Amid Many Johnnys Come Lately Are Folks With Deep County Roots

Where are you from?

That’s a fair enough question here in a place where nearly everybody is from somewhere else, where those who have lived here for several years can brag about being “almost natives.”

So maybe it’s understandable that when Loretta Lewis answers “Orange County,” some people get a bit confused.

“Yeah, but where are you really from?” they often ask.

“Orange County.”

“No, before that,” they say.

“Orange County.”

“But where’s your family from?”

“Orange County.”

At this point, Lewis usually cuts through the frustration by explaining that she’s not only a native Californian, but a “Native American” (referring to the American Indian members of her ancestry), whose family roots in what is now Orange County go back “to the beginning of time.”

Alexander (Sandy) Nalle’s family ties here are much more recent, but he, too, gets looks of disbelief when he explains that he isn’t from somewhere else. His great-grandfather came here just before the county was formed nearly a hundred years ago. And so does Joe Akiyama of Westminster, whose father settled here in 1907.

“People are always saying, ‘You speak English so well,’ ” says Akiyama’s wife, Sumie.

What does it mean to know that your family’s history is intertwined with that of the place where you live? For Lewis and her mother, Eleanor Carrisosa Chavez of Corona del Mar, the most important feeling is a sense of pride.

“It’s exciting. It makes you feel like a part of history,” Lewis says.

And that pride can be a good defense against the hurt and frustration that come as part of the package.

“Our family participated in the founding of the city of Los Angeles,” Chavez says. “But when I moved my family into a tract home here in Orange County, the other kids’ parents used to chase my kids home because they said they were dirty Mexicans.”

“My mother had stones thrown at her when she was a child,” Lewis says.

That feeling of rejection was what led Chavez to explore the history her family had always taken for granted. “I wanted to know where I really came from. I felt I belonged here. And those kids that were throwing rocks at me, they were the Johnny-come-latelys, you know?

“I would go to the Anaheim cemetery with my dad and see all the old markers (of my relatives), but I didn’t really comprehend,” she says.

Chavez was 12 years old when she came across a tattered brown book that had belonged to her grandmother. Inside were the records not only of her great-grandfather’s pre-1900 Silverado Canyon store but of her lineage. Many years later, with the help of a professional historian, she was able to understand the incredible story told in those fragile, yellowed pages.

Her great-great grandmother, Maria Sacramento Lucero, was the granddaughter of Don Santiago Arguello, the Spanish don who ruled San Diego. Maria’s parents’ wedding had united the Arguello and Lucero families, who together owned the land where the cities of Tijuana and Ensenada, Mexico, now stand.

Another ancestor, Conception Flores Williams, was a Shoshone Indian whose ancestors had long ago settled in Orange County. And yet another arm of the family, the Carrisosas, could be traced back 11 generations to the founding of Los Angeles.

Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of “Two Years Before the Mast” and the man for whom Dana Point was named, once did business with Chavez’s great-great-grandfather, John Russell Bleeker, who owned a store in San Diego.

“A lot of people don’t believe it,” Lewis says. “When I say, my family once owned all of Tijuana and Ensenada, people think you’re making up stories.

“People look at you and say, well, what are you? And if you say Spanish or Indian, people don’t know how to react. They don’t think that people like us exist.”

Over the years, Chavez says, the family has become defensive about the remarks some people make about California, “because so many people have the wrong idea about it. They say, Southern Californians don’t know how to dress, or they have bad attitudes. Well, when I was little, we always wore dresses, hats and gloves to town. It was the other people who brought all that loose culture. They got away from all their relatives and they could do as they pleased. That’s one of the reasons people would leave other places and come here, you know, because things had gone awry. Families who are from here can’t do that, because everyone in the family knows what you’re doing.

“We see people who say, oh, the relatives are coming from back East, and we’ve got to take them all to Disneyland,” Chavez says. “We never had to do that because everybody was right here.”

Chavez, an only child, had five children, all grown now. But Lewis, she says, is the one who is most interested in family history.

“I remember when I was growing up, I didn’t really understand why the Chinese-Americans or the Japanese-Americans were trying to have their history taught in school. But now that I’m finding out about mine, I can appreciate why they wanted to know.

“It makes me feel for all the people who don’t know their family histories,” Lewis says.

Lewis and Chavez say they don’t resent all the newcomers, although they are sometimes appalled when they hear questions such as “Where did all the Spanish names around here come from?”

“But we have to understand that they didn’t learn California history in school,” Chavez says. “They learned their own state’s history.”

