This story is part of the series 8 Over 80, celebrating artists and cultural figures over the age of 80 who continue to shape the greater Bay Area.
T
he hootenanny has just begun at Piedmont Gardens senior living facility. The staff is handing out programs, flutes of champagne and sparkling apple cider, and trays of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. This folk music sing-along, which started in 2014, is the facility’s most popular event, drawing 90 or so attendees every month.
To the center right of stage, nearly hidden behind a music stand, is a Filipina American elder — a manang — with a guitar propped on her lap. It’s 91-year-old folk musician, author and longtime activist Evangeline “Vangie” Canonizado Buell, the maven responsible for bringing all these people together.
The hootenanny had its start as a private jam session for three guitar-playing residents, but when Buell joined the group, people started stopping by and hanging out. “Why are we playing for ourselves?” Buell asked the other musicians. “We need to share this music.”
Alongside her now are the six core hootenanny members, a mixture of residents and staff. One of them, Helen Rubardt, sang live with Buell on KPFA’s folk radio show “Midnight Special” in the ’60s and ’70s. They recently reconnected at Piedmont Gardens.
When Buell sings her solo, it reverberates clearly and deliberately through the garden, the result of decades of practice. The audience is hushed by the low timbre vibrato of her singing voice; her fingers strum the guitar strings.
“Vangie is such a role model for me, not just as a person and a woman, but I feel really grateful to have this special connection because we are also both Filipina,” says Jenevieve Francisco, the Piedmont Gardens’ lifestyle enrichment coordinator and co-conductor of the hootenanny.
In fact, if it weren’t for Buell, Francisco never would have met the members of her own three-part singing group, The Sampaguitas, named after the Philippines’ national flower. Buell invited the women to sing a Filipino song at a previous hootenanny; they formed an official group and continue to perform together today.
The lovely harmonies of The Sampaguitas are just one of the many examples her admirers point to when explaining Buell’s knack for bringing people together. Throughout her multifaceted career, Buell has encouraged Filipino Americans to share their stories as she does — through music, creative writing and the celebration of her own multicultural family.
That family history starts long before Buell’s birth in 1932. Her grandfather, a Buffalo Soldier, fought in the Spanish-American war, then married and remained in the Philippines. During her childhood in West Oakland, music was a major part of Buell’s life; her father played in the U.S. Navy band and taught her and her sister to play the guitar and piano. Times were also hard: The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II prompted families like Buell’s to wear buttons that read “loyal Filipino American” — an attempt to lessen some of the racism and discrimination they experienced.
Buell graduated from McClymonds High School and went to San José State University, where she met an economics professor (and her future husband) named Hank Vilas. On the way back from their New Mexico honeymoon in 1952, the dangers facing their interracial marriage (Vilas was white) became clear when Buell was racially profiled and thrown in jail for suspected prostitution. Luckily, their marriage certificate secured her release.
She says her marriage to Vilas helped shape her life purpose. “He opened up a whole new world to me in terms of politics, culture,” she remembers fondly. “I feel like where I am, that path I took, I would not be there if I had not married Hank.” Five years and three kids into their marriage, Vilas came out as gay. They divorced, but stayed great friends and co-parents until he died of AIDS in 1985.
Buell became an activist for peace, civil rights and equality, using folk music as a cultural bridge and raising money for various causes in the process. Her name appears regularly in Bay Area newspapers in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s as a supporting act at progressive events, including a 1960 dramatic program dealing with the “Institution of McCarthysim.”
She remarried twice more. “I was very lucky I was married to three Irish Americans — not all at once!” she jokes about her husbands Bob Elkin and Bill Buell. Throughout, she juggled family and career, working at the Berkeley Co-Op (at one time the largest and best-known food cooperative in the nation), UC Berkeley’s International House, teaching guitar and finishing up her undergraduate degree at the University of San Francisco. Her organizing work in Berkeley led to the proclamation of “Evangeline Canonizado Buell Day” in 2009, honoring her commitment to social justice and cultural understanding.
Even on a national stage, Buell stands out. In 2015, she and 175 other Filipino Americans were guests of President Obama for the White House’s first celebration of Filipino American History Month. It was a moment of recognition for her important work as a co-founder of the East Bay Chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FAHNS), where she later served as president emeritus.
It was only after I read 25 Chickens and a Pig for a Bride, her 2006 memoir, that I understood the full scope of Buell’s contributions to Filipino American culture (at least, what she got up to in her first 70 years). With photojournalist Minerva Amistoso, she’s currently writing a second memoir covering the next 20.
I’ve gotten to know Buell (or Manang Vangie, as I call her) during hootenanny performances and lunches in the Piedmont Gardens dining room. There, she shares delicious soups, sandwiches and chocolate sundaes prepared by the staff, who always treat Buell like their own lola, or grandmother. The facility has around 60 employees of Filipino descent, including two of the cooks (“That’s why the food is so good,” she says). Being around her feels like being with my own lola, who I lost earlier this year.
Maybe that’s why she’s so special — not just because she brings people together, but because she represents how valuable Filipina women are to the diaspora. They are the sharers of food, music, culture, language and, most importantly, a bridge back home to the motherland.
Women like Buell are not just kababayan (our countrymen), they are kababaihan, Women Who Get The Work Done, as defined in her title essay from the Filipino American anthology Seven Card Stud with Seven Manangs Wild.
Buell’s essay is dedicated to her own kababaihan, the collective made up of her step-grandmother Roberta’s friends who passed down culture through their scheduled poker games. They were the Filipino wives of Buffalo Soldiers, who had only these poker games, and each other, to survive in the United States, where rampant discrimination and sexism was directed against them.
Along with poker strategy, Buell learned the concept of bayanihan through these games, when the manangs would purposely fold a winning hand to give their earnings to the one in most need that week.
“They had a lot of pride, so they would make sure that when they gave to each other, they had a way of doing it so that that person would accept the gift and not feel like they were indebted,” she says. She remembers how they cared for each other and the manong farmworkers, and how they protected each other in a Bay Area past that wasn’t always progressive and open-minded.
As a first-generation Filipina American, Buell has experienced the melancholy feeling of “coming back home to the Philippines” as an adult. It was a place she had no personal memories of, but instead learned of through the stories of her parents and grandparents.
During that trip, she remembers vast inequity: of seeing poor people on the streets while experiencing the privileges of being a U.S. citizen traveling abroad. It is a feeling that only people of our diaspora would know — and we both get emotional.
“I’m getting teary-eyed because my parents never went back. I had to go back for them. I sobbed when I landed,” she says, between sniffles. “I miss them, I miss that generation so much.” We hold hands and take a moment to comfort each other over the din of the dining room. “I’m now the matriarch in the family, and I used to be the little one, you know.”
Buell’s willingness to share her own past makes it easy for others to connect with her — it’s no wonder so many of us feel like she’s family. “There’s so much more to the elder community than meets the eye,” says Jenevieve Francisco of Piedmont Gardens. “Like any group of people that you don’t see a lot or interact with very much, it’s easy to generalize.” She cites a 93-year-old resident who just finished climbing Half Dome at Yosemite with his son and granddaughter, and Buell running the hootenannies.
It makes sense that music would be the cornerstone of Buell’s activism, one that she practices every day on the grand piano of the Piedmont Gardens sky room. I’m lucky because she doesn’t play for just anyone, and I’m getting a personal concert from the maven herself.
“What I like to do is to remember the work you do here, in trying to better your community here, it spreads out worldwide,” Buell says. “You inspire somebody else and it keeps inspiring. … I did it through my music.”
