Interview of Ernest Ortega
UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles Interview of Ernest Ortega

Transcript

Session One (June, 18, 2014)

COATES:

My name is Julia Coates, and the date is June 18th, 2014, and I am with Mr. Ernest Ortega of the Tataviam tribe, and we are at his home in San Fernando. We were going to start out—I think you wanted just to share a little bit about the sort of the larger history of the tribe. Is that what you were saying?

ORTEGA:

Okay. We can go back as far as I can remember, and probably I was about five years old, I think. I was living with my grandpa, which is Antonio Ortega—you probably know who he is already—and we were sitting on the front porch here in San Fernando. We’d been here all our lives, you know. I had no idea what Indians were or Mexicans or whites. I was just a little boy, you know. People were people. And I remember sitting with him on the front porch one day and he brought up the word “Indians,” you know, which didn’t mean a lot to me, and he told me his Indian name, and I could kick myself for not remembering it. That’s the very first time I ever heard the word “Indian.” As I grew up, we didn’t pay a lot more attention to it. (telephone interruption)

ORTEGA:

I think I was saying there about my grandpa telling me his Indian name, and to me it wasn’t very important at the time, but like I said, I could kick myself for not remembering it. I think I would remember if I heard it again.

COATES:

So no one’s ever told you since then what it was?

ORTEGA:

No, because, you know, I found out through my dad that they didn’t talk about Indians in them days, or even register, because they were afraid of being put on the reservation, because I guess that was the talk in them days, you know, in the 1800s, you know. “You’re an Indian, you’re going to be put on a reservation.” You wouldn’t have the freedom that everybody else has. So there was not too much talk about Indians until Uncle Rudy came about and he got into it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe his son. Rudy could tell you why he started it. But I remember him because he used to come to my dad’s house all the time and ask about our ancestors and who was who and who was married to who, and Uncle Rudy got a lot of his information from my dad and the archives at the mission, San Fernando Mission. But as a child, we never talked much about the Indians. As I said, they might have been afraid or something like that, you know.

COATES:

So when you heard “Indian,” what did you think that meant when you were—

ORTEGA:

At what age?

COATES:

When you were five years old and you heard it for the first time.

ORTEGA:

I didn’t. I didn’t have any idea what “Indian” meant. I knew what Indians were, cowboys and Indians were, because, you know, in fact—but I don’t think we ever had TV then, so I probably couldn’t have known too much about cowboys and Indians, because we didn’t have a TV till I was about eight years old.

COATES:

Was it on the radio or anything like that?

ORTEGA:

Maybe at the movies, you know, you saw the cowboys and Indians, stuff like that, but it didn’t hit me personally. The word “Indian” didn’t capture my attention, you know. I wasn’t—

COATES:

So you didn’t ask or anything like that?

ORTEGA:

No, I didn’t ask.

COATES:

Just weren’t interested in it?

ORTEGA:

No. Just—

COATES:

Do you remember the conversation when he brought it up? Why did he bring it up?

ORTEGA:

No, I have no idea. I can barely remember. I just know that I was sitting on the front porch with him, because he was real good to me. He would take me to work with him and stuff like that. It was sort of a favor, I would like to say, or probably not fair to say, on account of the other cousins and whatnot. But he would take me to his ranch. He was like a caretaker, I believe, on a ranch. I think he looked a lot like Indian, but like I say there again, we didn’t pay much attention to the word, you know. It wasn’t important to us, you know, like it is now, you know. We’re more into heritage, I think, as we grow up. Like my kids, all my grandkids, they love the idea that they’re part Indian or something like that. They just love it. But as us, nobody ever told us anything, that we were part Indian, or what it meant. So, like I said, I think it was more people more afraid to speak about it or maybe it might even been more of a minority that something to be ashamed of, in a sense, maybe being a minority. I don’t know.

COATES:

Did your grandfather seem to be secretive about it?

ORTEGA:

Yes. Well, he never talked about it, unless he talked about it to my dad or something, but, to me, like I said, I was very young, you know, and then he passed away when I was about ten years old, so didn’t go much further than that until Uncle Rudy brought it up.

COATES:

Were there other conversations that you remember that you heard—

ORTEGA:

With my grandfather?

COATES:

—that you heard him talking about it?

ORTEGA:

No, I’m afraid not.

COATES:

That was about it, huh?

ORTEGA:

No, no, that was about it. That’s why I told you I don’t remember a lot about it until Uncle Rudy got involved.

COATES:

But it stuck in your mind.

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, it did. That it did, and, like I said, if I could hear that name, that Indian name again, because it was his name, his Indian—not his, not James Ortega. Ortega’s a surname, right, you know?

COATES:

Mmhmm.

ORTEGA:

But he had his own name, just like his parents had names. But if I heard it, I might recollect it. I might remember it. But it pains me that I don’t know it. I’m so ashamed that I don’t know it, you know. I’m sorry, you know.

COATES:

Yeah, it’s okay. (laughs) So his name was, again, you said Antonio?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, he went by the name James.

COATES:

Oh, James, okay.

ORTEGA:

James Anthony Ortega.

COATES:

Okay. And that’s your grandfather?

ORTEGA:

That’s your grandfather.

COATES:

And then his—

ORTEGA:

And my father’s name is José.

COATES:

Okay. And that was his son, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yes. He had three boys, Ortegas. In fact, we still have one alive, Richard.

COATES:

Oh, really?

ORTEGA:

His name is Jimmy, Richard, one uncle alive. That was Rudy’s brother, and my dad’s brother. There were three Ortegas.

COATES:

So how old is he now?

ORTEGA:

The one that’s still alive, he’s probably eightythree, still sort of on the young side.

COATES:

Yeah, he’s not very old.

ORTEGA:

But he’s not very maneuverable. He has a hard time walking with a cane and hunched over a lot. He might be able to help you a lot about the tribe, because like I said, it was the brothers that would get together and talk about it, and I can remember them talking over the table of who’s related to who. And like I said, Uncle Rudy always wanted to know—I guess he really got into it. He really got into it. But he did the family a favor by doing this, otherwise we probably wouldn’t have got anywhere, or it wouldn’t be this far if you want to call it this far, you know.

COATES:

How old was he when he started getting into it, do you remember?

ORTEGA:

Who’s that, my uncle?

COATES:

Uhhuh.

ORTEGA:

Well, let’s put it this way. I can remember back to 1970 when we got a grant from the Indian government or something like that, we had an Indian grant, that was about ’70, ’71, so I’m sure he must have got into it way before that.

COATES:

He was pretty young still, huh, like in his thirties or something, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, probably, yeah, yeah. And I don’t know what got him into it, unless he explained it to his son. Rudy wasn’t born yet. Rudy’s probably—how old is Rudy? He’s got to be, what, fortyfive, maybe, at least under fifty, probably.

COATES:

Yeah, I think he’s fortyseven or something like that, yeah.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, so therefore little Rudy wasn’t around when all this started, but I remember a lot of people thought Rudy was crazy for even digging into it, that nothing was going to come out of it, nothing like that. But then all of a sudden when we got a little bit of money from the government, now everybody wants to get in, you know. All the people wanted to join the tribe and whatnot, you know.

COATES:

(laughs) When he first started to get into it and they thought he was crazy, was it because—I mean, did they know they were Indian but they just weren’t interested, or were they trying to hid that fact, or—

ORTEGA:

I can’t talk about other people, but I think like my dad, my dad knew, but I think he thought that Rudy was just going to be butting his head to the wall and not get very far, that he was putting a lot of effort into it for no reason, for, I mean, no gains, and stuff like that. But I know my dad would still help him. In fact, a lot of times when I would go to Indian meetings or something, I’d say, “Come on, Dad, let’s go,” my dad wouldn’t go, because it’s not that he was ashamed, it’s just that he figured it was a lost cause, you know.

COATES:

Was that sort of the sense of the whole community, do you think?

ORTEGA:

Well, like I said, we’re a small family, as far as uncles. When they first got started, I couldn’t tell you, because, you know, I was leading my own life and I worked. I was at a part where I was married and I wasn’t that close to the family, so I can’t tell you how they reacted to it. Like I said, I know once they got a little bit of money, I know that they all joined in, you know, and they wanted to know more and stuff like that.

COATES:

Right. So the families that joined, that were eligible and so forth to be members, were these families that your family had known for many generations, and they’d always interacted and so forth?

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

COATES:

So there was kind of a tribal community, even though they—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah. Well, you’ve heard of the Cooks. Remember the word the Chakanakas, and the Cooks were—I think the Cooks, Charlie Cook was one of the Chumash, and the Chumash and the (unclear) was supposed to be cousins. I think a lot of them originated here in Newhall and stuff like that. I’m not positive, you know. Like I said, Uncle Rudy never put together any history of how all—he should have done this, how it all started, so we would all have something that we could fall back on. So here, me talking to you, I really can’t tell you much, because Rudy didn’t give us a lot of information, except what he was doing. Now, what he should have done, and what I’ve done for my kids, is I’ve written my history of my life, well, as far back as I can, and all the different jobs that I’ve worked at, what I did as a kid, how we made our own toys and everything. So when my grandchildren get my book, they’re going to say, “Hey, look, Tata (phonetic) did this and Tata did that and all that,” and then they were different. And so this is what Rudy should have done. It’s a shame, but he did a lot after, when we’re all in the picture now, which is great. I give him a lot of credit, and you saw him—or did you ever meet Rudy?

COATES:

No, I never met him, but I certainly—

ORTEGA:

Well, he always wore all the Indian jewelry and everything. Now, getting back to my dad, like I said, he thought it was all for nothing, but he did like it because I used to make Indian jewelry—not jewelry. I used to make belts and headbands out of beads and the whole shot. I got into it, and my dad would say, “Make me a belt. So make me this and make me this.” So he was interested to the point where he liked it, but he didn’t want to—I guess, not go overboard, but how would you say it, he didn’t maybe want to show that he was very into it. But I think he was. (telephone interruption)

ORTEGA:

But I know he was very interested.

COATES:

Okay. So getting back to your life. You were born right here in San Fernando?

ORTEGA:

I was born—we lived here. We lived in San Fernando, but they only had a private hospital here, and we couldn’t afford it, so I was born in General Hospital in L.A., outside the General Hospital. That was the county hospital.

COATES:

So they had to travel a distance when your mother was in labor.

ORTEGA:

Well, yeah, it probably took a good hour to get to L.A. in them days because there was no freeways or nothing in them days when I was born. I was born in ’41, 1941.

COATES:

Did you ever hear her talk about that or about the—

ORTEGA:

About me being born early?

COATES:

About the experience of your birth and traveling to the hospital and all of that?

ORTEGA:

Well, the only thing she told me is that, see, my father was in the war, World War II, when I was born. No, wait a minute. I was born in ’41. The war started in ’41 and he went in ’42. So I was probably six months when my dad was drafted. So we had no money, like I say, that’s why I was born there. But the only thing I remember her talking about my birth was that she didn’t pay off my bill for about six years. (laughter) She says—I can remember this—she says, “I finally paid off your birth. It took me six years. I sent them the last ten or fifteen dollars,” or whatever that was, you know. But she paid it off.

COATES:

So that wasn’t much better than the private hospital then, probably.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. Then when my dad got back from the war, 1945, there’s a place called Hanson Dam, there’s a lot of land there, and they built a bunch of like Army barracks, but they were homes. Apartments, I guess you want to call them, like bungalows, and they built them there for all the servicemen returning back from the war. And I don’t know if that was handled by the county or who, but we moved there for a few years until my dad got his feet, you know.

COATES:

Now, where did you live while he was serving, while he was in—

ORTEGA:

We lived right here in San Fernando. There’s a building here called the Old Sears Building. It’s not there no more, but we lived right there, right on Celis—I did it all my life—Celis between (unclear). It’s the first street past San Fernando Road. It was a big building there.

COATES:

And was that a home that your mother and father had together or—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, my mom’s mother. We lived with my grandma. Yeah, but this is on my mother’s side.

COATES:

Okay, so you lived with your mom’s family.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. I lived there for until my dad got back from the war and then—

COATES:

And what is your mother’s heritage?

ORTEGA:

She is, believe it or not—she’s got a history there too. In 1771, they brought in—this was still Mexico, right, until 1850, I think. 1771, they brought fourteen families from Mexico to Los Angeles to establish the town of Los Angeles, to start farming for the Mexican soldiers. My mother is from the family, one of the fourteen families, and her name is on the stone there at the Placita, what is called the plaza. Have you ever heard of Olvera Street?

COATES:

Yes.

ORTEGA:

Right there.

COATES:

And what is her family name, what is that family that—

ORTEGA:

Well, right now, my mother’s maiden name is Fonseca, but on the stone it’s Rosas, Rosas, yeah. So she’s got a little bit of history to her, too, but it’s on the Mexican side of the family. So that’s why I say we have mixed marriage, you know.

COATES:

Right, yeah. Well, I spoke with someone, and I think they were talking about the same thing of with the Tongva, having those relationships with those families, too, you know, (unclear).

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah. Well, like I say, anybody born here before 1850 was Mexican, right? We’re Mexicans, you know. But now, now what bugs me is the race of the Mexican race, they say, “I’m Mexican American.” They’re saying it wrong. They’re American of Mexican descent. But they say, “I’m Mexican American,” and that’s not right. To me, that’s not correct. It’s supposed to be, if you’re born in the United States, you’re American of Mexican descent or whatever descent you are.

COATES:

So in your mother’s family and growing up with your grandmother in that home, or at least for the first few years after you were born, did they speak Spanish in the home, or what was it?

ORTEGA:

Believe it or not, even my grandma spoke English.

COATES:

They all spoke English in the home?

ORTEGA:

Spoke Spanish because of the other friends they had.

COATES:

So they were bilingual, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yes, bilingual and very well spoken in English, even my grandparents, yeah.

COATES:

So did you grow up bilingual as well? Did you hear both and learn both?

ORTEGA:

Believe it or not, in school they would not let us speak Spanish.

COATES:

I believe it. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

So we’re all English, but (unclear). Well, I know my Spanish from listening to my relatives speak Spanish, but we never spoke it as kids. I didn’t learn Spanish until I went to work for the City of Los Angeles, because I had to speak to a lot of the people from down South, the Salvadorians and the people from Colombia and everything. I spoke with them, so I had to relearn Spanish all over again, yeah. But other than (unclear), nobody in my family speaks Spanish unless you’re somebody distant, yeah.

