My wolf died a month before we moved from Ash Lane. We brought her with us when we first arrived and she died when we left. She was old. Thirteen years old. A thin, black german shepherd with aching bones and drooping ears. I don’t know how well Sophie heard through them or how far she saw through those deep brown eyes, but for all she lost in age, she made up for in genuine matriarchal dominance. Even her death made an assertive statement. Of the five acres of farmland we lived on, she could have chosen a deathbed tucked away in any of the many corners that made her feel the safest. Like the crawlspace under the house, where she gave life to three litters of puppies between plumbing pipes and cool soil. Or the old chicken coop where she’d seek shelter during thunderstorms. Or even the front lawn, where the lime green grass, gentle as the baby hairs of the Earth, cradled her like a toddler.
Instead, Sophie chose the spot of cold, hard concrete directly outside our front door. I wasn’t there when it happened, but my sisters say they noticed her passing when they tried opening the door and it wouldn’t budge. It was held shut by our wolf’s heavy, swelling body, trapping them inside. As if to reach through the silence of death to say Do not leave Ash Lane. As if to boldly display to us the death of a matriarch of this land—she wasn’t the first in our family’s now four-generation residence on that precious plot, and she shouldn’t be the last.
In 1954, my Filipino great-grandfather, Papa Ben, moved with his wife Mimi and his four daughters (one of whom is my grandmother) to Stockton, California. Steeping in the dust bowl that is the Central Valley, Stockton was, and continues to be, a hub of industrial agricultural activity. The town sprawls out between two parallel highways that can take you up to Canada and down to Mexico and it was built around the deepest inland port in the state. Needless to say, Stockton has always been excellent for moving things around—from the transit of harvested asparagus, grapes, and sugar beets to the transit of the sun-tanned laborers who grew and picked them. But in the chaos of all that movement, some dust still settles.
After decades of farm labor that took them through the western United States, Papa Ben, Mimi, and their sassy daughters finally settled in the beaming sun and yellow grass of Stockton, in order for the girls to enroll in elementary school. There, they began establishing roots that have lasted 71 years and counting. They planted themselves on the five acres of farmland our family has collectively referred to as “Ash Lane”, named after the ditch-lined road it rests against. Its rickety farmhouse stood humbly at the front of the property under the shade of a mulberry tree. When my great-grandparents arrived, the home embraced their family of six, who packed into it like sardines. Not much about the property or the farmhouse has changed in all that time. Except that me and my own four sisters didn’t have to use an outhouse growing up.
I’m 18 now, and Sophie is 12, but when we moved to Ash Lane with my mom and my sisters, we were humble little nine- and four-year-olds, unseasoned in Ash Lane exploration. Eight years has turned me into an expert. I know this land like the back of my palm. She is as wild and as untamed as the tufts of my curly hair. But I think Sophie knows this domesticated wilderness even better, so I always follow her. My brown, bare feet, scarred from stepping so many times on sharp stones and camouflaged sticks, skip quickly through the weeds. They are trying to keep up with the quick pace of padded paws built for exploration. We round the corner of the house and head for the back following the thrill of adventure, ears to the wind and snouts to the soil. I take a deep breath. The air is tinged with livestock manure and musty wood. It makes me sneeze. It smells like childhood wonder and a strong sense of home. Sophie smells something different, maybe a field mouse. We halt in front of the ancient train car that my grandfather rolled in on huge beams about 30 years before I was born. Back then, they remodeled the interior with a kitchen and a bed, so that my grandmother could live inside. No one lives here anymore, though. It is riddled with rust holes, its metal exterior aged orange through time. It looks like a menacing tetanus monster, but Sophie and I know that it is kind.
The train car is my favorite structure to climb atop and watch the sun turn a brilliant vermillion as it tucks into the horizon at the end of each day. Dusk paints Stockton’s polluted sky the color of candy, and the sweet train car lifts me up so that I can see the artistry in action. I press my hand against its flaky frame, balancing myself as I bend down eye level with my wolf. A familiar shape tucked into the dirt catches my eye. It shines as its silver surface catches the light. This hand-held object lived inside once upon a time, belonging to a family member who is no longer alive, no longer lives here in the physical sense.
