--hasta que tuve 30 y pico años. Y no comprendí que la cultura asturiana es diferente de la cultura española hasta que yo tuve 40 y pico años. Ahora oigo a otros miembros de la familia dicen que son asturianos, también. Por esto me di cuenta que nuestros pequeños actos de activismo realmente ayudan.

¡¡Eh!, nos iremos allí para probar este chorizo! Me encantaría....
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Art
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Text of the article

Post by Art »

Asturian alliance
Spanish immigrants’ legacy fading in Harrison County
August 28, 2005 Charleston Gazette
By Robert J. Byers, Staff writer [Thanks to Mr. Byers for permission to post the article here.]
http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Series ... 82729?pt=0

This is the fourth installment in a series examining remaining pockets of ethnicity in the Mountain State.

SPELTER — Talking with a friend beside her front porch along noisy U.S. 19, Josephine Alvarez mentioned that she was going to stop making authentic chorizo-style sausage, the kind that her grandparents made back in Spain.

“As soon as I run out of spices, I’m quitting,” she said flatly, attributing her decision to age and weariness.

In between air-brake blasts from the coal and timber trucks passing by, Ron Gonzalez, who has enjoyed her homemade chorizo for many years, tried to talk her out of it.

Alvarez brushed off his protests. When she turned toward her front steps, she paused to call back over her shoulder: “Hasta la vista.”

Later, as he showed a visitor around Spelter, the town of his youth, Gonzalez confided that he’s been dreading the day when Alvarez makes her last link of smoky, garlicky chorizo.

To him, it’s a taste of his heritage, of Spain and its Asturian emigrants, of Spelter and its once-hulking zinc works ... of a time that is rapidly slipping away.

Heart of town

Tucked away in the Spanish north, Asturias is a rugged land of high mountains and cliff-lined beaches fronting the Bay of Biscay. Its industrial foundation — mining and metallurgy — was not enough to stop thousands of workers from seeking the American dream in the early 1900s.

In the United States, the Asturianos sought out familiar work, leading many to settle next to the blistering zinc-smelting furnaces in Anmoore and Spelter, Harrison County.

Like other immigrants, they bunched together, forming neighborhood clusters such as North View and Pinnick Kinnick Hill in Clarksburg.

But it was Spelter, the company town built for the employees of the Grasselli Chemical Co. zinc works, that is perhaps the most cohesive example of a Spanish-West Virginia village.

Spelter is the name for the crude zinc rendered by the smelting process, and it was simultaneously the lifeblood and bane of many a Spanish worker.

It was widely known at the time that the Asturian men were some of the only workers who could (or would) stand the heat and the hard labor at the mouth of the furnaces.

For this reason, and various prejudices, the men were kept at the furnaces with little chance for advancement.

The massive plant loomed over the town, a smoldering, smoking core for the rows of neatly kept houses that crowded around its boundaries.

It was here in this tight-knit community, where Spanish could be heard as regularly as English, that Ron Gonzalez and a hundred other children and grandchildren of Asturian immigrants came of age.

“It was wonderful growing up there,” said Gonzalez, 68, who moved to Shinnston in the 1960s with his new bride. “The families cared for each other, the neighbors cared for each other.

“I look at it today and, ... ” he paused, shaking his head. “Sad, sad. Whatever legacy the original immigrants left is slowly evaporating.”

Following his father

Alvarez. Fernandez. Garcia. Gutierrez. Menendez. Vasquez.

On a hot day earlier this month, Gonzalez rode along the quiet streets of Spelter, pointing out houses and reciting the names of the Spanish families that originally lived there.

A few families with Spanish names remain, but nothing visible — save for a defunct sausage smokehouse in one back yard — tells of the ones who came before.

And on the knoll where the zinc plant once sprawled for acres, a grassy expanse of reclaimed land is broken only by a two-story brick house, the plant’s former office building.

Gonzalez followed his father into the plant when he finished high school and took up his post at the mouth of the furnace.

Forty-six years later, in 2002, the Spelter plant closed and was demolished — one year shy of Gonzalez’s retirement date.

By then, he was one of only a few Asturian immigrants’ sons still working in the plant. Most of the old prejudices had been forgotten years before, allowing Gonzalez to advance past the furnaces.

But there was a time ... He recalls the occasion when his father, who did not have a car, rented his garage to a man (an “American” man, as they were known at the time) for $1 a month. After four months and no money, his father padlocked the garage and told the man that he would unlock it when he got his money.