COATES:

Or somebody of that older generation or something like that, yeah.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, but everybody spoke English here. That was the way. You wanted to get anywhere, you had to speak English here. And, like I said, they’d been here for—well, on the Ortega side, I believe we’ve been here for 300 years, see, so.

COATES:

So your dad was drafted in ’42, so you were like maybe six months old or something when he—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, when he left.

COATES:

—when he left. And how long did he serve? How long was he gone?

ORTEGA:

I think he got out in about 1945, I believe, ’44 or ’45.

COATES:

So he was there for the duration of the war.

ORTEGA:

He did his three years. Yeah, he did his three, yeah, yeah.

COATES:

Where did he serve?

ORTEGA:

He was in the Philippines in the Japanese war, because we had two wars. We had the general war and the Japanese—

COATES:

Yeah, right, so he was in the Pacific theater, as they called it.

ORTEGA:

It was the Pacific theater. There you go. He was in Manila, the Philippines, yeah. But nothing happened, he came back safe, so we’re fine.

COATES:

Yeah, that was a rough service.

ORTEGA:

One joke, though, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this. But he kept telling me that I had a lot of Filipino brothers and sisters over there. (laughter)

COATES:

Uhoh.

ORTEGA:

So every time I meet a Filipino, I always say, “You know what? You might be my brother or sister.” (laughter) They don’t understand.

COATES:

I imagine there’s probably a lot of that, a lot of guys who could have said that. (laughter)

ORTEGA:

I don’t know if it was a joke. I don’t know if my dad meant it as a joke, it’s true or not, but that’s the—you know. In the war, it stays over there, right.

COATES:

Digging (unclear) or something. (laughs) Was he bilingual as well?

ORTEGA:

Yeah. Well, he was very wellspoken English. He spoke perfect English. My dad was a—his spelling, everything. He only went to tenth grade because they all had to go to work. You probably heard that, that not too many people graduated because they had to go to work, help the family. But he was a very—how you say it—literate. He grabbed any crossword puzzle he could find and he would finish it. I mean, to me, I can’t do crossword puzzles, they’re just—but he was very, very smart, very intelligent, very witty. You spoke to him, he would pull your wool over your eyes. He was just very witty. Yeah, very, very, very smart man, yeah.

COATES:

So what are some of your earliest memories during the time when he was gone and it was you and your mother living with your grandmother? Do you have memories of that, of that time and that home?

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like I say, we didn’t speak of the Indians or anything like that.

COATES:

Right. Well, they weren’t—right.

ORTEGA:

Well, you know, yeah, I just remember I’m going to school and we walk to school. And I remember when my brother was born. We’re six years apart, so my dad’s back from the war already. But, like I said, I grew up right here just in town, and I can remember at night we’d all go out on the front porch. There was no TVs in those days, so I’d go out on the front porch, and all the kids would play Kick the Can or Hide and Seek, and we wouldn’t come in till nine or ten o’clock at night, you know. Or listen to the radio. I loved listening to—that’s all we had, radio. We had one of the upright radios about so high, and I can remember listening to the Lone Ranger or the Cisco Kid, or The Whistler or stuff like that. I can remember hugging up against the radio, I don’t know, I guess you felt like you were part of it more, you know, stuff like that. And music, I remember my mom, my grandma would always have a lot of company over. I guess we had so many family and family, you know, people always over. And I think one or two of my aunts also lived there too. A lot of people used to live at one house. Some still do, a little bit.

COATES:

So were there a lot of kids as well?

ORTEGA:

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I had a lot of cousins. I still have a lot of cousins.

COATES:

And was it mostly adult women? Were the men away at war and like that, or were there adult men in the house too?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah, I think the men were all in World War II, my uncle—yeah. Just about all the men were gone. There were always a couple around that didn’t go to war for some reason or another, you know. Maybe they weren’t drafted or whatever. There was somebody around. Well, my grandfathers were around, you know. But it was very primitive. A lot of fun, though, you know, just it was fun being a kid, yeah.

COATES:

What kind of work were the adults in the household doing?

ORTEGA:

You know, I don’t know. I don’t know if there was a lot of work in them days. I don’t know what they did. I know when my dad came back, he worked—I was just reading. There was a little bit of research there. He worked for Lockheed for a little bit as a laborer, and then he went to work for a plumbing shop as a laborer, and then he got into plumbing and he did plumbing for thirtysome years, which me and my brother followed into. We all got into the union, plumber union, and did our time, yeah. So as far as my uncles and whatnot, I know they went to war too. They were in the Army and whatnot.

COATES:

So their pay was coming into the household probably, huh?

ORTEGA:

I guess so. I don’t know how it was sent (unclear).

COATES:

Were the women at home during the day, or were they going out to work, your mother and your sisters and—

ORTEGA:

My mother worked when my dad come back. I don’t think she worked while he was gone.

COATES:

Really.

ORTEGA:

I think she stayed home, took care of me. I know I was babysat—

COATES:

Because I know a lot of women went to work, you know.

ORTEGA:

What’s that?

COATES:

Because I know a lot of women went to work during the war, for the first time during that war.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, my mother worked all her life for us, yeah. That I know of, my mother worked all her life for me and my brother. My brother and I had a really good life. As a thirteenyearold boy, I had my own clothes account at a men’s store. I would stop after school and pick out a shirt and sign for it and go home. And when I was sixteen, they bought me a car. When my brother was sixteen, they bought him a car. In fact, I went to six proms because I had a car. (Coates laughs.) And I’m sure you can figure that one out, because there weren’t too many cars around in my days, so the girls wanted to go to prom, so they had to ask somebody with a car. (Coates laughs.) Yeah, I was only sixteen, I was going to proms. So my mother worked. All she did was work for us, and my dad worked for the house, and my mother worked for me and my brother. There were only two of us.

COATES:

Is your brother older or younger?

ORTEGA:

My brother is younger, six years younger than me, almost six years younger than me. He’s not into the tribe as much. He’s like my dad, you know. Whatever happens, happens, you know. He was signed in, he was registered, but I don’t know what happened. Maybe ten years ago, I don’t really mention this, but we had to reregister. I don’t know if our roll numbers were lost or what, so we had to reregister, and my brother was not notified or something, so he and my brother went down to talk to Rudy to sign in or something and they said, “It’s too late. You had to reregister ten years ago,” or something like that.

COATES:

Oh, really.

ORTEGA:

So my brother got a little irritated, but he was originally—

COATES:

So now he’s excluded?

ORTEGA:

Huh?

COATES:

So now he’s excluded?

ORTEGA:

I guess.

COATES:

Oh, my goodness, huh.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, my brother was a little perturbed about that, you know. You know, he’s just as much Indian as I am. But little Rudy didn’t mention that, that we had to change our roll number or something?

COATES:

Yeah, I think what it is, is I think it was part of the Federal Recognition Petition, wasn’t it? And they were going to be—

ORTEGA:

Right, because they had to start again.

COATES:

Yeah, yeah.

ORTEGA:

And did little Rudy mention, too, that we were registered at one time and that they lost our paperwork, and they even—I think even little Rudy, my Uncle Rudy said that we weren’t even recognized at one time and that our paperwork somewhere was lost or burned, or I don’t know what it was. So they had to start over again. This is what we are going through now.

COATES:

Yeah. No, I know both Tataviam and Tongva were being recognized by the Bureau in 1950s, I know that, and so I’d have to go back and listen. I’m not sure I recall what, but he did say something about that.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, and I used to have this map of the United States with all the tribes. I think there was about 1,000 tribes on that map, and we were on the map. But paperwork, the government is the government, you know. You can’t fight them. That’s what they’ve been doing now for the last few years is get recognized, because Rudy says we’re in the process, but—

COATES:

That’s a long process.

ORTEGA:

—I think they told me that.

COATES:

It’s an expensive process.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. I probably won’t be around when they get recognized, because the last meeting I went to was here in San Fernando Park, and they had lawyers there and other representatives. I don’t know if they had somebody from the BIA there or something, but they said it would take fifteen to twenty years to get recognized, and I don’t have twenty years in me.

COATES:

Oh, you never know. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Well, even so, it won’t do me much good, though, you know. So hopefully my kids will profit by this. If not, you know, it’s just life, you know.

COATES:

Yeah. So your dad came back in 1945, and then did the family move immediately into the housing that you were talking about for the service people?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, we moved there. I remember, I was like six or seven years old when we moved to that housing there. Well, when my dad came back from the war, we lived with his parents, my grandma. We lived in a barn. It was a garage, but it looked like a barn because it was made out of redwood siding, and it’s just like a barn, and we lived in there. Dirt floors, dirt floors.

COATES:

And that was attached to their house?

ORTEGA:

No, it was a little off, you know, in the back of the house.

COATES:

To the side of it.

ORTEGA:

And we lived in there. Dirt floors, but I think he used to put carpet or something to cover the dirt. We stayed in there for a while. I remember living there.

COATES:

Was it just like one big room or something?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, it was a garage, yeah. But it wasn’t a garage with plaster or something. It was this redwood siding boards that you stand up, you know. You’ve seen a barn. It was that, and it was right here on Celis, same place, but down the street more. My dad’s mother and my mother’s mother lived on the same street but like maybe four blocks apart from each other, and we lived there for a while when Dad got back from the war, and then I think from there we moved to Basilone Homes. He probably got some sort of a—not a judgment, but maybe an allowance to go live in these barracks, I guess you want to call them. And we stayed there till I was about nine years old, and then we moved to Pacoima, just not too far from here, for about a year, and then we moved back to San Fernando, been here the rest of our lives here.

COATES:

Now, where did your mother and father meet? Did they know each other growing up?

ORTEGA:

Right here. They lived in San Fernando, like I said. My grandmother lived here, my other grandmother lived there, and they met evidently in high school, and they dated. And they loved to dance. In fact, my whole family are dancers. We’re all dancers. And they used to go to—you probably never heard of the Aragon Ballroom. Have you heard of Spade Cooley?

COATES:

No. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

He’s that western singer. And they used to have an Aragon Ballroom over there at the Santa Monica Pier, and they used to go down there dancing. It was a ballroom. In them days it was called ballroom dancing. It’s not like a nightclub now where you just go and they got a little tiny floor. They had a regular ballroom, and they used to do a lot of ballroom dancing.

COATES:

Now, how did they get there, do you know? Because that’s a pretty good distance.

ORTEGA:

By car.

COATES:

So they drove and everything.

ORTEGA:

By car, yeah.

COATES:

Because I know they had trolleys and things in that time too.

ORTEGA:

Well, we had trolleys here, but they didn’t go that far to L.A. But, no, they had their old car, and I think they had that car like in the 1930s, 1930, ’40 Chevys or something like that, and they would probably get together and all drive down there. It probably took an hour to get there, you know. Here, we can get to Santa Monica in, what, twenty, twentyfive minutes?

COATES:

Right.

ORTEGA:

But I think in them days—and then, remember, there’s not that much traffic.

COATES:

They didn’t drive 75 in those days. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

No. But there was no traffic in them days either.

COATES:

True.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, see, like now, you know, traffic’s there. I just came in from Burbank last night, and I can’t believe where all the people are coming from. But I think they met in high school and they got married. Let’s see. I think my dad was twenty when I was born. Let’s see. I was born in ’41, and he was born in 19—so he was probably about twentyone when I was born.

COATES:

How long had they been married at that point, do you know?

ORTEGA:

At what point?

COATES:

When you were born. How long had they been married before you were born?

ORTEGA:

Not very long, I don’t think. I think they were probably married a year or so, yeah.

COATES:

So he ended up going off to war pretty quick after they were married.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, well, the war started, and everybody got drafted, you know. In fact, my mother used to tell me stories that if you were Indian around here, they would pick you up and draft you. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

COATES:

Yeah, yeah, I don’t doubt it.

ORTEGA:

Because the war was so demanding, that they picked up a lot of the—not juveniles, I guess, just loiterers.

COATES:

Yeah. I just think that’s kind of remarkable when—I mean, they’re kids, basically, when they get married so young.

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, yeah, nineteen or twenty, very young nowadays.

COATES:

And then within a year and a half, he’s gone for four years.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. Well, remember our draft is at eighteen years old. They don’t have a draft anymore, but I signed the draft when I was eighteen. But I got married when I was twenty, and there was no wars going on, and then I had children almost two years later. And then the little war started, what’s called the Dominican Republic, which is down there like towards Cuba and whatnot. There was a small war there. So then they started in drafting again, but I missed it because I already had two children, so I was deferred. Plus, I was going to plumbing school, and that’s like a college course, and that’s also deferment. So I didn’t have to go or anything like that.

COATES:

So you said your father had gone to school through the tenth grade, and then how did he learn the trade of plumbing? Did he learn that after he came back?

ORTEGA:

He worked as a laborer. Oh, yeah, when he came back. When he came back, he got a job. Like I said, I think he worked as a laborer when they were building Lockheed, they were adding to it or whatnot. Lockheed was covered at one time with a tent because of the war, you know. They covered it with like an Armytype tent. And I think he worked there as a laborer. He didn’t have a trade or anything else like that. Then from there, he went to work for a plumbing shop, digging ditches and working in a General Motors. We had a General Motors here in Van Nuys at one time, and he was there. Finally, the business agent for the plumbers union talked to my dad. He liked my dad. He said, “Hey, Joe, I want you to join the union, become a plumber. You’d make more money, and you don’t have to do any digging, you know.” (Coates laughs.) So my dad joined the union, and he was in the union for thirtytwo years, and then he got me in when I was twenty, and I did my thirty years.

COATES:

So as far as the plumbing, he just kind of learned on the job then? He didn’t go to a—

ORTEGA:

He went to school, but they—

COATES:

Did he? Okay.

ORTEGA:

—didn’t have a very good school in them days. You could miss as much as you want, not go if you didn’t want to. When I went to school, you had to go all the time. I did my five years in there. But, yeah, he was a good plumber. He liked his job. In fact, that afforded us to buy a home. I was fourteen—

COATES:

Yeah. I was going to say that’s—

ORTEGA:

—when we bought our first home.

COATES:

—pretty wellpaying jobs usually.