My great-grandmother Mimi kept her spoons in a can on the dining table all throughout her life on Ash Lane. She was a woman of odd collections, from seashells she painted faces on, to an expansive assortment of spoons of all sizes and purposes—like trying her homemade salsa or scraping bone marrow from the meat of animals they raised and butchered on the property. Outside, she worked with her daughters, brow dripping with sweat beads under her big trucker hat. Inside, she fanned herself over steaming meals that cooked on top of her beloved wood-burning stove. The fusion foods that came out of Mimi’s kitchen were artifacts of a multicultural household. Her own Spanish culture came to have strong influences from Papa Ben’s Filipino culture, which also permeated throughout Stockton. In fact, part of the reason they settled in the city was because they felt at home among so many other Filipinos.
Immigration from the Philippines began in the late 19th century, when the country was passed from the imperialist grip of Spain to the imperialist grasp of the United States after the Spanish-American War. Most of the people who came were young men who, due to discrimination in the labor market, ended up in agricultural and domestic work across California (Mabalon 3). By the 1930s, they comprised a population of over 45,000 in the U.S. Just a few miles north of Ash Lane happened to be the site where these men carved out a core for their community: Little Manila. Though labor took Filipinos all over, this small four-block enclave was where they built their homes, ballrooms, gambling corners, grocery stores, and hotels. Where they all finally came together over lunch counters to laugh, to check in with family, to receive their mail, and even to organize Filipino farmworkers into the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) that fought against the many labor abuses they endured in the fields of California. Little Manila was a place of Filipino empowerment.
As immigration continued, and more women came to the states, Little Manila became a tight-knit, multi-generational community—the heart of the Filipino population in the states. When moving freely through Jim Crow Era Stockton was not an option, this ethnic enclave became their place to rest. To feel loved. My Auntie Nita, daughter of Papa Ben, tells me pleasant stories of being a child in Little Manila and singing sweet songs to her cultural uncles in exchange for bubblegum. The sense of kinship that she and her sisters felt in those four square blocks must have been profound. I’ll never know though, since most of the space today has been crushed into rubble.
I grab one of Mimi’s spoons and straighten my spine back up toward the hazy sky. The cool metal is refreshing in my palm. Fresh like my memories of Mimi in these moments. Sophie’s nose didn’t mislead her. A small mouse scurries out from under a pile of wood. She lets out one low-pitched growl, rumbling straight from her gut. She’s no doubt the oldest dog in the neighborhood, her geriatric superiority granting her the most authoritative bark. We chase the mouse, her with a slight limp and me with a tentative hop through coarse ground.
The rodent leads us to an ageless structure. One that probably built itself straight up from the land using random materials from the Ash Lane dirt soup of spoons, splintering wood, and rusted nails. Standing 10 feet tall with a pointed roof and an octagonal wire frame, the great dilapidated chicken coop looms over us. We walk inside its damp darkness. Back when my mom was a kid in the 70s, the coop was new. Now its concrete ground is caked in several layers of dust, chicken droppings, feathers, broken glass, rope, nails, whispers, and sad sighs of loneliness. Entering feels like returning to a pet I’ve neglected. It begs to be cleaned and cared for, but those are not my intentions. This is the face of Ash Lane that quickly snatches off the rose-colored lenses through which I view my home, forcing me to see it soaked in all its grime.
The love I have for my home has always been muddied by feelings of disgust and shame. I want Ash to be new again. Manicured. Repainted. Re-landscaped. Beautified. And because it is none of those things, it’s hard to imagine having friends over, even for my birthday parties. I usually spend those with my sisters, to whom I do not have to explain why we have a train car in the yard or a chicken coop one uncle-sized sneeze from toppling over.
