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| Photo: Michael Pole/Corbis |
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Web Exclusive. . .
The Chino Latino and the Elopement My father’s father, Ramón  took to his grave secrets as deep as his wife Rafaelita’s . The biggest? It’s not at all certain that his surname—and therefore my dad’s, and mine—is the real thing. We may not actually be Hernándezes! According to family stories, Ramón’s father was Chinese. If that’s true, and if naming custom was followed like tradition and the law dictate, I should have a Chinese surname. Although my grandfather Ramón never went to college, he had an insatiable intellectual curiosity. He worked part-time as a journalist and was a self-taught engineer of sorts. After the devastating hurricane of 1933 (known to Cubans simply as “el huracan del '33”), he rebuilt the main boilers of the sugar mill where he worked and redesigned the aqueduct that brought water to Cárdenas. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I first heard Ramón’s father was among the 140,000 laborers who immigrated to Cuba from China in the mid-19th century. It was a brutal business. The Chinese came “usually on an eight-year contract, and they were therefore not to be regarded as slaves,” wrote the historian Hugh Thomas in his monumental book Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. “But the difference was in name only. The Chinese were persuaded, press-ganged…or deluded by the merchants’ Chinese agents' promises of a good life.” Was my great-grandfather in fact one of these unfortunates? The written record indicates that he was not. On my father’s birth certificate, a Manuel Hernández Arencibia appears in the slot for “grandfather,” the place that family legend reserves for the Chinese man. Of course, Chinese who went to Cuba often took on Spanish names. But news from Mayra’s source in Cárdenas makes the Chinese connection even less likely: Ramón’s birth certificate states that his paternal grandparents—my great-great-grandparents—were Mateo Hernández Jiménez of Havana and Josefa Arencibia Álvarez of Matanzas. Even Manuel’s father was a Hernández. One thing is for sure: nearly all of Cuba’s Chinese were male. The census of 1861 found 34,834 “Asiatics,” of whom only 57 were women. In Cárdenas, according to the 1919 census, there were 215 Chinese persons, all men. So it is almost certain that my Chinese great-grandfather, if such a person existed, founded a family with a woman who was not Chinese. That would have been “Pilarcita” Serrano, Ramón’s mother—and my great-grandmother. Pilarcita’s full name appears in my dad’s birth certificate: María del Pilar Serrano Philpot. It does not give her place of birth. Yet even before I first learned that my great-grandfather may have been Chinese, I had heard stories that Pilarcita was born in Tampa when it was home to a Cuban-Spanish community. The legend has it that her father had been a doctor in Spain whose wealthy parents employed an English maid named Seraphine or Serafina Philpot. The doctor and Serafina fell in love. But he was Catholic, the scion of an upper-class family, and she Protestant, a mere domestic employee. Supposedly, they eloped and found their way to Tampa’s welcoming Hispanic culture. But the couple died in a train accident, and their baby daughter Pilarcita, who survived, was adopted by a family in Cárdenas, where she grew up.
Still, even if the Tampa legend is wrong, it remained possible that Dr. Serrano and Serafina—my great-great-grandparents—eloped at an earlier time to some other American city: maybe New York or Key West, which had small Hispanic communities as early as the 1830s. I tried Serrano and Philpot (under several spellings) in the list of passengers in Castle Garden, New York, where 10 million immigrants landed between 1830 and 1892. Nothing. I tried Key West, New York, and other ports on the website of the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild. Still nada. Nothing, either, in arrival notices of old New York Times. I tried Pilarcita on CubaGenWeb's list of passengers to Cuba in the 19th century. Struck out again. Then Mayra’s researcher turned up Pilarcita’s death certificate. She was born in 1850, more than three decades before Tampa became a center of Hispanic culture, and in the province of Matanzas, near Cárdenas. On paper, the possibility that her birthplace was somewhere in the United States is foreclosed. Still, the document reconfirmed that Pilarcita’s surnames were Serrano and the English-sounding Philpot. Was at least part of the elopement tale true? Answers began to arrive after I again called Aunt Mayita in Cuba. She found Ramón’s baptism certificate. His maternal grandparents—Pilarcita’s mom and dad—were Ramón Serrano Rodríguez, a “doctor en medicina” born in Spain, and Serafina Philpot Henderson, born in England. A few days later there was more from Mayra’s researcher. Pilarcita’s birth certificate also said Serafina was English-born, and listed her parents: Juan (which must have been “John”) Philpot and Serafina Dreeque (but nothing on Henderson). It also named the physician’s hometown, La Coruña in Galicia, as well as his parents, Antonio Serrano and Vicenta de Ocal. I still do not know why a Spanish doctor and an Englishwoman had a daughter who grew up in Cuba and gave birth to my grandfather (possibly with a Chinese man). But now I have names to follow my Serrano branch to its gallego home. Next goal: track down the Philpot hometown in England. As for the Chinese connection, I was still stumped. So I turned to genetic genealogy. << Previous | 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 | Next >>
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