ORTEGA:

It was $11,000. $11,000 for a fourbedroom house, brandnew. (Coates laughs.) Not like now what they’re like anymore.

COATES:

So how old were you when they bought that house, you said about nine or so?

ORTEGA:

I think I was fourteen maybe when we bought a house, yeah. I was eight or nine when we lived in Pacoima, and then—

COATES:

Then you came back when—yeah. Okay.

ORTEGA:

Yeah.

COATES:

So did you go to different schools then because—

ORTEGA:

No, I went to three schools: grammar, junior, and senior. The grammar was right here on O’Melveny, which is right here in town, and then the junior high is about three blocks from us, and then the senior high is down here on Laurel Canyon.

COATES:

So you went to school with the same set of kids all the way through from beginning to end.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. We’re having our fiftyfifth reunion in a couple months.

COATES:

I was going to say, that’s probably a pretty tightknit bunch, huh?

ORTEGA:

Well, you know, there’s still a group of us here. They throw dances every year, and it’s (unclear), all highschoolers, that they’re still living. We’ve lost a lot of them to cancer, you know. Cancer has taken a lot of my school friends, but I still have a lot left, yeah.

COATES:

So what was it like going to school around here in terms of was it pretty much people who shared the same heritage and so forth, or did you have different—

ORTEGA:

No, you had your segregation, I guess you want to call it. In fact, believe it or not, I grew up as a Mexican, because that’s what I thought I was. They weren’t allowed on this side of the tracks. I don’t know if you know where the tracks—you just passed the tracks.

COATES:

I do, yeah.

ORTEGA:

This is all white area. A lot of towns had their white areas. Now, everything is Hispanic, right, or (unclear), whatever you want to call it, even your states, you know. (laughs) I was surprised. I was watching the TV program, and I don’t know if it was Illinois or Minnesota, somewhere, and they were having a Mexican mariachitype dance. Like, “Wow, they go way up there.” (laughter)

COATES:

Even in Oklahoma, we’ve got a pretty sizable population now. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yeah, they should make Mexico a state. (laughter) State of the United States, you know.

COATES:

That would probably solve a lot of problems for us. I don’t know about for them.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, we all grew up right there in town in a little area. San Fernando is a very small town. I think it’s only like a mile square or something like that, a mile and a quarter square, very small. Like I said, there’s still a few of the old families. My mother is ninetyfour. She can tell you some stories of some of the people that used to live here and whatnot.

COATES:

So when you were in school, was the school—you say there was a certain degree of segregation in the town, but all the kids are still going to the same school together.

ORTEGA:

But there was segregation in the school itself. Well, I shouldn’t say “segregation.” They were grouped.

COATES:

Right, they’re kind of cliques or something like that.

ORTEGA:

Your blacks cliques, exactly, your whites, Mexicans, and then every once in a while you have your fights between them, you know high school kids.

COATES:

Yeah. Did that exist when the kids were little in the elementary school?

ORTEGA:

You know what? San Fernando, they didn’t allow blacks. It was all mainly Mexican and whites. I don’t know why, if they had some sort of law. They wouldn’t even rent to them. In fact, we might have one black right here in San Fernando right now, one that I know of, and he may not even be black. You know, nowadays, you see people from Cuba, from somewhere, you don’t know if he’s black or what because he looks it.

COATES:

Where he’s from.

ORTEGA:

But we don’t know, you know. We don’t know anymore. But in school there, you had your groups. You had to watch out, you know, where you were, whatever, right, teenagers.

COATES:

Well, I just wondered if that had existed, because teenagers go into cliques anyway, it seems like—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, groups, yeah, yeah. But ours were racial.

COATES:

—even if it’s not about race, it’s about their—

ORTEGA:

Ours were racial groups. Now they just go into groups where—

COATES:

Their interests or whatever, yeah.

ORTEGA:

—maybe their neighborhood or something like that, yeah.

COATES:

Or their turf or whatever, yeah. But with little kids, they don’t so much and so I just wondered did you—

ORTEGA:

No, they don’t know. Like I said, I didn’t know anything about race when I was five or six, and I’m sure nowadays these kids don’t either.

COATES:

So do you remember interacting more with like the white kids when you were real small than when you were older?

ORTEGA:

I think I did. I think the kids that I went to school with, I think the school was probably 75 percent white, maybe 80 percent white.

COATES:

Oh, really. So you were a minority in it.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, but I didn’t know what a minority was. I thought I was one of them, you know, yeah.

COATES:

Right, and they thought you were one of them, too, or that they were one of you or— (laughs)

ORTEGA:

I used to have a lot of white friends, you know, yeah. A couple Japanese in this town, not very many.

COATES:

Did those friendships kind of grow apart then as you became older and got into—

ORTEGA:

Well, I think as you’d graduate, people get married, leave town, go to other states and whatnot, but the people that stayed here, no, we still get together and see each other. In fact, my wife just now went to go see one of her friends that got cancer that she went to school with. And my wife’s from here too. Well, she was born in Arizona, but I think she came over when she was five. She went right here to Morningside, just a little school about three blocks from here. She was the only girl that couldn’t speak—she couldn’t speak English, my wife, because she was from Arizona.

COATES:

Oh, okay, so she was speaking Spanish, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yeah. I think she’s a Yaqui.

COATES:

Oh, okay.

ORTEGA:

Aren’t they Yaquis from Arizona? I’m not too sure. She doesn’t have a lot of history on her family. It’s a shame. It’s a shame. People should write down more things, you know.

COATES:

But they’re down there close to Tucson, so is that where the area she’s from?

ORTEGA:

Oh, she’s right on the border. She’s in a town called Douglas, right on the border.

COATES:

Yeah, I know it, yeah.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, their family is from Douglas.

COATES:

So do you remember when you were growing up—it sounds like you don’t recall much of prejudice or discrimination or anything in the school itself when you were a child.

ORTEGA:

Not until we were high school. High school prejudice.

COATES:

What about just in the general community? Do you recall having experiences of you or your family?

ORTEGA:

In the neighborhood?

COATES:

In the neighborhood, in the larger community, in the business community.

ORTEGA:

Like I said, I grew up mainly it was all Hispanic. I don’t want to say the word “Mexican,” because we’re not Mexicans. I guess the word is “Hispanic” nowadays, or “Latin.” I don’t know what word to use anymore. I always lived in a Hispanic neighborhood, so there was no segregation there. When I moved here, this is in ’79 I moved here, this was, I think, all white in here, but it was more where nobody—you know. I wasn’t shunned on or anything like that. I have a friend that—do you know where Sylmar’s at?

COATES:

Yeah, vaguely, generally.

ORTEGA:

Sylmar’s east of here maybe about ten miles from here. I have a friend of mine that when after they graduated, his family moved to Sylmar, and his house was always TP’d or egged. His cars got paint on them and everything.

COATES:

Wow. And when was that, what year approximately?

ORTEGA:

It was probably 1963, ’64, ’65. Still a lot of segregation or a lot of, how would you say it, where people didn’t like you. They just—

COATES:

Prejudice and discrimination.

ORTEGA:

Prejudice, exactly, yeah. So there was prejudice here in this town up until then.

COATES:

So like when your mother would go to the grocery store when you were a kid or something like that, was she always sort of staying in a Hispanic community?

ORTEGA:

Well, yeah, because we had stores there (unclear).

COATES:

Yeah, that’s what I was saying—

ORTEGA:

We always had stores in the area.

COATES:

So there really was a fairly—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, this was predominantly—more of San Fernando is predominantly Spanish town.

COATES:

—just sort of a complete community that you didn’t even ever have to leave it to—for anything, huh?

ORTEGA:

No, no, well, you didn’t, you know. Yeah, because I’m sure that when my dad was in the service, we never had a car, so—in fact, we had a market right across the street. Across from the house was a market. That’s what we had, yeah, so you didn’t have to go far to the store. We had a theater just around the corner, and anything you needed was right there. So that was good about living in town. In fact, San Fernando Road, we lived the street in back of it, so you could walk through the back of the store and you’re in town. So we didn’t have to go far to do anything, yeah. So my mother also was—she got along very good with a lot of American people or white people. Like I said, she worked all her life just for us, and she was very—how do you say it—not aggressive or assertive. She worked for Lockheed, being a minority. She was flown to different areas of the state to go pick up parts to bring back to Lockheed for their airplanes or whatever, and so, therefore, she must have had a good job to be flown as a person, you know. So evidently she did fine in her work. She wasn’t looked down s a minority, you know. She wasn’t kept from having a good job.

COATES:

And this was in the fifties, the sixties, the seventies—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, this is prior before I was born, I imagine—

COATES:

Even in the forties then.

ORTEGA:

—or even maybe after I was born, yeah. She worked right here on First Street. There used to be—they used to call them sweatshops, sweatshops where they made a lot of garments, shirts, and stuff like that, and she used to work in one of them. She used to make a lot of my clothes, and I can remember her bringing home buttons, all kinds of buttons. I used to—you ever heard of the game called Tiddly Winks?

COATES:

Oh, yeah. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

I used to play Tiddly Winks with all them buttons we had in the house. Well, you played with what you had, you know. But my mother was very assertive and very well dressed. She was a beautiful woman and loved to dance, very fun, a lot of fun.

COATES:

Was there a lot of community social life going on, parties, festivals, things like that?

ORTEGA:

You know, as a child, I don’t know if anything went on in the towns as far as here in town. I know they would go out to go dancing. We used to have fiestas here in town, carnivals. As a kid I remember going to the fiesta, watching the parades going on, and all the horses and whatnot, and then it would all lead to the San Fernando Park. It was here, and they’d have a carnival there. Now, we had that all our lives. Every year we’d have that. That was social. As far as things to do in this town, there wasn’t a lot. Just a couple theaters. We had three theaters in this town, and we didn’t have any dancehalls in this town. Oh, I’m sorry, we had an American Legion and an Elks, and I think they went dancing there, yeah.

COATES:

Probably. They do everywhere, so, yeah. You were raised Catholic, is that—

ORTEGA:

Well, let’s put it this way. My dad, he didn’t push it. It’s like me when I first got married. I’ve been married a couple times, and when I married my first wife, she was raised Catholic, she went to Catholic school and everything, so, of course—and I was never pushed to go to church. My mother would give me a dollar, “Here, take this to church and put it in the basket.” What I would do—and this is St. Ferdinand right here. It wasn’t built when I was a kid, but it was built later. I would walk in the front door, and then out the side door, just so I could tell Mom I went to church. (Coates laughs.) Then I’d go out the side door, and just down the block there used to be a bowling alley, and I used to go play the pinball machines with the dollar. A dollar was quite a bit of money in those days, you know. But I wasn’t pushed to go to church. My dad didn’t push me. My mother was religious. Of course, a lot of the women were religious in them days. When I got married, I was telling you, when I got married, I had to get married in the church because my wife was a—she went to Catholic school. I had to go to catechism and whatnot in order to receive the sacrament so I could get married. I thought being married in the church was supposed to last forever, right? Well, I soon found out it didn’t last very long, so I said, well, that was the holy sacrament, aren’t what I thought they were supposed to be, so I never pushed Catholicism on my kids. My kids, I figured, hey, they want to seek a faith, let them do it.

COATES:

So while you were growing up, your mom went to church, your mother went to church regularly?

ORTEGA:

Regularly, but, you know what, I don’t really remember her going to church when I was a kid. I think she might have before she got married, and she might have gone some days that maybe I wasn’t aware of, but I don’t really remember her going to church. Yeah, I don’t remember. But I know she was—

COATES:

But she still gave you a dollar to go take to the church. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Every Sunday, every Sunday. “Take a dollar to the church,” and I would go so I wouldn’t lie to her. I would go in the front door, out the side. But I think she was religious. She still prays every night. She says her rosary every night. And she has the little statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary, stuff like that, so I don’t know if that means anything. I think older people were more religious than we are now.

COATES:

Probably, yeah, I think so too, yeah. So did your father’s family have much relationship with the mission then or what was their relationship?

ORTEGA:

My dad actually helped rebuild the mission when it was torn down. It went through a lot of—I think they had two earthquakes. I think they had one before I was born that sort of tore it down, and then I think right before I was born, my dad was there, and they used to make the adobe, and as a laborer I think he helped there. You know the history of the Indians, right? They were enslaved to build the missions.

COATES:

Yes, yes.

ORTEGA:

And I believe that’s where we got our surname. I don’t believe our name is Ortega, because Indians didn’t have names like that. I think the word “Ortega” came from probably some Spaniard that probably might have baptized an Indian at one time and that’s how your surname stays with you. I believe that’s how it works.

COATES:

Or maybe they were sort of loaned out in service to somebody named Ortega for a while or something like that.

ORTEGA:

That could have been, too, yeah, but I always thought it was a baptismal name. I always took it as a baptismal name.

COATES:

Yeah, I’m sure it is. So he worked to reconstruct the mission, but he never was involved as spiritually with it, I guess you could—or religiously or anything like that?

ORTEGA:

No, my dad was not a spiritual man, no. I tell you what, though, spiritually is different than saying Catholic—

COATES:

Religious, yeah.

ORTEGA:

—than being religious. Because he read the Bible. In fact, I’m into it too. I’m into evolution, and I read about all these, King Solomon and all that, you know, and it’s not just Jesus Christ. I’m not saying anything about Jesus Christ, you know, but I mean even way before him, you know. But that doesn’t mean that I’m religious, no.

COATES:

Right.

ORTEGA:

I love to listen to how the world started and how we came about and how we evolved.

COATES:

How far back does that—and I don’t know what to call it—disinterest or—I don’t know if I’m putting words in your mouth when I say that, but, you know, that they weren’t very engaged with the mission or with the church or anything. I mean, your father wasn’t. Was your grandfather also not real—or do you remember?

ORTEGA:

You know, I don’t remember them going to church or the mission. I know the mission had a burial grounds, and I know that they would go there to pay their respects, because we have a lot of ancestors buried there. I don’t believe the men—and especially I don’t know if it had anything to do with being Indian or anything—would actually even participate, because, you know, as another thing, too, if whatever Indian I’ve got in me, I believe—I don’t believe in the Christ and all that. I believe that the real word is the way the Indian believe, that God is everything, you know. God is the trees and the sky and whatever, you know. That’s the way I believe. I don’t think it’s just one person, you know. I think everything we got is God, you know. I could be wrong too. That’s just the way I am. I’m not religious.

