Reylyn Roldan was born in the Philippines and lived there for eight years before coming to New York City. However, her first family member to come to America was her great-aunt, Felicitas Bobrow, who left the Philippines in early 1960 for America. During this time the only means of transport was by boat. She sailed the Pacific Ocean and first traveled to Hawaii and from there to California. She came here alone with only a few words of English, enough to carry out a conversation. After nearly a decade of working as a biochemist, she earned enough money to help bring her two sisters and brother in law to the United States. At this point, Felicitas Bobrow moved to the East Coast and conducted research at many prestigious universities such as Rutgers and Columbia. Together with her sisters, they all decided to settle down in Queens. This was only temporary because as soon as Reylyn’s grandparents earned enough money to bring their four sons they all moved to Staten Island to accommodate the increasing number of family members. Finally Reylyn and her mother and two brothers came to America 6 years later in 2003.
Reylyn’s family had deep roots in the Philippines with a lineage that goes all the way back to Spain; her family even has their own family crest. They originated from the northern islands of the Philippines in a rural landscape where they lived as farmers and fishermen. It was hard to make a living however, unless you were born into a wealthy family. There was a large disparity between social classes and a larger gap in the income between the upper and lower class. With government corruption and appeasement, moving up the social system was impossible. That’s why they decided to move to America; to pursue a better life for themselves and their families. Reylyn’s family saw America as the land of freedom and opportunity and in order to improve their living conditions they decided to make the ultimate sacrifice of leaving behind their homeland and immigrate to America. However the whole family couldn’t afford to go all at once because the trip is long and expensive. Instead only a few people at a time – roughly every decade – could make the trip. But now they all live in Staten Island, New York City and they came a long way from the lifestyle they left behind them.
Yet immigrating to New York City is only half the trouble. The second half is finding ones home here. That means finding a community or a neighborhood where one feels comfortable and at peace. One barrier from stopping Reylyn’s family from finding their home was the language. Only Reylyn’s grandmother was lucky enough to know English well because she was a schoolteacher and she was able to teach her four sons and her husband the language. Another barrier is the weather. The family was used to the tropical island weather of the Philippines where the lowest it gets in the year was 70 degrees Fahrenheit. However the weather cannot be changed, so Reylyn and her family had to get used to it. Even though it was hard for them to deal with the weather at times, it was also a new experience. For them, their first snowfall was magical because they never had such a thing in the Philippines and they were just in awe at its beauty. Another big barrier Reylyn mentioned was the diet change. Not only was the cuisine different from the Philippines but the serving sizes were too. Bigger pizza. Bigger sodas. Bigger plates. Everything in America was bigger. Then there were new tastes for them such as mustard which Reylyn said tasted weird the first time she tried it. The last barrier to be broken is the life style differences between her family and native New Yorkers. New York is such a faced paced city especially when compared to a little Philippine farm village. The way people walk here seemed like running to Reylyn and it seemed that everyone was always in such a hurry to get places. No one looked at each other. There were no conversations. No pleases. No thank yous. No smiles. Everyone seemed to care about themselves and carried on only to their next destination. However Reylyn and her family soon learned that they had to look hard to spot the kindness in people’s hearts here. They learned that people are a lot more intimate here than the people back in their village.
By coming to America, Reylyn’s family’s hopes and dreams were to provide happiness for the rest of their family to provide their children and future generations with the freedom and privileges that were only in America at that time. Here, in America, they had an opportunity to work hard and they seized it. Through this journey they learned to never give up even when times are rough and to remind themselves where they came from and how they got there. Reylyn and her family pass along their traditions, heritage, and family story to their children and hope that they do the same to their children. But now they have a new place to call home and a new place to create new memories and traditions for future generations. As far as Reylyn sees it, her family’s hopes and dreams definitely have been realized in the half century that it took for them to get here and they wouldn’t do anything differently.