“I was just a kid, but I remember I was standing right next to my father at the time,” Gonzalez said. “The man got mad and said: ‘You damn dagos should pay us for letting you live in this country!’”

While the “dago” slur is often associated with Italians, it is actually a corruption of the Spanish name “Diego,” and was originally applied to both nationalities.

“That word started a lot of fights in those days,” Gonzalez said.

A desire to learn more

The Asturian immigrants themselves, of course, spoke Spanish. Their children were often bilingual, but the next generation — Ron Gonzalez’s generation — were English speakers ... unless they were talking to their grandparents.

Gonzalez used to like to sit and listen to his mother and grandmother talk to each other in Spanish. At one time, he had a good command of the language, but years of disuse have washed away much of that ability.

When Gonzalez was a student, the local schools taught French and Latin, but not Spanish.

Deborah (Garcia) Harki, whose great-grandfather was an Asturian emigrant, took the French and Latin classes at her Catholic high school in Clarksburg, but as soon as she enrolled in West Virginia University in 1967, she realized Spanish would be her major.

“I had a real desire to learn more about my Spanish background and about the language,” said Harki, who is now the foreign languages coordinator for the state Department of Education.

She said she was not encouraged by her family to learn Spanish. When asked, her father always pronounced his nationality as “American.”

“But when I took it up in college and came home speaking Spanish, my grandfather was delighted,” Harki said.

Prior to her state job, Harki was a high school Spanish teacher in Shinnston for 26 years.

There, she taught Ron Gonzalez’s daughter, Suronda, who was fast becoming enamored with Spain and her roots.

In 1991, Suronda Gonzalez completed a master’s thesis titled “Talking Like My Grandmothers: Spanish Immigrant Women in Spelter, W.Va.” based on interviews she conducted with several Spanish women remaining in the community.

Most recently, she wrote the preface for G.W. Gonzalez’s lightly fictionalized memoir “Pinnick Kinnick Hill, An American Story” published posthumously by the West Virginia University Press in 2003.

“From 1910 to 1920, the Spanish population of West Virginia more than tripled to 1,543,” she noted in the preface. “The growth of West Virginia’s Spanish population, expanding at nearly twice the national rate, led to the establishment of a Spanish Vice Consulate in Clarksburg by the 1920s.”

Unbeknownst to his family, G.W. Gonzalez (no relation to Ron and Suronda) had been writing down remembrances from his Clarksburg childhood up on Pinnick Kinnick.

The memoir, which changes the names of characters and places, was found after Gonzalez’s death in 1988.

It is a rambling tale of Asturianos trying to fit into their new home while still holding onto a semblance of their past lives. Its pages reveal adventures and fun, as well as death and the yearning for more from life.

Today, Pinnickinnick Street is a quiet, paved lane trailing up the steep hill.

On a recent day, an older woman sat outside her home on Pinnickinnick, peering through the summery haze that enveloped downtown Clarksburg in the valley below.

Spanish-American families? She puzzled at the question. “A Spanish family used to have the house next door, and mine, too.” But there aren’t any families with Spanish-sounding names still living on the street, she said. “No, not anymore.”


[NOTE: You can discuss this article in the Charleston Gazette's forum, too:
http://www.wvgazettemail.com/forums]
Last edited by Art on Thu Sep 01, 2005 12:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Ron Gonzalez
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Immigrant Stories

Post by Ron Gonzalez »

It is true, the "Asturian Community" that I once knew is just a memory now. It was a time when there was respect for your elders, your neighbor, and most of all mom and dad. As a young boy we would go to Canton, Ohio to the Spanish picnic, a two-day affair. The Asturians of Canton would bring in a show from New York City. What a time it was. I do think of myself as lucky: I have my memories. Believe me it was great, I think they have the picnic in a park yet today, nothing like it was. We do need more PR and I thank anyone who had anything to do with the Gazette article.
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Xose
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Post by Xose »

At least in my family, there was a great pressure to be "just American" and my grandfather considered himself as such. Like others' relatives here, he called himself Spanish when people asked about his heritage, but I only heard him speaking Spanish with my mom when she learned it and with me when I did in college. (I studied in Salamanca.)

I think he was pretty psyched that I had such a keen interest in his heritage, and I know he enjoyed our conversaions in my broken castellano.
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Art
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Post by Art »

I sometimes wonder what our grandparents would think of this forum. I think my grandfather would feel touched by my interest but he might also think I was wasting my time.

