Maquirang, Arianne
US History, Period 2
February 13, 2015
Ortego-Maquirang Family Majority of my family came down to Southern California. Some came with the intentions of going back to where they came from; others came to find better oppurtunities and also to start a family. This is the story of my family and their reasons to why they chose to come to California. My grandma, Josefina Rebosura, was a nurse in the Philippines. By 1972, she had four kids and had completely finished nursing school. After a couple of years of nursing in the Philippines, my grandma decided that she wanted to expand her dream and come to the land where oppurtunities were available. So then after she arrived, she began nursing here in Santa Clarita, CA, leaving her four kids and her husband, Pedro Ortego, in the "homeland". My papa, on the other hand, was a Marine engineer in the Philippines. He was struggling to raise my mom and her three brothers because he was always away at see. Because of always being so far away, my grandpa later decided to leave the Marines and come back home to be a professor to the young soon-to-be engineers. My papa felt so bad leaving his kids behind that he waited until they were all ready to go off to America so that he can go too. When my mom's two older brothers were finishing high school here in America, my papa and Uncle Joey were the third trip to come to America. My father, Larry Inocencio Maquirang, came here to just tour California. His dad rewarded him with money for finishing high school. His dream was to come down to SoCal and visit Disneyland, little did he know that the money his dad gave him was only enough for that. A little after his trip, he used up the rest of his money to feed himself and to find a place to stay. He called his cousins in San Francisco to see if they had an extra bed for their 20 year old cousin. After they accepted him into their home, he knew he was eventually going to have to pay rent if he wanted to keep living with his cousins who had been providing him free food and a free room. So he found