COATES:

Okay. When you finished high school, what did you do after that?

00:46:59

ORTEGA:

When I finished high school, I was only seventeen, so I couldn’t get a job. They wouldn’t hire you unless you were eighteen in them days. So I went to work with my dad in the summer, and then I wanted to go enlist in the Air Force because, you know, there’s nothing to do. And my dad said, “Join the Army. You’ll get an education.” So I was seventeen, I went to Birmingham High School, that’s where you would sign up, and I filled out some questionnaires and then I came home. And then my dad said, “Well, come on, keep working with me during the summer,” and he was paying me pretty good. Finally, the guy from the Air Force called me, said, “Okay, bring your dad in to sign for you,” because I wasn’t eighteen.

And then I changed my mind and said, “You know what? I don’t want to go,” because I was making good money and I had a car, right? I didn’t want to go. So I went to General Motors and I went to go sign up, and I wasn’t eighteen, but when I turned eighteen in September, three months after I graduated, I got a telegram from General Motors to come to work. So I went to work for them for about a year and a half. About the same time, I had signed in with the plumbers union to come to work for them, so I worked a year and a half with General Motors, and I got a letter from the plumbers union to go to school and go to work as plumbing. So that’s what I did. I went to school for five years and I became a plumber, and I was doing that for about thirty years.

COATES:

For five years in school, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, you have to do five. We still have it. I was a teacher. I just retired in December. I was a plumbing teacher for twentyeight years.

COATES:

Oh, my gosh. So how many classes for five years? I mean, what’s the—

ORTEGA:

You have four classes per year, five years, that’s twenty classes. You’re up to ten.

COATES:

And do you go in the evenings or on—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, you go after work. Yeah, you go after work.

COATES:

Did they pay for it or—

ORTEGA:

Well, it didn’t cost us nothing. Everything was free, the books and everything—

COATES:

Right, so somebody paid for it. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

—was, so it didn’t cost us anything. Well, it comes out of the union, I guess, the funds of the union, yeah.

COATES:

Yeah, something like that.

ORTEGA:

Yeah.

COATES:

What about your brother?

ORTEGA:

My brother’s identical to me. Everything I’ve done, he’s done, except that he was in the Vietnam War. He got drafted when he got out of high school. But as far as worked, he got into an apprenticeship, he went to school, he worked, he became a teacher, and we also were building inspectors. When we retired from plumbing, we got into the City of Los Angeles and became building inspectors. He did the same thing. (Coates laughs.) We both became teachers for the union, plumbing teachers, and we just both retired.

COATES:

So you were just blazing the trail and he followed, huh? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Exactly. We’re clones, I guess. And I retired in December from the plumbing teacher, and he decided, he retired in November, a month before me. I thought he was going to wait for me. (Coates laughs.) But we’re identically the same, everything we did.

COATES:

Yes, because six years is kind of a large age difference for kids, you know, sometimes and—

ORTEGA:

Yeah, well, in fact, I didn’t grow up with my brother, in a sense, because I was too busy with my cousins, because they were older— (interruption)

COATES:

Okay.

ORTEGA:

But, anyway, six years is quite a bit of difference in age when you’re a child, you know. He was just a little thing, probably had to babysit him once in a while. But as far as playing together, doing things together, no.

COATES:

So how many cousins did you have? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

You got to remember, I’ve got two sides. I’ve got my dad’s side and my mother’s side, and I was always getting picked up. Like one grandmother would go to the other grandmother. I’d be staying with one grandmother, and my dad’s grandmother would make us take naps, and in the summer it was terrible. So my mother’s mother would come pick me up and take me home with her. She didn’t want to see me laying there on the floor taking a nap. But I had—let’s see—that I would associate with my age, I probably had maybe ten cousins, yeah, that I would associate and play with as a child, yeah.

COATES:

Right. Because you’ve got a lot of cousins that are almost different generations from you, right, such as Rudy.

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, look at Rudy. We’re thirty years apart, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Rudy was probably the last—no, there’s one after Rudy, I think. Did he have a sister, littler than him?

COATES:

Yeah, I think he said he was eleventh out of twelve or something like that.

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, yeah. He had a big family. But, yeah, we have—well, you know, most of my cousins are close to my age, except for Rudy’s family, because of Rudy, yeah. But we’re all close. I wasn’t real close to my Uncle Rudy’s kids except for little Rudy because of the tribe, because they seemed to live somewheres else. They weren’t here in San Fernando. If you didn’t live here in San Fernando, we weren’t close, you know. If you moved out of town, of course, you don’t see each other.

COATES:

Right. So are there other families that you know are members of the tribe right now that you’ve been close to all along but maybe you didn’t know that you were all—

ORTEGA:

No. I know I had cousins, but like I said, if we didn’t live in the area, we didn’t associate. I know that Salas were part of our family, and we had some Newmans that were part of the family. In fact, one of the Newmans, I still see him. We’re pretty close. Jack—I don’t know if you have the name there on this—is Jack Rios on your list? He is an Ortega. Jack Rios’ grandfather is my grandfather’s brother, James Ortega. Anyway, now, we’re fairly close. He lives in Sylmar and we see each other once in a while. But as far as growing up, Indian family, no, no, we didn’t. Well, like I said, we didn’t know we were Indian at the time.

COATES:

So I guess that’s what I was looking to try and understand, you know, if now that you know you’re Indian, but these are still people that you’ve known all your life, some of them (unclear).

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah, like I told you earlier, the word “Indian” didn’t come into our lives till after Rudy started probably in the sixties, yeah.

COATES:

Okay.

ORTEGA:

And I don’t know if that’s going to hurt the census of the tribe or anything like that—

COATES:

Oh, I don’t think so.

ORTEGA:

—because we didn’t know that much about it, you know,

COATES:

No, no, no, that’s—no, that’s probably commonplace, I think. So you got married when you were pretty young, for the first time, you said?

ORTEGA:

I was about—I think I was twenty. Everybody did, I think, in my days, because you got out of high school, everybody went their own ways, and you lost all your friends in a sense. So the thing to do was get married and work, yeah, yeah.

COATES:

So you were twenty and—

ORTEGA:

I think I had my first child at twentythree.

COATES:

Where did you meet your first wife then?

ORTEGA:

High school.

COATES:

So it was somebody you’d known pretty much all your life.

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, everybody did. Everybody married high school sweethearts. (laughter) Well, because you didn’t know other girls. You didn’t know anybody except for the people you went to school with, right?

COATES:

So growing up, your family didn’t like travel on vacations and leave the area or things like that?

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, we went. Every year we’d go to Yosemite. Every year we went to Yosemite for a couple weeks.

COATES:

Did you go in the summertime and camp?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, right during summer, we’d camp for two weeks in Yosemite. We did that for ten or twelve years straight until I grew up or whatever. But, no, my dad always believed in vacations. We used to go to the beach a lot, grunion hunting. I don’t know if you know what grunion hunting is.

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

The moon brings up these fish at night, and they come out of the water and they lay their eggs. The female fish, it’s about this long, about this fat, and what it does, it comes out in one wave of water, and it plants itself—

COATES:

Upright, huh?

ORTEGA:

Upright, and the other fish comes, the male fish come, and wraps around her and sperms her, and then this all has to be done in one wave, because they have to go back on the next wave. (Coates laughs.) And what happens, a lot of people go out there and they just grab these fish. It’s a lot of fun because it slips out of your hands, and this is like two o’clock in the morning, and all the grownups are drinking and having fun and dancing and getting drunk, whatnot. But we used to do that a lot, grunion hunting, they called it. People still do it.

COATES:

Where?

ORTEGA:

Right here in Huntington Beach or Santa Monica, wherever they thought the grunion were going to come, and it was all done because of the moon. Now, the forecasters would say, “Okay, we think we’re going to have a grunion hit on this beach or that beach,” and I don’t know, it might have been a setup just to get people to go to certain beaches, I don’t know, because there were many times we didn’t hit them. (Coates laughs.) But we did a lot of that as kids, I can remember. The kids loved going to the beach, camping overnight, you know, a lot of fun. But like I said, it was the same kids, same family, all the brothers. My mother’s sisters. My mother had four or five sisters, I think, and they all went to the beach, and the husband and the cousins and so like that.

COATES:

Just have like picnic kind of things or things like that.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, just a big old party, you know. Well, we were just kids, but the men, the husbands would drink and sing along, guitars and whatnot.

COATES:

Now, you talked about going out the side door of the church. As a kid, were you kind of prone to escapades of— (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Escapades of what? You better refine that a little bit better.

COATES:

I’m leaving it wide open for you to answer as you want to. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

I know.

COATES:

Are there things your parents didn’t know about? Put it that way, I guess. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Well, I guess everybody gets into trouble. We were pretty free. As teenagers, my mom—see, we lived on this side of San Fernando High School, so we would come to town to the record shops to listen to music, and then when I was a teenager, San Fernando used to have midnight sales, like on a Saturday, stores would stay open till midnight. So it was a gathering place for teenagers. I would come. Every once in a while, I’d get in a couple of fistfights with somebody or something, and Mom and Dad didn’t know about it because you don’t tell your parents you got in a fight or something like that. Trouble? I don’t think I ever got in any real bad trouble, you know, just I wrecked my car once, but they knew about that, you know. No, I don’t think nothing special.

COATES:

Just the usual stuff, huh?

ORTEGA:

Anything, yeah, nothing unusual. I never stole anything or robbed anybody or anything like that, you know.

COATES:

(laughs) I’ve just had a lot of interviews with people who had periods of delinquency, shall we say, in their lives, you know, that they would talk about.

ORTEGA:

Oh, I never got into trouble as a child. Never got in trouble as a child. I did when I was older, you know, when I was single. I was single for many years after that marriage, and I used to play—I don’t know if you ever heard of it—bar league baseball. I used to frequent the cocktail bars, because when you’re single, that’s what you do. And you form a clique, and these cocktail bars would have baseball teams.

COATES:

Okay. So they would actually go out and physically play then? It wasn’t just like a fantasy thing?

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah. No, no, no. We would play other cocktail bars. And when you do that, you drink a lot. You go in the morning, first thing you do is you go in the morning to the bar to meet all your friends, all dressed up in your jerseys and everything, and you start drinking. Then you’d go out to the park and play baseball, and after baseball, then you would go to the winners’ bar, and after the winners’ bar, you had to go back to the losers’ bar. You had to be fair about it. So I did a lot of that. I’m not too proud of that.

COATES:

But you get a lot of exercise and— (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yes, I did, and I was in pretty good shape in those days. But I don’t think my mom and dad liked that I was single and out (unclear) cocktails, but they didn’t realize that when you’re single, you can’t stay home and watch TV, you know.

COATES:

Right, no.

ORTEGA:

I had to be out with my friends, you know, people that are single like me, and girls. We just did a lot of partying and whatnot. I never did any drugs. I tried a couple times, you know, somebody would have—in fact, you know, I never seen any marijuana in my days. I saw one, a kid had a little cigarette one time, and I didn’t pay no attention to it. But in my days there was no drugs or anything. It was just drinking. It was just mainly drinking, in the places where I went to, anyway. I never hung around with any hardcore gangsters or anything like that. Everybody was pretty good people. They were just single, a lot of single girls, a lot of single guys in my day, you know. Had fun.

COATES:

So you got married when you were twenty, and you had your first child when you were twentythree.

ORTEGA:

About twentythree.

COATES:

And you were working as a plumber already by that time.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah.

COATES:

And how long did that marriage last? It broke up at some point.

ORTEGA:

It lasted about seven years.

COATES:

Okay, that’s pretty long.

ORTEGA:

Then I was single again till 1977. I was probably single for about fifteen years or so, and I was married to that lady for about seventeen years, and she left me. She left me for another man, which is fine.

COATES:

Fine now. It probably wasn’t at the time, huh?

ORTEGA:

Well, she was a lot younger than me. She was fifteen years younger, and I think she wanted to get out there, and she fell in love with some guy she worked with. It’s all right. That’s life, you know. No big deal. I don’t look down on it. It’s just part of my book, right? (laughter)

COATES:

Was your first child a son or a daughter?

ORTEGA:

A daughter, and she’s a registered Indian, and she loves it. In fact, in 1971—I’m pretty sure it was ’71. Let’s see. She was born in ’63. Yeah, she was born in ’63. She turned eighteen—’81, right? In 1981, I was working for this plumbing shop. They had just passed a law—I don’t know if you know about this—where a lot of companies had to hire minorities. Did you hear about that?

COATES:

Mmhmm.

ORTEGA:

I think it was somewhere about ’81. Was that about the right time frame?

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

Anyway, the federal government, I think, did this. And I can remember that my bosses—there were there bosses in our company—they were trying to hire more Mexican people for the minorities, but it had to be a ratio, if I remember right, so many to so many whites or something like that. So I remember my dad, because me and my dad and my brother always worked together, different shops, same plumbing shops, always together, and I remember my dad telling my boss, he went up to him, he said, “Hey, Roy, what about this minority thing? Would it help you if I told you that we were Indian, registered Indians?” And he got all elated because now he had a different kind of minority. He had two different kind of minorities instead of one.

COATES:

So that changes the proportions of the (unclear), yeah.

ORTEGA:

That made his corporation look better, because he was not only hiring just Hispanics, now he’s hired Indians, too, see.

COATES:

Right. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

So when my daughter—no, you know what, this happened in ’71. In ’81, when my daughter was eighteen, when she found out she was Indian, she applied for a job for the state of California, and she put down “American Indian.” Boom, she got picked up just like that, and she’s been there for thirtysome years now. From day one she’s been there, and she’s gone as high as she can in her job. So that really helped her, that “American Indian.” And I’ve got a couple certificates here with my other daughter, my youngest, that I was with last night—I’ve got four daughters. Actually, one’s a stepdaughter. I’ve got three daughters and two sons, and my youngest daughter, she really likes it. She’s into the Indians too. She used to dance a little bit with Rudy when Rudy had dancing, and she used to dance a little bit. I’ve got some certificates from her here when she was in high school. The high school had some sort of an Indian heritage group, and she was involved in that group. She got a certificate from that. And she also had a camp. She went to an Indian camp in the Hollywood Hills for American Indians and stuff like that. Anyway, so I don’t know where we’re at now. (laughter)

COATES:

So your first daughter, while she was growing up, you didn’t know about the Indian things, or had Rudy started kind of investigating that already?

