Monthly Archives: April 2018

Drinking Mate

Nationality: Argentine-American
Age: 44
Occupation: Director of Residential Services at local health center
Residence: Claremont, CA
Performance Date: April 21, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Everybody drinks mate. As long as I can remember, since I was a kid, my mom and her friends used to drink mate. I think it’s made out of coconut or something. Everybody drinks it out of these cups made out of wood that basically look like coconuts. They put tea leaves in it, and drink out of a strange straw made of metal. The straw lets the liquid through without letting the tea leaves through. Basically, whoever is serving the mate has a bowl of yerva, which is the herbs, and they put it in the mate, and once you have all the tea in, you pour in hot water and sugar. The person serving drinks first because it’s usually very bitter but gets sweeter. You pass it around, adding more sugar and hot water, and everybody gets the mate out of the same container and straw.”

Background Information and Context:

According to the informant, her parents drank mate every morning and throughout the day, and her cousin drinks it by himself by the river, but the particular ritual she described is meant for a social gathering. She’s not sure if any of this is symbolic. “People will share with complete strangers. It’s really strange,” she remarked, “My cousin will be down at the beach and meet some strangers, and they’ll drink mate together.” In Argentina, kids drink it too, but with warm milk and lots of sugar. She remembers drinking it as a kid all the time, and remarked that shMare was sad that she didn’t make it for her kids when they were little.

Collector’s Notes:

Traditions reveal a lot about social relations within a culture. Based on this tradition of sharing mate, one can see that hospitality – moreover a deference for one’s guests – is an important aspect of Argentine culture and that being friendly and welcoming, even to strangers, is expected. The first time I came to the informant’s house, I was so confused by the extent to which she’d welcomed me into her home and wanted me to make myself comfortable because it was such a different experience from my own more conservative Vietnamese upbringing. A good way to see the differences between these two cultures would be to compare this mate tradition to what I’d consider a typical Vietnamese social interaction, like greeting each elder individually and bowing, a representation of the strong sense of hierarchy in Vietnamese social groups.

The Meat Tray

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/18
Primary Language: English

The informant told me about the meat tray, which is basically a platter of appetizers. At any family gathering, the informant’s grandma (on her mom’s side) will bring out the meat tray only at her house. The tray consists of cheese, crackers, some type of sausage, black olives, and mini pickles. Informant says she’s never been to an event for her mom’s side of the family that hasn’t had the tray. It’s something that has always existed to her. She told me that she knows it’s serious to the family and the get-togethers because one year, her grandma forgot to make it and everyone flipped out. Even family out of state know about this story and how important it is to the family and any family function. The informant looked nostalgic when she spoke about it. If something is missing from the meat tray, the family also freaks out about it and makes comments about how they can’t eat from it until it’s complete. The informant thinks it started when there started being more and more grandkids, when the grandma’s children started having kids. It’s her mom and her two sisters who both have kids. The grandma oversees the meat tray. It’s not a family function without it. The family are big eaters, so for the informant, it feels like family gatherings are centered around food – the beginning of the gathering is when the meat tray is brought out and that’s truly when the event starts. Informant also mentioned that extended family come to enjoy it too and that it’s on open door policy at her grandparents and a lot of friends can come too, even on big holidays. The meat tray signifies gathering and union. This is a place where you can eat and feel like you’re being taken care of as the informant explained. It’s also important to the family considering the passing of the grandpa very recently and the meat tray was still brought out at the funeral. I find this to be a beautiful way of being close to your family, it’s fun and good to eat which is always a plus.

Mind Over Matter Proverb

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Pre-Med Student
Residence: Washington, D.C.
Performance Date: April 22, 2018
Primary Language: English

Main piece:

“I sometimes just will myself to not be sick… it’s like mind over matter.”

Background:

Informant is a third year pre-med student at George Washington University who grew up in Mill Valley, California. Although she knows that there are definitely better methods for curing a cold, she shared that sometimes if she simply changes her mentality, her symptoms begin to improve.

Context:

I was just getting over a cold, so the informant shared with me some of her favorite ways to feel better.

Commentary:

This is a folk remedy that also can be categorized as a proverb. The informant believes that she can somehow cure her illness by telling herself that she is no longer sick, which is not actually supported in science yet many people still follow this practice. Additionally, it is summed up into a short, easy-to-remember phrase that allows it to be classified as a proverb. This saying is used for many illness beyond the common cold, and it is interesting in this case that the informant did not even internalize it as a proverb, but rather just an accepted method of curing her symptoms.