Just a year before my mom was born, the construction of the Crosstown Freeway was completed in Stockton. The highway stretched laterally through the city, connecting Interstate 5 and Highway 99, the two routes that ran parallel on either side. The Crosstown Freeway’s conception was owed to the State Division of Highways and the pro-development Stockton City Council, who believed the metropolitan area could be revitalized and beautified with a freeway that integrated the city (Tiongson 2008). This rhetoric of beautification and redevelopment never included the preservation of precious Little Manila. The cries of its residents to spare their home—the center of their lives—fell on wholly unsympathetic ears. In the end, the path of the freeway cut right through Little Manila’s four-block radius, bulldozing homes, businesses, and community centers to ash and rubble. A place that for decades had served as the heart of the west coast Filipino population was largely flattened to ruins under highway infrastructure and a McDonalds. All that love sacrificed in the name of “revitalization”. My mom didn’t get to experience Little Manila as her mother did. She arrived into the world just a few months too late. But my mom always had a home, the same home we’ve all had: Ash Lane.
They brought little Kia straight from the hospital to the farm, where she did not leave until adulthood. There were farm chores to be done. With a goofy, crooked-tooth smile, the slender girl wrangled mama goats to be milked and gathered wood to be split under a big contraption of her grandfather’s own design. She did the type of labor that builds strong women with strong work ethics, evidenced by who she is today. Of all the chores that left her panting and spattered in mud, the most daunting one took place in the big coop. Upon Mimi’s demand to feed the chickens, she’d clad herself in thick jeans to protect her skinny legs. Then, she’d bring herself to the determined headspace of a warrior entering battle. As she entered the coop, sweaty palms clutched around the handle of a heavy bucket of seeds, a hundred hungry chickens would come running to her shins. Kia would squeal as they pecked her and clucked their aggressive demands.
The place that Sophie and I stand in almost feels lifeless, just an empty vault with no clucking hens or fearsome roosters. Even though I’m aware of the invisible stories that fill this place, sometimes all I can see is the gloom. In these moments, my mother’s and grandmother’s and great grandmother’s histories mean nothing more to me than dust to be wiped away with Clorox. To be bulldozed. The rhetoric of redevelopment taints my worldview. I’d sacrifice this chicken coop to make Ash Lane prettier. More than just my farm, sometimes I want my entire wholesome hood to be revitalized. I want there to be sidewalks along my road instead of weed-filled ditches. I want my friends to marvel at the beauty of Southside Stockton on the way to my house, instead of coiling back with fear as the city slowly fades into ruin, Ash Lane still further in.
In 2018, when I was 15 years old, the city’s revitalization gods heard my prayers. Council members celebrated the opening of an Amazon warehouse just a block away from my home. They were happy about the jobs it would create in the area, which suffers from historical disinvestment that has led to high unemployment rates. Indeed, the Amazon factory became the second largest employing establishment in the whole city, with over 4,000 jobs having been created thus far. If this Amazon is a good thing, why can’t I shake the story of the Crosstown Freeway and Little Manila from my head when I look at it?
I first noticed its construction when they tilled the field next to my house. All throughout my childhood, driving home meant passing up that beautiful field of golden grass that twinkled in the sun’s rays and swayed gently in the low breeze. They deforested my golden grass and poured concrete over its remains to build the Amazon: great and rectangular, stone-cold and heavy against the warm Earth. They put up obnoxiously powerful light posts that shine through the night to defend it. Now it’s hard to see the stars. Now it feels like that husky beast surrounded by its bright fortress is asserting itself as the tyrant of our neighborhood. The youth, including my own sister, swarm to it in submission and work 10 hour shifts in that warehouse through the night, all to the benefit of the beast. What was supposed to bring stable income to the pockets of Southside Stockton residents, mainly left them dangerously sleep deprived and lacking sufficient vacation time. I suddenly realize that this was not the development or the beautification that I desired. Why couldn’t my soft, golden grass be home to a grocery store, bank, or any facility that could care for my neighborhood in kinder ways? Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since development in Stockton has damaged and leeched off of marginalized communities throughout history.