ORTEGA:

No, no, I knew. I knew about our Indian way, way before my daughters grew up. Like I said, Rudy started this in the sixties.

COATES:

Okay. I thought you just said seventies. Okay.

ORTEGA:

No, in seventies is the one is—

COATES:

So this is all happening then at the time—

ORTEGA:

Seventyone is when our employer, we told our employer. That’s when the federal government said, “You need to hire minorities.” And that’s when we told our employer that we were registered Indians. That was in ’71. In ’81 is when my daughter signed on with the state of California as an Indian.

COATES:

So when your daughter was born in ’63, that is around the time when Rudy is doing all of this work, and so she’s growing up with this going on. Okay.

ORTEGA:

Yes, that’s when he’s doing all the research. Yeah. I remember him doing all this research. I can remember him talking about going to the mission, “I had to do this, I had to go that.” My dad, now that I’m thinking about it, my dad even got involved with it. He went to Utah to the Mormons—what’s the name of that building?

COATES:

I don’t know what the building is, but it’s the—

ORTEGA:

It’s where they have like the archives or something like that.

COATES:

Yeah, right, the Mormons are great for that.

ORTEGA:

Now, he went there, but I don’t know why he went there. He didn’t tell me why. I got a feeling he went there to do a little bit more research on the family.

COATES:

The Mormons keep fantastic genealogical records, and a lot of times they’re the best sources for information about Indians’ genealogy.

ORTEGA:

Now, let me ask you question now.

COATES:

Okay. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

People are born 100, 200 years ago, which is not a long time, you know, even though our country is only about 400 years old, right? People are born at home, no doctors, probably weren’t even documented of what day they were born.

COATES:

A lot of times they are because they’re noted in the family Bible. That’s how people used to do it.

ORTEGA:

Well, what if they didn’t have a family Bible?

COATES:

Yeah, then you’re kind of—

ORTEGA:

Now, a lot of people—what I’m getting at is I think there are some people that they don’t know when they were born, and the only record they have is baptismals, and even those old baptismals, I think they had to guess at a date, and I’m sure the priest would ask the parent, “When was your daughter born?” “Oh, she was born three months ago.” You know what I’m saying?

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

No specific date, “three months ago.” So I’m sure they would put down January the 20th or something like that, which may not be accurate. So how did they do it in them days if there was no documentation?

COATES:

Probably just like you just said. (laughs) Yeah. But, I mean, the Indians didn’t keep any kind of calendar like that—

ORTEGA:

No, that’s why I’m saying there was—

COATES:

—so you wouldn’t have even had any—

ORTEGA:

Well, I’ll bet you that before the 1750s, before—well, let’s see. California didn’t become a state till, what, 1848 or 1850? Before that, in the 1700s, I don’t think there was even any paper to write on here. How did people keep notes?

COATES:

Probably not.

ORTEGA:

What, they write on leather or what? There couldn’t have been no documentation, see. In the 1750s there was not many people here. There was probably just Indians here. I don’t even think the Spaniards were here yet. When did the Spaniards come over here? When did the missions start? Do you remember?

COATES:

I think a little bit earlier than that, but not much (unclear).

ORTEGA:

But you’re talking coastal.

COATES:

1720s or something.

ORTEGA:

You’re still talking coastal.

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

And all the people that lived inland, Indians, they were born, they didn’t get when they were born. They were just born and born and born, just like—I don’t want to say animals, but, you know, they were just born and there was no documentation. So, you know, how was that done, you know? That’s intrigued me, how did they keep records before paper, because paper didn’t come about till the easterners came, till civilization came across, right? So that intrigues me. That I’d like to know about, because that you don’t hear about.

COATES:

All kinds of ways tribes did that, though, kept records of some sort.

ORTEGA:

You think so?

COATES:

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

ORTEGA:

Well, you would know. And how would they kept track, you know, on a piece of leather or something?

COATES:

Well, it might not be writing. It might be creating pictures of some sort, you know, like—

ORTEGA:

Well, that’s how they—

COATES:

—like petroglyphs or like carvings on totem poles or painting on hides.

ORTEGA:

But those were just stories that—that wouldn’t be a document, would it?

COATES:

We consider it a document these days, yeah.

ORTEGA:

But it wouldn’t tell you when they were born or years or something.

COATES:

Not precisely in the way that we think about it right now.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. This is what I’m getting at. You don’t know how old a person is because he was born at home 100 years ago and whatever. That is what I’m more interested in. I would love to know how they did it in them days, you know. Born out in the wild or—well, they had to been wild, you know. And I’ll bet you they didn’t survive very long. I heard that back in them years, people only lived to about thirty, maybe forty at the most.

COATES:

Yeah, maybe. But you know what? There’s some people who think they lived a really long time, because there was no disease and they had good diets.

ORTEGA:

I have pictures of, I think, my grandmother, somebody that they said was 106 or something like that, yeah.

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

But then how do they know? They had no calendars. Did they count the moon, huh? See there. (laughter)

COATES:

They do, I think. Actually, they do go through cycles of the moon.

ORTEGA:

I don’t know.

COATES:

So when Rudy is starting to pick this up and your daughter has just been born, are you being drawn into this as a family? Are you learning about it as he’s learning about it?

ORTEGA:

Yes. In fact, I was at first, because I even joined a group called the Indian “Y” Guides, with my son, and my son was born in ’65, and we were getting into the Indians more and more. But then you’ve got to remember Rudy didn’t still have that much research in them years. We didn’t still know a lot of our background. We just heard we were part Indian, and how much, we didn’t know, and he’s gathering this research. But I think the thought of just maybe knowing made me want to get into this club with my son, and we would go off and do the campsites, put up teepees and the whole shot. We used to make soapbox derbies, and I would name it after my son. I would call him—what did I first used to call my son? In fact, my daughter and I were in a smoke—what do you call it?

COATES:

A sweat lodge?

ORTEGA:

A sweat.

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. And she got her name. She’s proud of her name. She will tell you this is her name on her driver’s license. Her Indian name is Summer Winds. But anyway, I can’t think of my son, what I named him. Something like Little Feather or something. I forget, something like that.

COATES:

Your father is Rudy’s brother, right?

ORTEGA:

Yes, he’s the oldest. My father is the oldest of the brothers.

COATES:

Was he interested in it when all of this was—

ORTEGA:

He was interested in it, but he thought Rudy was wasting his time. In fact, Rudy would come over to the house. I can remember Rudy coming over to the house. Sometimes my Uncle Richard would come over, and they would talk about the family, and I wasn’t interested so I didn’t sit in and listen in. Rudy was writing all this stuff down. Like I said, Rudy would use my dad and the missions as his information, base of information. But I can’t remember. My dad was interested. I guess maybe he liked talking about it and saying who was related to who and who was related to who, but, like I said, I think my dad was like, “You’re wasting your time, you know. You’re not going to be accepted.” My dad was a—how would you say it? He believed that as a minority you weren’t going to get nowhere in this government. You know what I mean? I think that’s what he felt, just—

COATES:

Now, how much do you think—I mean, Rudy is going out and he’s investigating and he’s learning things and he’s—and all of this. But how much do you think that maybe he and your dad already knew of some things? Was it, I mean, did they know a little bit already?

ORTEGA:

I think my dad did. I think what happened, I think Rudy lit the spark under my dad as far as research. You know what I mean?

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

But my dad did not want no part of the limelight, or if there is a limelight there, you know. He just wanted to stay in the back, and, “If you need some more information, come on over, and we’ll talk about it,” you know. Like I said, my dad thought it was just a lost cause, you know.

COATES:

But he was probably able to supply Rudy with a lot of family information.

ORTEGA:

Oh, he gave Rudy a lot of information on the family, yeah. Like I said he’s the oldest.

COATES:

Because he’s the older one, yeah, right.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, my dad was probably—Rudy would be about probably eightyfive right now. My dad would be—my dad was born in 1919, so—

COATES:

He’d be ninetyfive.

ORTEGA:

—he’d be ninetyfive. So he’s probably ten years older than Rudy, so he had a lot more recollection of the family, yeah. And then my other uncle is—I think, yeah, he’s the youngest. He’s only about eightthree. Yeah, Rudy did a lot of work, he did an awful lot of work, and I give him a lot of credit.

COATES:

So you got involved with this society. What did you call it? The White something or the—

ORTEGA:

What’s that now?

COATES:

You said there was a society that you became involved in, an Indian club or something.

ORTEGA:

Oh, no, no, that was a group for children, a fatherson group. It was called the Indian “Y” Guides.

COATES:

“Y,” okay.

ORTEGA:

It’s like Boy Scouts.

COATES:

Okay, no, I see, yeah. I misunderstood. I thought it was saying “white” or something like that. “Y” like the letter.

ORTEGA:

No, no, Indian Y. Yeah. The letter “Y.”

COATES:

Like YMCA, I think.

ORTEGA:

I don’t know what the “Y” was for, youth, I guess, just like the Boy Scouts, but instead of Boy Scouts, it was for Indians. And we had a lot of fun there. We used to dress up our meetings. We had to make all our own outfits, our little loincloths and everything. (laughter) It was like playing a game, really, because—I hate to say this—but every time we went to a meeting, they had a case of beer there, you know, for all the men to drink, and the boys, kids, go out and play and whatnot.

COATES:

It was a different time. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yeah. I shouldn’t have said that, huh?

COATES:

No, it’s good. (laughs) It’s what it was.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, but it was a lot of fun, yeah. All my kids know they’re part Indian, and they love it. They know that they’re like special. They’re not just ordinary kids. There’s something special that they have. In fact, let me tell you something. Two of my grandkids, their last name is Billie, because of their father. They want to change their name to Ortega.

COATES:

Oh, really? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

“My (unclear) can be an Ortega. We’re going to change our name to Ortega,” because they knew the name Ortega associated more with Indian than their father’s name.

COATES:

But “Billie” is among the tribes, too, isn’t he?

ORTEGA:

No, I think that’s a name change. I think their name was changed from something to Billie.

COATES:

Okay. So he’s not Indian, huh?

ORTEGA:

I think they were like Greek or something like that, yeah.

COATES:

Yeah, because there were Seminoles who were Billies. There were Navajos that were Billies.

ORTEGA:

Really? See, I didn’t know that. Well, there’s got to be a ton of tribes out there. But the kids, they knew that the Ortega here in town was the Indian of the town, so they wanted to change their names.

COATES:

Yeah. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yeah. In fact, I told you I have a stepdaughter. The stepdaughter has not told her kids that I’m not their real grandpa, right? She doesn’t want them to know, I think. I told her, “You should have told them a long time ago.” But she doesn’t want to tell them, because they know I’m part Indian and they think they’re part Indian, and if they’re told they’re not, they might get heartbroken.

COATES:

They’re going to find out, you know.

ORTEGA:

What can I do with that? The mother is the mother, and I can’t make her do that, you know, because my daughter, believe it or not—my stepdaughter is Russian, I think, or—well, not her. Well, let’s see. I think my daughter is part Polish and I don’t know what else. But her husband—they have a daughter. Her husband was Russian, so the baby is Russian and Polish. That’s my stepdaughter April. She was brought up here. In fact, when her mother left, the girl stayed with me. The two girls stayed with me and the mother just took off. When she went to school, she didn’t want to use her maiden name. She used my name Ortega. She went all through school, everything, with the Ortega name. I don’t know how they did that, because you’re not—how did you do that in grammar school? How did you she go by the name? Didn’t they ask for I.D. or something, or birth certificate or something, in grammar schools? But she had been an Ortega all her life, yeah. She didn’t like her last name, Vukich. Didn’t like it.

COATES:

Go figure, huh? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yeah.

COATES:

Okay. So what are some of the first things that you remember? I mean, there’s a lot of doing genealogical research and finding out the family is part of the beginning of sort of this recovering an Indian identity, right?

ORTEGA:

Mmhmm.

COATES:

What are some of the first like activities and actions and things that you remember?

ORTEGA:

Well, the first thing that I really enjoyed when we found out, we started looking for powwows. Yeah, in fact, I think Rudy had a couple. But we still go to the (unclear) powwows. The ones in L.A., to me, they’re too commercial. I don’t care for them. I like the little village powwows. I used to go to—there’s a tribe, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, they’re called the Tule Reservation.

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

They’re up there—

COATES:

Way up.

ORTEGA:

—by Bakersfield and Porterville. We used to go there—

COATES:

Oh, that’s different than I—

ORTEGA:

—five or six times a year, and we got to know the—he wasn’t the chief. He was the—they had a sheriff up there. I forget. I don’t know if they call him sheriff or not. But we got to know some of the Indians up there, and they took us in because they knew we were part Indian. In fact, they used to make fun of us because we used to have stoves and everything, you know, camping, and they’d come over on their horses. What scared me, they always carried guns on them, because you know Indians on the reservation can carry a gun anytime they want, right, because they’re always looking for deer or whatever. And they’d always come over to my campsite and they’d go, “What kind of Indian are you, cooking with a stove?” (Coates laughs.) After that, I never took another stove. I would cook, I would cook on the fire. I would take a grate. They just embarrassed me. They just embarrassed me.

COATES:

They were serious, huh?

ORTEGA:

They were serious, what kind of a—because they knew we were registered Indians from Los Angeles, and they’re real Indians, right? I mean, they’re more. They’re 100 percent Indians up there. And we used to go there every year, five, six, ten times a year, every year up there to Tule. I enjoyed it up there because there’s fishing and camping and everything. And the people we used to meet up there—in fact, we had that sheriff make us some belts, because he was into crafts, and he made me and my dad some belts. And I met the wives and whatnot. But like I said, I enjoyed the powwows, I enjoyed going to the Indians. Anything to do with Indians just thrilled me. In fact, I’ll tell you the truth. Now, this may sound funny to you. When I hear the beat of the drums, it does something to me inside. It sparks me or something. At the Tule Reservation, they had the powwow where the music lasted over twentyfour hours, the drums lasted for more than twenty—we slept through them. It wasn’t easy, but we slept through the drums all night long. (Coates laughs.) We walked to the campsite to watch them for a while, and they just nonstop. I mean, you know, it was okay. It was their property, you know. But the only thing wrong with it, they drank. You know, Indians when they’re drunk get a little bit wild, you know, which they kept to themselves, but they got a little crazy. But when I found out, I think the question was when I found out I was Indian did I entertain myself more. I did. I really enjoyed it. In fact, my daughter still calls me, “Dad, when is the next powwow?” or something like that, you know. Some I don’t like because they’re too commercial. You see a lot of—I’m not saying they’re not Indian, but you see a lot of the American people in there, where they’ve got their little stands and they’re selling stuff. And it’s stuff they’re not supposed to be selling, I don’t think. You can’t sell sage, can you, legally?