One Way to Scratch an Itch

Nationality: American
Age: 61
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Southern California
Performance Date: March 24, 2018
Primary Language: English

My maternal grandpa was from the poorest part of Birmingham, Alabama. His birth father died in a dynamite factory explosion when he was two years old, and his mother remarried a few years after that. Even with a new man, their family was poorer than poor. Some winters, they’d resort to eating shoe leather out of desperate hunger. He had one pair of overalls, and later became an expert marksman out of necessity (he could hit a squirrel between the eyes from 30 yards out). He climbed out of poverty via the GI Bill which he used to get an education here at USC, and then a job as a salesman of medicinal gasses to airline companies and hospitals. He didn’t much like talking about when he was poor – it was not his proudest moment. The one thing he did enjoy talking about from back then was family. Even when you have no money, you have family. As his sister June put it, “it never felt like we were poor. We had so much love in the household.”

 

My mom imbued this same sense of family on me through different stories she’d heard as a small girl from her dad, my grandpa. I’d heard this story before, but it had slipped to the back of my mind. Driving home from lunch one sunny afternoon, I ask her and my dad if they have any stories about the inexplicable that I could use for my folklore project. My mom starts:

 

“When your great uncle – great, great uncle – had… his leg amputated, it was itching itching itching, the stump was itching.  So his family said, ‘go dig up the stump and see if there’s anything wrong with it.  And he did and it was covered with ants.  And so he properly buried it and the itching stopped.  And that was a common belief of the time, in Alabama among Christians a couple generations ago.”

 

I love this story because it plays on so many different levels. On the one hand, it’s a story of a very strange folk belief that has found its way into mainstream medicine.  Phantom pains are a common phenomenon in the paraplegic world. To stop it, many doctors put a mirror up to the intact limb, making it look like their missing limb is still there. Almost immediately, the pains stop, and even when the mirror is removed, the pains are not felt. On the other hand, this story works through the familial lens, as it provides a rather sincere snapshot into life in rural Alabama so many years ago.  In a strange way, it makes perfect sense to dig up the withered limb and clean it off to stop the itching. It’s not like there was any other information out there, they just did what they thought would work and it worked.

 

A Train to Alcatraz: A Contemporary Legend

Nationality: American
Age: 58
Occupation: Attorney
Residence: Tiburon, CA
Performance Date: 4/20/18
Primary Language: English

So they’d convicted Al Capone for tax evasion in Chicago and sent him to prison in the Midwest, uhh Atlanta, I think. When they transferred him to Alcatraz, y’know maximum security – no one gets outta there, and they say his gang was planning to break him out during transit when he was coming through Tiburon on the uhh traintracks– you know the bike train used to be traintracks.

 So the exact route for ‘is move to Alcatraz was… top secret. What they did was made it sound like he was going by either armored truck, maybe by train to San Francisco… But they, uhh, they secretly put him on this train car and chained him to the floor – I mean, they chained him to the floor.

And so the train come into the train depot downtown, where Café Acri is now, and they used cranes to lift the entire car onto a ferry, a uhh uh uh, barge with Al Capone chained to it and then barged him to Alcatraz and completely avoided San Francisco.

This is story I’ve heard numerous times. My dad (aka Paul) has a knack for saying the same thing over and over, paraphrasing himself, retelling stories. My dad mainly tells this story whenever he’s showing someone from out of the area around Tiburon. I may have heard it before, but I still love this story. I remember one day we were walking along the bike trail, the former train tracks, and we worked out that my Great Grandfather almost certainly watched from the porch as the heavily guarded train car passed by his, now our, house.

Interestingly enough, the legend turns out to be true. Around 40 inmates were being moved from an Atlanta prison to “The Rock,” also known as Alcatraz. The warden discovered a plot to free Al Capone in route because an escape from Alcatraz was reportedly impossible. Capone was transported with extra security and, seeing the biggest weakness in security would be the trek through San Francisco, opted to go through Tiburon instead. Al Capone’s train car was placed on a barge and towed via tugboat directly to Alcatraz. There were apparently guards at the Tiburon ferry terminal and in small boats to make sure no other boats came close to the barge.

For more information on this legend, see the following articles from local newspapers like Mercury News and the MarinIJ.