“I don’t blame people for wanting to live here,” Lewis says. “But I blame the politicians for letting too much development happen. I resent that California is being ruined. I literally get upset in my stomach about what’s happening here, compared to the way I knew it.”

“Why shouldn’t people want to come here?” asks Florence Nalle, 77, of Santa Ana. “It’s a lovely spot.”

Nalle’s grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Mullinix, first came to Santa Ana in 1885 from Midland, Tex. In 1891, he bought a home on North Main Street, along with an entire city block of land, for $4,000. Nalle chuckles to think about how much that land would be worth to the family today. But it passed into other hands long before the county’s real estate began booming.

“His only mistake was selling the land he had in Midland,” Nalle says. “He didn’t know there was oil under the ground.”

Although Mullinix’s descendants take pride in their heritage, “we don’t live in the past,” Nalle says. “We’re just lucky that it happened this way. It’s nice for anybody to have a heritage of having lived in a place.”

“Everybody comes from someplace,” says her son, Sandy Nalle. “We just happen to come from here. I don’t know that I was ever impressed by it.”

Florence agrees. “There are no bluebloods here,” she says.

Once a year, the family attends the Orange County Pioneer Council dinner and mingles with other old-time residents. The council is part of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County. Although they enjoy the socializing, Sandy says the family prefers not to emphasize its connections with county history.

“It’s only been in the past 20 or 25 years that anybody has made a big deal of it,” Sandy says.

“It’s nice to have roots,” says Becky Welputt of Corona del Mar, Sandy’s sister. Their brother, Doug, is a wine maker in Healdsburg.

Sandy’s wife, Dorothy, says she has seen the effects of the family’s long heritage on her two daughters. “It’s given them a great deal of confidence,” she says. “And they try to always remember and live up to their family’s standards. They know that certain things are expected of them.”

For example, both daughters did volunteer work with the youth auxiliary of the Assistance League.

“If your family has been in a place a long time, I think you tend to feel a sense of responsibility for that place,” Sandy says.

“Our family has always felt that we owed a lot to the community,” says Florence, who herself has long been active in the Assistance League.

Florence never got to meet her grandfather; he died in 1901, 10 years before she was born. But she heard stories about him from her grandmother, who had been left to bring up six children by herself. And she sees reminders of him in local history books.

Sandy says the time he has spent outside Orange County has helped him appreciate his heritage. His first job took him to Peoria, Ill., and later his work involved travel to other countries.

“When I moved to Peoria, I didn’t know anybody,” he says. “That was difficult. But the biggest problem was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants. My mother used to freeze tortillas and send them to us by air freight.

“I can understand it must be difficult for newcomers here, too,” he says.

Sandy says he never felt any pressure to live up to any family expectations. “If anything, I think it makes you more comfortable, to know that you can strike out on your own and you always have a place to come home to.”

Kiyomi Henry Akiyama was born in 1888, a year before Orange County was founded, in Nagano-ken, Japan, high in the mountains north of Tokyo. The younger boy in a family of two sons and five daughters, he knew that his father’s land and possessions would eventually belong to his older brother. But he heard that there were opportunities in America, and he knew he was about to be drafted into the army his brother had already given five years of his life to. So he got on a ship with his life savings--about 300 yen--and left home.

Akiyama, one of the first Japanese immigrants to come to Orange County, told his story in 1982 for the Oral History Project at Cal State Fullerton. He celebrated his 100th birthday in February of this year and died a month later.

At first he worked as a field laborer, but after he started raising goldfish as a hobby, Akiyama started a business, Pacific Goldfish Farm, which eventually became the largest of its kind in the western United States. Today, the business has been passed on to son Joe and his wife, Sumie. But it won’t be handed down to the next generation--both of the family grandchildren have chosen other professions.

The Akiyamas have always taken pride in their longstanding Orange County heritage, even during World War II when they were taken to the Poston Relocation Camp in Arizona because the government perceived all Japanese and Japanese-Americans as security threats.

“I’m really proud to be living in Orange County and know that my family is part of it,” says Carolyn Yamashiro, daughter of Joe and Sumie. “I really have a sense of belonging.”

Yamashiro was with her grandfather when he returned to Japan in 1980. “He had taken pictures over the years and sent them back to Japan. There were all these photo albums of what Orange County used to look like, in this little Japanese town. I had never seen them before. It really helped me feel the connection.”

Yamashiro now has a 3-month-old son, Scott. “I’m looking forward to telling him the stories my grandfather told me,” she says.