COATES:

Sell what?

ORTEGA:

Sage.

COATES:

Sage?

ORTEGA:

You know, that you just burn. And they’re selling it. I thought that was something that you give, you know. You’ve seen little groups of sage. In fact, I used to collect it. You can get it at (unclear) Canyon. I used to go up there and grab and bundle it, and I used to take it to our meetings. I used to be pretty active in our meetings, and then after our dad died, I have my mom and it’s hard to get away. As soon as my mom passes, which, you know, I’m going to get more back involved with Rudy, because I feel bad for him. He’s doing it all by himself, you know. I know he’s got brothers, but I don’t think the brothers are involved as much as he is.

COATES:

Isn’t one of his brothers the chairman, though?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, Larry. Yeah, Larry. But Rudy’s the one that’s been doing all the work. He took after his dad. He’s completely involved, and his wife, I think, really helps him.

COATES:

He talked about that, yeah, just kind of being raised to—

ORTEGA:

I just saw him the other day here at the coffee shop here. But I give him a lot of credit for what’s going on. In fact, I just saw—did you see a picture of him where it looks like he’s at the Capitol in Facebook?

COATES:

Oh, really, yeah, yeah.

ORTEGA:

Did you see that?

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

He put it on Facebook. Yeah.

COATES:

When did you all start kind of investigating things that were specifically about your tribe and finding out that kind of thing?

ORTEGA:

Well, I didn’t investigate. I was just more all ears and, like I said, Rudy would come over and tell us what was going on, you know. And it had been mainly about trying to get us registered again. That’s been the whole issue all these years, you know, and a lot of us have grown stale to that kind of talk and listening. And it’s like nothing’s happening and—

COATES:

Yeah, he’s talked about things like recovering the Bear Dance and things like that.

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, he does that.

COATES:

Have you been getting involved in that kind of thing? Have you—

ORTEGA:

Well, I don’t know if you know it, but we have a little park here that was given to us—not given to us, but it was like dedicated to Uncle Rudy, and they have their social meetings there and stuff like that. So we tried to go there as much as I can. Like I says, it’s hard for me to get away, but we try to, you know. Like I say, as soon as Mom passes, I’m going to get completely involved again. But for the last ten years, it’s all been hearsay or what I read or if I get a phone call or if I run into Rudy somewhere, he’ll tell me what’s going on, or he’ll post it.

COATES:

Are you involved in or do you just hear or oversee sort of discussions within the community about the recognition effort and things like that?

ORTEGA:

Only if it’s in the newspaper, and that doesn’t always happen, you know. Something, you know, because like here I got newspapers with articles of the tribe and stuff like that, but lately not a lot has been posted, yeah.

COATES:

Right. Okay. So there’s not much conflict or internal dissention about the direction that this is taking and that kind of thing?

ORTEGA:

No, there’s no conflict. I would think that this town would be proud to have this heritage brought back up in the open, you know. So there’s no conflict at all, if that’s what you’re getting at.

COATES:

Well, I know that in my tribe, and I think in most tribes, there are internal sorts of conflicts about, you know, whether we should be doing this, whether we should be doing that, what, you know, and—

ORTEGA:

I really don’t think that internally you have that kind of a situation because—well, I haven’t been into any closed meetings, so I really couldn’t tell you if there is an argument on this or that. But I would think the way Rudy’s handling it, and I think they just all listen to him as far as input.

COATES:

Yeah, yeah, it’s what it seems like.

ORTEGA:

I think what he’s doing, I was at the office here not too long ago, he’s got it organized where now they’ve got the teaching section and this section and then you’ve got a secretary, Pamela, and all this. I think he’s got it well organized where everybody does their job, and he does his job, and I think everybody listens to him. That’s what I feel, you know. As far as anybody disagreeing with him, I wouldn’t think so, because I don’t think they know what’s going on. I think he’s the top man, yeah.

COATES:

Yeah, he was just describing to me what I found to be some rather remarkable things that they had achieved just through some negotiations concerning some remains and things like that, so it was—and a developer up in the—I think in the Santa Clarita area or someplace. So I thought it’s—

ORTEGA:

What remains are you talking about?

COATES:

Human remains, I think, and artifacts and things like that.

ORTEGA:

Well, in ’83, I was in charge of a construction job up there at Balboa and Ventura Boulevard, right across the street from that museum. In ’83, they dug up some Indian bones, and they put a stop—Uncle Rudy put a stop on the job. And I was there with my daughter, and we saw the way they excavate. You know how they get the squares, put all the strings up and all that, and you could actually see the part of the skulls and everything on the side of the ditches where they were digging. That was, I think, ’83 or ’84. Yeah. So we were involved in that. That was pretty interesting. In fact, there was a big argument—I don’t know if you want to call it an argument or what—on what to do with the bones. They didn’t know what to do with them. I don’t know if Rudy got them buried across the street, because there’s an Indian burial ground, I think, across the street. What’s it called? I think that whole area in Balboa and Ventura was a trading post at one time, different tribes and maybe the Spaniards would come in and trade. I can’t remember the name of that. But in there—have you ever been in there?

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

They have a museum building. And, okay, I don’t know if Rudy told you this. Our family used to own 4,000 acres in Balboa right in Encino.

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

And we lost it all due to taxes, which the Indians don’t know anything about taxes, and I think it was a very small amount, you know. If you go to the museum, it’ll tell you the first owners of the property were the Ortegas, yeah. So that’s pretty interesting, yeah. I hope that don’t ever get taken down and lost. (laughter) So they can say it was somebody else’s property. But it’s a shame that the land was taken away for taxes, you know. Whoever heard of taxes in them days, you know? The Indians didn’t know what taxes was. It was just a scam.

COATES:

You know, if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else to take it away. You know what I mean?

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah, I’m sure they would have got pushed out of the land—

COATES:

I think that was exactly as you say, it was just an excuse, you know.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah. But you’ve got to have taxes. You don’t have taxes, you don’t have this, you know.

COATES:

(laughs) So you’ve kind of watched the tribe become organized over these thirty years or so.

ORTEGA:

Yes, yes, I think they’ve done great. Look at the building they’ve got now compared to where they’re at before. They’ve got more room. They’ve got the tribal sign out there in front. It sort of means something now. It’s like it stands out. I wish they would publicize a little bit more and tell—we used to have a town paper, but I think due to the economy they’ve downsized it or I don’t even know if they—they don’t even deliver anymore. I think you have to go pick up a paper. But they would publicize the tribe a lot. In fact, the owner of the paper, which owns a lot of property—you’ve heard of Escanasi (phonetic), the owner?

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

He owns about onefifth of this town. He was willing to donate a lot of money to the tribe in order to get things going or if they ever needed anything. Of course it would be a writeoff for him, but at least there’s somebody there.

COATES:

Right.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. He’s a young man, very aggressive, very assertive. He’s buying property everywhere, and all he is was a fireman. In fact, his wife is related to my family.

COATES:

This is good. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

But it’s not on the Indian side. It’s on the other, my mom’s side.

COATES:

So what did it mean to you when there was a tribal organization again? What was the meaning of that?

ORTEGA:

The meaning is that I feel personally important, like I’m somebody, you know. Not that it means anything to any of the other people, but it’s like we stand out a little bit, you know, and of course we do. We wouldn’t have the building if we didn’t stand out a little bit. I think most of the tribal members probably feel the same. I’m sure there are tribal members that are just—all they want to do is, “Let’s get a casino. Let’s get a casino,” right, and I’m sure that’s in the back of everybody’s minds. Like with me, I know I won’t be around, so I don’t care, but maybe this will help my kids or my grandkids or somewhere down the line. But right now I think Rudy’s done a great job just getting it this far ahead, you know, and I think now when you mention the word (unclear) or Fernandeno, which I don’t care for that word, it’s a known word, people know what you’re talking about when you mention it in this town, you know. “I’m from the Fernandenos” or something like that, you know. In fact, they just got some patches made up. I don’t know if you’ve seen them or not. Did they give you the patches that they just made up? Fernandeno tribe, it’s supposed to be shown on tshirts now. I just got about four of them. I’m going to put them on my tshirts.

COATES:

No. It’s been about two weeks since I saw him, I guess.

ORTEGA:

But, yeah, I’m sort of proud that we belong to a tribe, you know. It goes way back. A lot of people don’t have much on their heritage. You can ask a lot of our people, and they’ll tell you, “Well, I think I’m related to some people in Ireland or something like that,” but, really—

COATES:

This is a lot closer. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

—if you think about it, it’s not close, you know. Like all my people were coming (unclear) to my daughter, and I know there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to interest her. And, like I told you, I was writing my life history, and I think that’s going to be interesting. I think everybody should. Do you have children?

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

No?

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

But, anyway, I think everybody should have something to hand me down so you can see how people lived. Like my dad wrote—in fact, what got me going on that was made dad wrote a little story about himself, about where he was born and what he did and everything. And my mother didn’t like the story because he put down there, “I married a hometown girl.” (Coates laughs.) He didn’t even mention her name, so she got mad there. And he did this and he had a couple of sons and he did this. And that gave me an idea, like, you know what, my grandchildren don’t know what I did as a boy, how I played with marbles and made slingshots and had to make our own toys. I worked in a slaughterhouse, killing cattle. I did this and that. I think my kids would love to hear stories like that about what it was like in my day. Most all the streets were all dirt in my day. This street right here in front of me is a horseandbuggy street. I don’t know if you notice how narrow it is. It’s a horseandbuggy street, no cars in them days. But stuff like that I’ve written down, and I think they’re going to—well, I have to refine it and make it into a little book so I can give it to my grandkids. But my dad did the same thing, but it wasn’t very, very long. It was just—but I think everybody should do that. But I say being in this tribe gives us that much more information to put in there, and I think it gives the kids a little bit more pride, knowing that they’re not just ordinary people but they come from a people that have been here a thousand years or whatever we’ve been here, you know. And I’m sure you feel the same way.

COATES:

I do. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

I bet you feel different now. You feel a little bit different. You more so than me, because you’re really into it, and you probably have more of a history than I do, you know.

COATES:

Oh, I don’t know about that. I grew up in California away from—

ORTEGA:

But when did you get into it?

COATES:

Probably I’ve always been into it to some degree, I mean, as much as you can be when—

ORTEGA:

Even as a child?

COATES:

—I was a kid, yes.

ORTEGA:

Well, see, yeah, well, you probably more so than I was as a child, see, because here they’re afraid to talk about it. And you were probably raised in a family where that’s all there was, yeah. Are both your parents Indian?

COATES:

No.

ORTEGA:

See.

COATES:

Just my dad.

ORTEGA:

Intermarriages. Your mother, what is she?

COATES:

She’s, I don’t know. She’s everything I guess, European, you know.

ORTEGA:

Oh, okay, European, yeah. Well, 400 years ago, everybody was European, right? (Coates laughs.) When did they settle here, 1620?

COATES:

Yeah, some were earlier.

ORTEGA:

Okay, 400 years ago. No, I think they came across in the 1600s, 16—

COATES:

Well, even the Spanish are Europeans, right? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Well, yeah, but, no, they didn’t—but the Spanish didn’t settle in the East Coast.

COATES:

That came a little later.

ORTEGA:

I’m talking about your pilgrims and whatnot. Civilization, let’s call it. Civilization doesn’t start till your 1600s. So our country’s new. We’ve come a long ways. I’ve been to Europe a couple times, and Europe is some old countries. They’re thousands of years old. Then you come back to U.S. and we’re only 400 years old, you know. That’s the way I see it, you know, and we’ve come a long ways as far as our buildings and our way of living, you know. In fact, you know, you’re in very good shape, but if you look at most Americans, they’re all heavy. If you sit down and just watch people go by at Starbucks or something—my dad, when they went to Europe the first time, my dad ordered something, and I’ll never forget this. He ordered a—they give a salad, a small salad, and he liked it so he ordered a second salad, and the waiter told him, he said, “You Americans eat too much.” (Coates laughs.) Imagine that. And it was just a salad. It was true, you know. Europeans eat—either that or they eat right or they eat very little. And you come over here to the U.S. and—can I show you something on one of the pictures here? This will have something to do with what we’re talking about real quick.

COATES:

Mmhmm.

ORTEGA:

It’s a little email that I saved.

COATES:

I’m going to pause this for a minute.

ORTEGA:

Okay. (End of June 18, 2014 interview)

SESSION TWO (June 27, 2014)

COATES:

My name is Julia Coates. The date is—what is the date—June 27th, 2014, and I am with Ernest Ortega at home in San Fernando. This the second interview, and we’re going to just get into some other family stories to start off here. So you were going to tell me about your grandfather, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yeah. I guess back in 1870, as far as the records go back, he used to live there in the canyons of—I guess it was just a little south of Acton, and he lived there and he used to hunt animals for a living, and he was hunting a bear. Evidently he wounded the bear, but the bear turned on him and killed him, but the stories are that the bear also died anyway. So with that being in the history and in the library books, they named an offramp or boulevard after him. It’s called Santiago Road. It’s at the top of the hill when you’re going through the Acton Hills there.

COATES:

So what’s the full story on the bear? (laughs) I mean, how did that happen, blow by blow?

ORTEGA:

I really don’t know. That’s all that’s in that book, and that’s all we’ve got. It’s just that he lived there and they would hunt animals to survive, and evidently he was hunting a bear. I don’t even know how he shot it or what he used to kill the bear, but evidently it wasn’t good enough, because the bear turned on him and killed him. But there are stories that the bear died anyway, probably from the wounds that was sustained from my greatgrandfather. And that’s about all. There’s not a lot written in that book, you know, but it’s something that we can tell our grandkids, you know. Yeah, they like hearing stories like that.