Today, the original Little Manila’s physical presence has dwindled down to just two buildings: The Mariposa Hotel and the Emerald Restaurant, both vacant and boarded up. This community is not gone, though. It survives through the invisible threads that bind Filipino people across Stockton. It lives on through the memories we have from older family members, like my own Papa Ben and his daughter Auntie Nita. As late author and historian Dr. Dawn Mabalon titled her beautiful book about the historic community, Little Manila is In The Heart. Organizations like Little Manila Rising, which she co-founded, carry on our history and bring us back together. I distinctly remember learning about the existence of Little Manila for the first time at 15 years old, when I visited the Little Manila After School Program. There, inside a classroom of a Southside Stockton high school, about twenty teenagers gathered to listen and learn this suppressed history. Though much has changed since the first Filipinos settled in Stockton in the 1920s, that tradition of care has remained constant.
I wonder what my Papa Ben would think about the place if he could visit today. He died before the Crosstown Freeway was completed, so his last memories of Little Manila stop at a point where it was still vibrant, active, and overflowing with a feeling of kinship. Mimi passed away at Ash Lane in 2010. Her eyes closed shut in the heat of the living room, sun rays shining through the great window and making dust particles glimmer golden in the air. Her last memories of our home do not include an invasive Amazon factory next door, or the several other warehouses that are cropping up rapidly. I think both Mimi and Papa Ben would hate Stockton’s patterns of development. When I think about it like that, a deep sense of inward shame wells up inside me. Shame over the fact that I would ever ridicule our home for its splintering wood, overgrown weeds, dingy corners, and ever-present wafting smell of livestock manure. Shame that I let myself be brainwashed into viewing Ash Lane through the gaze of a re-developer, someone who deems precious neighborhoods ugly and builds freeways through them and Amazon warehouses beside them, having little to no respect for us specks of dust who have settled in Stockton. I become ashamed that any part of me wouldn’t want Ash Lane to be here and to exist just as it is. This has been my family’s land to live on and to die on, the soil hoarding our stories and our spoons, so that we can continue on afterward.
In 2021, my sisters moved into the new house my mom purchased on Stockton’s northside, and I moved away to college. We were all leaving Ash Lane at once, ironically to places more “developed”. After we were gone, 78-year-old Auntie Nita moved back into her childhood home so that it would never be separated from its family. But before any of this took place, back when our moving boxes were still being taped together, our wolf Sophie made her grand exit from the material world.
My big sister and I lifted her body from its spot in front of the door and laid her in the baby soft grass of the lawn. We dug her grave, struggling to use the shovel against the hard ground with our skinny little arms and all the while laughing to fill in the silence of shock. We placed her in the shallow hole and covered her with dirt. I giggled nervously as the last of her black hair was hidden away, ignoring the choking realization that irreversible change was happening all around me. That my time was up on Ash Lane. That Sophie and I would never tour its wilderness together again. No more following clumsily in her path as she pranced and I hopped.
Maybe one day my descendants will find Sophie’s collar in the lawn near the oak tree, having surfaced from her shallow grave after all those years. Maybe they’ll hold her name tag in their palm, feeling its chips and dents and imagining what she was like, as I imagined my great-grandmother when I held her silver spoons. I cannot help but wonder what artifacts of my own life Ash Lane will hold. Will they be smothered under giant warehouses, or picked out of the overgrowth by wild-haired little girls who refuse to wear shoes and who dare to run with their own wolves?
Works Cited
“Filipino Americans.” Asian Nation, www.asian-nation.org/filipino.shtml. Accessed 8 June 2023.
Interviews with Anita Bayaca, conducted April and May 2023
Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano. Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/O American Community in Stockton, California. Duke University Press, 2013.
Tiongson, Antonio T., et al. Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse. Anvil, 2008.
Trammel, Kimberly. Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, 30 June 2022,
www.stocktonca.gov/files/2022_ACFR_Final.pdf.
“What Remains of Little Manila Stockton, ca | El Dorado ‘Land of Gold’ with Little Manila Rising.” YouTube, 7 Oct. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnhXoDlL-UI.