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De vez y cuando me pregunto qué pensarían nuestros abuelos de este foro. Creo que me abuelo se enternecería por mi interés pero también es posible que pensaría que estoy perdiendo el tiempo.
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Ron Gonzalez
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Immigrant Storys

Post by Ron Gonzalez »

I think my grandmother (Aurora Vasquez) would be busting with pride to know that there were so many Asturians coming together in one place. She was old in years , but had a young mind.
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Art
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Post by Art »

I was just writing to Ron Byers about two slight corrections for his wonderful article when it occurred to me that one of the things I really like about Ron González is the fact that he and his family have a strong story-telling tradition. My immediate family lost that in its attempt to blend into the mainstream culture. Maybe that's because telling those stories would have revealed how we were, in fact, a little different?

Update: I have inserted Ron Byer's corrections.

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Acabo de escribir a Ron Byers de dos correcciones leves para su maravilloso artículo cuando me ocurrió que una de las cosas que me encanta más de Ron González es el hecho que él y su familia aún tienen una tradición narradora fuertísima. Mi familia inmediata la perdió en su tentativa de integrarse en la cultura principal. Tal vez sea porque repetir aquellas historias habría revelado que éramos, de hecho, un poco diferentes?

Actualización: He insertado las correcciones hecho por Ron Byer.
Last edited by Art on Wed Feb 08, 2006 3:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
Barbara Alonso Novellino
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Post by Barbara Alonso Novellino »

I know that my father would have been extremely happy to know that there was a forum where people from Asturias can come together.

He always prided himself as being an Asturiano...I heard him say that on many occasions, when he was asked his nationality.

Hopefully I will get his journal finished one day. He ended it...

"For many years I have wanted to record the history of the Asturianos in the United States. They are a people that came mostly from the Province of Asturias in Spain and settled mostly in those states having zinc smelter plants. They came here in the early part of the 20th Century. Pedro Menendez, the founder of St. Augustine, Florida, came from Aviles, a seaport of Asturias,60 years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. My father came from Lunaco, another small seaport, not many miles from Aviles. I had many happy days there going to the Instituto del Santisimo Socorro from 1919 to 1921.

Julius Garcia Alonso a man very proud of being born in Asturias...
Gil Andrés Sopeña
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Post by Gil Andrés Sopeña »

Art:
Como asturiano que soy , te puedo decir que tu abuelo, como la inmensa mayoria de los asturianos, se sentiria orgulloso de ti, y yo que no conoci a tu abuelo ni a los mios, te puedo decir que me siento muy, pero muy orgulloso de todos los asturianos o descendientes de asturianos, y de todos los que en este foro y en esta lugar ponen su granito de arena, para hacer más grande y mas universal a Asturias.

Por eso yo denomino a esto "Asturianos del Mundo" no en vano la mayoria de los asturianos procedemos de la aldea y hoy se habla de "la aldea global" a causa del internet y otros adelantos.

Gracias Art por recordar esta tierra.

¿Sería interesante un foro o tema, para debatir la forma de sacar a Asturias de la crisis economica que padece?

Muchas gracias a todos los "Asturianos del Mundo."

Gil Andrés Sopeña Gonzalez

-------------------
trans. Art

Art:
As the Asturian that I am, I can tell you that your grandfather, as is true of the vast majority of Asturians, would be proud of you, and I--who knew neither your grandfather nor mine--can tell you that I feel very proud indeed of all the Asturians or descendants of Asturians, and of all those who in this forum and in this place who do their part to make Asturias greater [better] and more universally [known?].

For this reason, I call this [forum] "Asturians of the World" and not in vain. The majority of Asturians came from small villages and today we speak of the "global village" because of the Internet and other advances.

Thank you Art for remembering this land.

Would anyone be interested in creating a forum or topic in which we could discuss ways of delivering Asturias from the economic crisis that it is suffering?

Thank you very much to all "Asturians of the World".

Gil Andrés Sopeña Gonzalez
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Art
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Post by Art »

Thanks, Gil, we like your idea of creating a new section of the forum to discuss the future of Asturias and the related economic, political, cultural, and other issues. If we want to go somewhere new, we it's very important to envision what it might be.

Here it is:
http://www.asturianus.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=52

We hope to hear from you there!

------------------

Gracias, Gil, nos encanta tu idea de crear una sección nueva del foro en que discutimos el futuro de Asturias y las cuestiones relacionadas de la economía, la política, la cultura, y más. Si se quiere llegar a algún lugar nuevo, es importantísimo prever lo que puede ser.

Aquí está:
http://www.asturianus.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=52

¡Esperamos que participes allí!
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