COATES:

Everybody likes hearing stories like that.

ORTEGA:

And in the same area, there’s a reservoir up there called Littlerock, Littlerock Reservoir or Littlerock Dam, and my dad’s grandparents—and I’m not positive it was Santiago or not—lived on the north part of the dam. I don’t think it was a dam at the time. It was just a stream that came up the hills. And my dad says that his grandparents lived there in a shack right off the stream. I guess they used the stream for water. And my dad says he remembers it. So when I was about twentyfive, my dad said, “Come on, we’re going for a ride. We’re going to go see if we can find this shack. If we can find proof that it’s still there and we can claim it, maybe he can get a Spanish land grant.” Well, we went, and we couldn’t find nothing. In fact, my daughter was working for the state, she had all the keys to all the gates and everything, so we did get into some of the properties we weren’t supposed to, looking for this shack. But evidently it was washed away or something like that, so there’s no proof of anything. But we did try. And according to my dad, you know, he had been there when he was a kid. So that’s about all as far as that story there, yeah. But it’s stories that I can tell. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve told it or not. I’ve got to remind me. I have to rewrite my book again so little things—talking to you brings back some of the memories that my dad told me.

COATES:

Well, good, yeah. What else have you got in your—

ORTEGA:

Oh, god, I’ve got a lot of stuff, you know.

COATES:

What other stories?

ORTEGA:

Some of this is repeats, and this is—I already showed you that one. That’s the one that when I got interviewed the first time, why, some of this is—oh, that’s my son’s graduation. I don’t know what it’s doing there. Oh, there’s that little (unclear) birth certificate of my dad. Remember I told you they were afraid to say they were Indians at the time because they might be put on a reservation back in the days?

COATES:

Mmhmm.

ORTEGA:

He had it amended. See here where it’s “Mexican”? He had it amended back to “American Indian.” Once we started bringing our Indian blood back into the picture, he had it amended. He had mine amended so it no longer said Mexican, because, you know, at the time—

COATES:

And this was in ’89 that it was—

ORTEGA:

This was in ’89 that he had it amended.

COATES:

Do you know if there was any resistance by the state to him wanting to amend it?

ORTEGA:

No, no, everything fell right through.

COATES:

Took him at his word and he didn’t have to provide any—

ORTEGA:

I don’t know. I don’t know if he had to provide anything about his father. I’m sure he did. I’m sure he did, but I don’t know what was required. I’m sure they had some requirements filling something like this out, proof or something like that, yeah.

COATES:

Yeah, that’s interesting.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. And here’s a burial that we went to. We’re all getting blessed.

COATES:

What was that?

ORTEGA:

One of our cousins name—they were Newmans, but the Newmans married into the Ortega family, so their kids were born Newmans. This is Little Rudy here performing the ritual with the sage and whatnot and bidding a fond goodbye to one of our elders. Did he talk to you about the Newmans?

COATES:

I think he mentioned the name, but other than that, not much, no.

ORTEGA:

The Newmans’ father was my grandfather’s brother. But then when somebody marries, you have to take their name, and then it went and changed to Newman right off the bat. You know how that happens. When you marry somebody, your name changes. So that’s how the Newmans came in there. But they were originally Ortegas. Like I said, our name Ortega probably came through as a surname in baptismal I believe. That’s what I want to believe.

COATES:

So for the funeral services there, they were doing a traditional Indian burial?

ORTEGA:

Indian burial. My dad had an Indian burial, singing and the whole—yeah. In fact, when anybody in our family dies, Rudy will perform and he will get some dancers and flute players and stuff like that. It’s just a regular—I’m sure you have the same thing.

COATES:

So everybody’s doing it this way now (unclear).

ORTEGA:

We’re trying to. We’re trying to, you know.

COATES:

Was that always the case? When you were a child, did they do it that way?

ORTEGA:

No, no, it just started after Rudy got involved looking at our ancestors.

COATES:

This is Rudy senior, huh, uncle, yeah?

ORTEGA:

This is Rudy senior, yeah, so it started probably in the sixties. After that it started, yeah. That’s only on request, yeah. If you requested an Indian burial, then they would give you one.

COATES:

Where did he learn—

ORTEGA:

Uncle Rudy?

COATES:

Yeah. What the burial ceremony was.

ORTEGA:

Evidently Uncle Rudy traveled quite a bit, you know. I’m sure he traveled to powwows and whatnot and other religions, and he probably saw them. And I’m sure he went to classes, and I know Little Rudy took classes on singing and everything and performing some of these rituals at burials. So I’m sure that’s where they learned. In fact, I think they still have classes for singing and whatnot right now. Some of these are my mother’s side of the family, just the old—some of this stuff is just—some of these are pictures of Indians in a parade back in the—

COATES:

And what’s the date on that?

ORTEGA:

This one in 2001. Not that long ago. This paper looks pretty old, though. But, you know, I wasn’t really prepared to go through this stuff and talk to you about it, so I don’t have nothing in order. Some of these are just maps and some of these are copies because I keep copies in my family safe. Rudy’s family came to the valley 1,000 years ago. So I keep some of these. Some of these are copies so I’m going to give them to my kids.

COATES:

So the tribe has been getting a lot of press. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yeah, in a sense, yes. I think Little Rudy just went to Sacramento. I’m not too sure. I saw a picture of him on Facebook, and it looked like it was the Capitol. So they’re digging in. They’re trying to get the thing recognized, you know, so when you do that, you have to—and I know that Big Rudy used to go to the councilmen all the time, made friends with the city councilmen here in San Fernando Valley, and they were always getting into things about like Rudy going to the schools, LAUSD schools, and performing and stuff like that. So he would get press there, you know, out of stuff like that.

COATES:

This is the San Fernando paper, and there seems to be—I mean, this is a big thing that’s taking up the whole front page, right, this article?

ORTEGA:

Yeah.

COATES:

So there seems to be like a real celebration of the tribe on the part of the city.

ORTEGA:

We do. We have our gatherings and every once in a while he’ll try to gather everybody to have a group picture, which is not that easy to do, you know. I’ll tell you. You’re talking two or three hundred to try to take a picture, panoramic picture. In fact, I think that’s coming up.

COATES:

But that’s Rudy, or is that the paper? The paper is owned by a relative, is that—

ORTEGA:

Yes, we have a distant relative.

COATES:

Okay, that’s what I remember now.

ORTEGA:

We have a distant relative that owns the paper, but I don’t know if they owned the paper at this time, you know. There might have been another owner at the time, because this new owner has just come into town in the last ten years or so. So I wish I had been more prepared for you on this.

COATES:

Oh, that’s okay.

ORTEGA:

I didn’t know we were going to get into this.

COATES:

Yeah, we talked about a lot of these things last time anyway, I think, but, okay. No, I’m just kind of trying to see. It looks like the city is—like I said, they’re really celebrating the tribe’s presence here, and I think that’s probably—

ORTEGA:

Yeah. (unclear) San Fernando way back when, yeah, some of the fathers, founding fathers of San Fernando.

COATES:

Now, I bet if you looked at that, you probably wouldn’t find a mention anywhere of the Indians or the tribe, would you? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Probably not. I don’t think so. In fact, I don’t even know why—

COATES:

But that looks to be from the (unclear).

ORTEGA:

I think somebody gave it to me because they had it in their garage or something like that, and then they knew I was interested. They knew I was interested in the San Fernando years ago. See, this mission here—I mean this church here, we lived there on the property before the church was built. And before the ’71 earthquake, the steeple was higher, and me and my aunt climbed it while they were constructing it. Then after the ’71 earthquake hit, it knocked half of the steeple off. So that’s why I keep it, so I can still when I talk to my kids, “See the Valley? There was nothing here.” On my mother’s side, my grandma told me that when she was here, little girl, there was only fourteen families in the Valley, fourteen, and she said she remembered the lady coming in from Los Angeles with a little stagecoach or a wagon type, horsedrawn wagon, and she was the doctor that would help the families and also sell booze. (laughter) So stories like that, you know, I still tell my kids. This building is still here. It’s a monument, San Fernando. And this is stuff here that’s the Pass, I think that’s ( unclear) Pass. Anyway, just some of the schools and whatnot, and the aqueduct when it was built. This church is still here, the 1914 church. But I keep this book, not because I know any of them, it’s just there’s one of your Spaniards there under Pico, and there are stories here about the Indians when they discovered gold here. This is the mission. My dad worked on some of this, on the older part, because it just crumbled, and when they rebuilt it, they rebuilt it with adobe. They didn’t alter it. But like I said, there’s just stuff that I’m going to hand down to my kids now. As it gets handed down, it’ll probably lose the importance of it. You know what I’m saying? Unless I can get Rudy and my kids really involved. Unless something happens with the tribe where we can get recognized, then I think that will really help the popularity and it’ll help the kids, all the younger kids get more involved in it, because as we lose the older generations, you’re losing a lot of knowledge. You know what I’m saying? And then the young kids, they’re only going to know what we tell them.

COATES:

Are the older generations making an effort to pass it on?

ORTEGA:

Well, like I said, I am. I don’t know about the others. I’m sure Little Rudy is, because he’s got his whole family involved, you know. They all work there at the site, and all my nieces and whatnot, they’re not involved to the sense where they could participate, but they’re involved where they want to know what’s going on. Because a lot of things that Rudy does are—how would I say it? He does the gatherings. He tries to get gatherings together, and get people together, but sometimes the only publications are on Facebook or something like that, you know, or maybe on the Internet, you know. But not everybody’s on Facebook. So a lot of things—

COATES:

Especially the elders.

ORTEGA:

—that go on are not publicized, you know. A lot of the kids don’t know what’s going on, so they’ll miss it. Sometimes, I’ll miss it, you know. I didn’t know that went on or what’s going on. But Rudy’s putting everything on Facebook now, so I stay on top of that.

COATES:

Okay. So what have your interactions been with the tribal government over the last thirty years or so maybe?

ORTEGA:

I was involved. I was in the committee until my dad died, and my dad died in 2001.

COATES:

What’s the committee?

ORTEGA:

He has an Indian Committee, secretaries and all that, financial, and a board.

COATES:

So like a council?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, it’s a council. And I was involved in that till my died dad, and after my dad died, I started taking care of my mom, and, like I said, my mom’s ninetyfour and she can’t get around, so I miss a lot of stuff on account of her. And I told Rudy a long time ago, I said, “Rudy, I’m going to have to drop out of the committee because of Mom.” He understood, you know. But I still stay involved in what’s going on. I told him after Mom passes, I want to get back in.

COATES:

I’m trying to get a sense of what the average person, the average tribal person, when would they interact with the government, like under what circumstances with the tribal government?

ORTEGA:

I don’t think anybody does, except for Pamela. You know Pamela?

COATES:

Mmhmm.

ORTEGA:

Pamela and Rudy, and I think those are about the only two that are involved, and I know he’s got the office and I know there’s—

COATES:

But do people go to the government for services? Do they go to the government for—

ORTEGA:

I think Pamela does all that. I think Pamela and Rudy do all that. They’re in charge of that. Now, I don’t know about Rudy’s brothers. He’s got Larry and all them.

COATES:

I understand that they’re in charge of it, but the everyday person, does the everyday person go to them? What kinds of things does the everyday person sort of call on the tribal government to do for them or to—

ORTEGA:

You mean, asking for help or something?

COATES:

Involve them in, or what kinds of—yeah, what are the—

ORTEGA:

Or just involved? You know, you’d have to ask Rudy what kind of calls he gets from people and whatnot, you know. I always call to see—

COATES:

What about you?

ORTEGA:

I talk to Rudy, I would say, maybe once or twice a month, ask him what’s going on. Or, like I said, there again he’s on Facebook so I don’t have to call him. Everything he does, he will put it on Facebook, and I will comment back and tell him he’s doing a great job or it’s interesting what he’s doing or let me know when this is coming up. So we stay in contact on Facebook. Everybody does that now. But that’s about it, you know. I’ll stop by the office once in a while. In fact, I just stopped by there, I think, last week, and I’ve got some more papers too. I’ve got two more grandchildren that were never introduced to the tribe, and I’ve got to fill out the papers and take it back to him. Then we just got new I.D.’s, I heard, and so I’m going to call and get a new I.D.

COATES:

Okay. So things like that, you would go to for the enrollment kinds of things.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, I want to keep the kids involved as much as possible, and I tell the kids. I used to make Indian jewelry before, and I handed a lot of that stuff down to my grandkids, trying to keep them involved. And if you know kids, kids are excited about being part Indian. They love it, you know. But they don’t know anything about the involvement in it yet. Maybe we’ll get recognized, things will just completely, you know, just come out where everybody will be excited about it, you know. Because as it is now, we don’t know where it’s going, and when you don’t now where it’s going, how excited can you get, you know? The only time people get excited is when Rudy gives us some good news about this is going on or we’re stepping up, getting closer. That’s what people want to hear, but that’s not definite. So it’s hard for us. People that already recognize it, I don’t know if they take it for granted or this or that, but we’re like on a ladder trying to get up there, and we’re having a hard time, I guess, I would say.

COATES:

So what do you think the changes would be if you were to get recognized?

ORTEGA:

I don’t know what Rudy has in mind. I think if we got recognized, I think our tribe would get more organized. I think we’d have more involvement in it because once it was recognized, I think people would feel more legit. I don’t know if that’s the right word. I think people would feel more proud and, therefore, get involved. I think it might even come out in the Valley that we have a tribe that’s growing and growing. But then again, I don’t know how much it’s allowed to grow, because we don’t know the bloodline. I mean, Rudy might know the bloodline. I’m not too sure. I heard it was an eighth or a quarter or something like that.

COATES:

So there’s a minimum standard, huh?

ORTEGA:

I think. Don’t you know that?

COATES:

I don’t know that. Every tribe is different. Every tribe sets their own.

ORTEGA:

Yeah, oh, yeah, I guess so. Okay, okay. I gotcha.

COATES:

So I don’t know what yours is.

ORTEGA:

You know, I heard about the Pechanga, what, ten, fifteen years ago, where they were weeding out some of the people who said they were but they didn’t have enough bloodline, because they were actually getting money from their government. And I don’t know, they figured they were giving too much money out to people that don’t really deserve it, so I know that that happens. As far as us, we don’t get that, so I think our tribe right now is sort of quiet. Rudy’s doing his best. I’ve got to give him a lot of credit for what he’s done, you know. I support him for everything he does. I’m always telling him, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. Keep it up.” Like I told you, I don’t think I’ll be around to see any big changes, but I keep in contact. In fact, I just emailed my daughter about getting her I.D.’s, getting the kids’ I.D.’s on there, try to keep them involved, you know. In fact, that’s one of my daughters, she sent me a picture. She was at one of these—not a rave. They don’t call them raves anymore. Her husband sets up these big stages and all that, so her husband does, and she was at that rave. And she was on stage with her husband, and she her little western straw hat, cowboy girl hat, and she had one of my headbands on it. And I looked at that picture, and I called her up and I said, “Where did you get that hatband?” She said, “Dad, it’s yours.” She took it from me. (laughter)

COATES:

She borrowed it.

ORTEGA:

Yeah. But anyway, as far as our tribe, like I said, I think once, if Rudy can get us recognized, I think it’ll come out. Because like I told you, my dad years ago told my uncle, “You’re just butting your head against a wall.” But as far as I’m concerned, I think we’ve come a long ways, you know. If it would had been up to my dad, we probably wouldn’t have come this far if he would have been in charge. But Little Rudy or my dad’s brother, he said, “No, no, I’m going to take it as far as I can,” and he did. It’s just a shame he got a heart attack. He’d still be here fighting and doing what he could you know, because he’d go to the state and he would go different places trying to talk to people, to the mayor of Los Angeles. There’s pictures. I know there’s pictures of him with the mayor and all the councilmen and everything, you know, because he was trying his hardest to get us in there. Then I remember when he told me that our papers were lost in Sacramento or burned up or whatever it was, that was a big letdown, you know.

COATES:

Have you seen changes for just the general people, the tribal members, in terms of their standard of living?

ORTEGA:

Well, I don’t think the standard of living got anything to do with the tribes. Everybody lives to the standard of what they can afford. Are you talking about education or—

COATES:

I’m talking about over the past thirty years or so, have you seen changes for the tribal members just economically?

ORTEGA:

Well, I know that Rudy has come up with some sort of a grant for sending some of the kids to college, and that’s a good change right there. And like I said, they offer classes. They have craft classes. They have classes for learning to sing, learning to dance, so, yeah, there’s been quite a few changes. And some of the kids are proud to do it, and I’m glad to see that, too, you know.

COATES:

From the way people were living thirty or forty years ago in comparison to the present day?

ORTEGA:

Well, thirty or forty years ago, we were barely finding out about our heritage, because, like I told you, we didn’t start looking into this probably till the sixties, which is fifty years ago, right, but then it was slow, slow to go.

COATES:

So I’m just wondering if finding out about the heritage made a difference economically for people over the last thirty years, forty years.

ORTEGA:

Economically, only for the people that work for the tribe, you know, that are in the office, and I know that they got a grant to keep going, keep the tribe going as far as all the office work and stuff like that. But as far as normal people like me or something like that, it hasn’t benefitted me financially, no. We got one check years ago, but this is way before—this is, I think, when we were recognized. We got one grant. We didn’t have very much money. But at least it boosted people up, like, “Wow, we got some money from the government,” you know. That made everybody think that maybe now we’re going to start getting recognized and we’re going to come out now, you know, come out and people will know that we’re not just Mexican, because everybody thinks you’re Mexican when they look at you, you know. And we’re not. We’re something else, and we’re one of a few and we’re from here. We’re not from another country that came here. So, yeah, I think that really helped. But I think your question was economically. I don’t think so, except for the people that worked for the tribe that get paid.

COATES:

Which is just a handful of people, probably.

ORTEGA:

Yes, the people that are in the office, I imagine, yeah.

COATES:

Educationally, have you seen much as a result of the tribe?

ORTEGA:

Well, you know, I don’t know much about that part, but, like I said, I know they do offer—

COATES:

They are now, but—

ORTEGA:

They are now, but I think just in the last maybe five or six years that’s happened.

COATES:

Yeah. So the tribal members in the last thirty or forty years maybe, has the tribe not been able to assist educationally? Have there been educational changes?

ORTEGA:

Well, I really don’t know when the education took place exactly. You’d have to ask Rudy on that. Educational, I think the only thing that was educational in the prior years was when they would have maybe a powwow and people went to the powwow and got involved and started maybe thinking about their own heritage, as far as their own background, who their father was, how was he part Indian, something like that. That’s probably about the only way that people got involved is, I think, the powwow, because, you know, when you go to a powwow, it excites you. I know it does me, you know.

COATES:

So it’s been like a cultural education that’s gone on, but in terms of the academic education, it hasn’t necessarily improved, huh?

ORTEGA:

No, that’s pretty new. The academic part is pretty new, because I even told my daughter that she could even apply for scholarships when the kids get a little older, you know, because they have that program now. I don’t know how it works and I don’t know how much is granted to the children as far as education, but I know there’s something there.

COATES:

From the tribal members, the other tribal members that you know, are they living sort of middleclass or is it at poverty, or where are they at?

ORTEGA:

I would think it’s middleclass.

COATES:

Of the ones you know, huh?

ORTEGA:

Maybe a little bit lower than middleclass, but I think everybody’s doing fine. I don’t think anybody is starving or anything like that, you know. I think just being here, I think everybody’s got their own little niche, as far as surviving.

COATES:

Do you know many tribal members outside of your own family, or is everybody pretty much family? (laughs)

ORTEGA:

I know of them, but I don’t see them unless it’s a function.

COATES:

But when you see them at those functions, you know them, huh? You know who they are?

ORTEGA:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I’ve got a lot of cousins that are tribal members, and, like I said, I see them at funerals, of course. (laughter) You always see them at funerals or we’ll see them at a function or when they have—I’m at a loss of words now. When they have a powwow, yeah.

COATES:

Yeah, or something like that.

ORTEGA:

Or if Rudy calls a meeting. Some once in a while, a meeting maybe with some lawyers. The lawyers may be telling us—I think we had a meeting at the San Fernando Park here a couple of years ago, and that’s what found out it that it was taking longer than it was, and so it was depressing, because they told us it might take another fifteen years. And I’m thinking, “Well, heck, I’m this old. I may never see it.” And I do want to see it. I want to see it for my kids, that we did get recognized, you know. I want them to be recognized as Indian, you know, not just another person here. So that’s the only thing that’s got me going that I’m interested in, because I want to see it, you know, like I said. I want to see that they’re different—not “different,” that’s not a good word—that they’re Indian, you know.

COATES:

That they’re acknowledged, huh?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what keeps me going as far as the tribe. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t even be involved if I knew it wasn’t going to benefit the kids.

COATES:

So is that the main value to you of the recognition, would just be the acknowledgement?

00:27:53

ORTEGA:

I don’t know if you can put it there. I think acknowledgement has got a lot to do with it. From my own being, selfbeing, I would like to know that we finally got recognized, but there again, I know that if I find out, then my kids are going to find out, and there will be more involvement. I’ll tell you, if we do get recognized and when, I think you’re going to see a lot of involvement. (laughs) Financialwise, you’re going to see a lot of involvement, because once they get recognized, hopefully they’ll get a grant or something like that, or maybe Rudy will get a grant for his educational part, you know, for colleges or whatever. Because a lot of the people here in San Fernando, they—to me, anymore, the way I look at it, college is not as important anymore. To me, now it’s trades, going into a trade school. I’ve seen so many people where they send their kids to college just to get them out of the house, and then they’re in college, and they don’t even know why they’re there. And they spend 50, 100,000 dollars in school and then they come out and they don’t have a job, because they didn’t actually take up a field that’s going to help them, you know. They go in because, “I’m going to college because my mom and dad want me to go, and it’s the big thing now. We’re going to college,” you know. And then get out, then what?

Nowadays, everybody wants to be in computers, which is fine, but it’s going to get dime a dozen, and if it’s dime a dozen, it’s not going to pay much, right? You’ve have to get into something that’s specialty, and a specialty is a trade school, you know. My daughter, my daughter went to college, and she got a damn good job, you know, very good job, very responsible. So college is nice if you could put it to work for you, because nowadays, a lot of jobs you can’t get a job unless you got some sort of degree, but that doesn’t guarantee a lot of money either, and it costs a lot of money to live nowadays. Excuse me. A lot of money.

COATES:

Within your family, your extended family, can you just kind of talk generally about the changes that you’ve seen over the last thirty or forty years? I mean, do you get together as frequently as you used to? What are the gatherings like of the family?

ORTEGA:

You mean my personal family or the tribe, tribal family?

COATES:

No, personal family. What are the gatherings like as compared to thirty years ago or forty years ago? I mean, just—

ORTEGA:

I think they were more fun when I was younger. (Coates laughs.) You know how it was when you’re younger, you see all your cousins and everything, it’s fun. As you get older, you see the young kids a year older, you can barely walk. And I know you’re still young, but, you know, when you get older and you see the family together, you started thinking, “I was there. Look at all them little kids running around having fun.” You recall all that stuff, and it’s almost depressing. It’s good to be with the family; don’t get me wrong. But as an individual, it’s almost depressing to know that you’re not here for much longer, you know, because we’re here a very short time. Eighty or ninety years is not a very long time in the world, you know. But as far as going to gatherings, yes, that’s a lot of fun, talking to people, “How you been?” And it’s depressing, too, to see other people that maybe are in worse shape than you are physically, and so it can be nice and it can be depressing, yeah, but it’s good to see everybody.

COATES:

Are there as many people at them now as there used to be?

ORTEGA:

Left?

COATES:

Are there as many people at the gatherings now as there would have been in the past?

ORTEGA:

All I know is they were more fun then. Now you know what? There are so many little ones that I don’t even know who they are, and I have cousins that I don’t remember who they are either here, because it’s like look at Rudy’s family. He’s got eleven kids, they got kids, so they’re related to me, but I don’t even know their name, who they are. So you lose closeness with the two generations down, you know, of who they are. The only ones you really know are the ones that are in your own generation, you know, because a lot of kids, lot of people, they see my daughters, and they, “What’s her name again?” Or, “What’s her name?”

COATES:

Sure, yeah, yeah, everybody does that.

ORTEGA:

But it is nice to gather, yeah. The only time we see gathering any more is funerals.

COATES:

Is it?

ORTEGA:

Yeah. Unless Rudy can have a powwow or something like that. Other than that, we don’t gather as much as—

COATES:

As you used to?

ORTEGA:

Yeah, as used to when we were younger. When we were younger, when I was a kid, we used to go to the beach a lot. In fact, family would go to the beach. And I told you about that grunion hunting and stuff like that. Or my dad would take us camping up in Yosemite, and three or four families would go up there. We’d all get together and do that. You don’t see that much anymore.

COATES:

So that doesn’t happen anymore?

ORTEGA:

No, not anymore, no. People have gone their different ways. People have moved and people get all this—they just spread out. It’s just like when you went to high school, you had tons of friends, but as soon as you graduated, they disappeared, huh?

COATES:

Yeah. I knew this would be shorter today. I guess I don’t have a whole lot more. I think we’ve gone down through most of these topics. Are there other things that you can think of that would be important for people to know?

ORTEGA:

No. The only thing is that to me is important is that hopefully Little Rudy will get recognized for all his hard work that he’s doing, and his wife helps him a lot, too, Samantha. I don’t know she’s Indian or not. Did you look into that?

COATES:

I think she’s not.

ORTEGA:

Well, that’s what happens with intermarriages, you know. You can’t—this is a little bit away from what we’re talking about, but one of my friends from work, he’s pure Japanese, his wife is Japanese, and when he had his firstborn, he goes, “I just had a baby boy and he’s full Japanese.” (laughter) In other words, he wasn’t mixed, and he was so proud that he was full, you know. But how often do you see that nowadays with people intermarrying and stuff like that? But I just hope, like I said, Rudy gets recognized for all the hard work he’s doing, and I hope that it goes through for him so he’ll see his accomplishments, you know. Like I said, Mom’s not going to be here much longer. As soon as Mom passes, I’m going to get back in there and see if I can help him as much as I can, because I’m the oldest Ortega, except I’ve got one living uncle yet, but he’s not doing very well. So as far as my generation, I’m the oldest, and I think Rudy and I are probably fifteen, twenty years—I don’t know how old Rudy is. He’s pretty young, huh?

COATES:

You know, I thought he was in his late forties, but I listened to his interviews again, I think he’s in his late thirties.

ORTEGA:

Really?

COATES:

Yeah.

ORTEGA:

So, yeah, we’re almost forty years apart.

COATES:

That’s pretty amazing. (laughs)

ORTEGA:

Yeah, terrible, terrible. My knees are my killing me, and it hurts to get up and it hurts to get down. Oh, gosh. But I hope that I can help him, you know, just get in there and get involved, you know. If he needs somebody to do something or run some errands or maybe handle some sort of affair, because he’s got two or three of our relatives in there already helping him out. I don’t know if you met Elisa. Elisa is not an Ortega. She’s a Romero. But like I said, I hope I can help him, and I will. I will. Maybe in another year or so I will get in and offer my services and take on a little bit of the load he’s carrying, and hopefully he’ll accomplish what he’s doing. And, like I said, I’ll be there to back him too. Hopefully he gets recognized, yeah, like his dad did. His dad was pretty well recognized by a lot of people. They used to call him “the Indian” or “the Chief” or everything like that, and he was very well known.

COATES:

Sure was, uhhuh. Boy, I hear about his dad from everybody, yeah.

ORTEGA:

Everybody knew him. They called him “El Indio.” I think they called him “El Indio,” or they called him “Chief,” yeah. Yeah, it’s a shame he left us so soon, because he was in good health except for the heart attack. We didn’t know he was going to have a heart attack, and we don’t know what caused it, because I don’t think he was in a lot of stress, just physical. Okay?

COATES:

Okay.

ORTEGA:

All right.

COATES:

Thank you. Thanks very much.

ORTEGA:

I want to thank you for bringing this out of me, because you know there’s a lot of stuff that I hadn’t thought about except for the questions you asked me, you know. Yeah.

COATES:

Right. Well, go forward with your book. (laughter) (End of June 27, 2014 interview)