Carolyn Sideco
Carolyn Sideco’s story begins in The Philippines.
Her dad, Tony Sideco, was born on the island of Cebu in 1938. Her mom, Linda, was born in Paniqui in 1942. By the time Carolyn’s mom was born, the Japanese occupied The Philippines. Young Tony worked for the electric company, which sent him to Paniqui. He soon met his wife-to-be there when he boarded at Carolyn’s grandmother’s house.
It wasn’t an overnight romance. The way Tony (who joined his wife in the room with me and Carolyn as we recorded) tells it, he had eyed Linda for so long that he went cross-eyed.
Linda was her parents’ first daughter, and she came after five older brothers. So she was always afforded chaperones. After Linda, her parents had three more girls. One of those girls, Carolyn’s aunt, lives next-door to where we recorded, a tradition of intergenerationality the family carried with them when they migrated to the US.
Tony came to the United States first in the late Sixties, shortly after Carolyn and her twin sister were born. His migration was motivated by the so-called “American dream.” Carolyn’s version is different, though. She thinks it had more to do with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which effectively did away with nationality quotas. By the time Tony arrived, several members of both his and his wife’s family were already here, many of them in the Outer Sunset.
When baby Carolyn, her sister, and their mom arrived, they first lived on 45th Avenue in The Sunset with her aunt and uncle. Then the family moved to 39th Avenue to be on their own. This was the house that Carolyn grew up in, and the one we recorded this podcast in. A community of Paniquieños already existed all around them.
In hindsight, Carolyn thinks it was a lot easier for folks like her parents to move halfway around the world because they landed, in essence, in an expat community. Her mom didn’t have to learn English so urgently when she arrived, to cite just one example. Several of those families are still around, spread around the North Peninsula. Some also still live in San Francisco, like Carolyn.
Carolyn talks about various aspects of her life that now, in hindsight as an adult, meant she rarely felt different from those around her. She says that in her adult life, meeting folks her parents’ age who didn’t have the same accent as her parents really opened her eyes. Today, Carolyn is the president of Paniquieñans USA, an organization as old as she is.
Then we get back to Carolyn’s personal story. Her and her twin, Rosalyn, joined their mom to go to the US when they were two. She shares a cute story of how their mom loved a party so much that she would celebrate their birthday every second day of the month (their birthday is Feb. 2). Because of this, Carolyn grew up thinking that birthdays happen every month.
She was five when her family moved out of her uncle and aunt’s place on 45th and into their childhood home on 39th Avenue, and Carolyn remembers it well. We talk briefly about the real estate agent who sold them the house and how little they paid (“$24,000,” Tony Sideco, who was in the room with us that day, chimes in—that’s the equivalent of roughly $173K today).
Linda Sideco found work at Little Sisters of the Poor Convalescent Home on Lake Street, where Carolyn would sometimes visit her. Both of Carolyn’s parents worked graveyard shifts. The young couple were able to save for a year for the down payment on their new home.
We take a sidebar for Carolyn to talk about the difference in how service and healthcare work are valued in The Philippines vs. how they’re valued in the US.
Carolyn then shares a story of how, when she was in the fourth grade, she and her twin sister started going to a new school in their neighborhood. Prior to this, they were bussed. At her new school, they asked Carolyn if she wanted to play volleyball. But to join the team, she needed to pay five dollars. She ran four blocks home to ask her mom for the money, but turns out she wouldn’t give it to young Carolyn, who was so upset that she cried until her mom relented.
She did well at volleyball and even made friends through her new sport. She felt so good about it all that she thought, ‘This is why dad brought us here.’ It was the beginning of what would become a lifelong involvement with sports.
We end Part 1 with Carolyn’s foray into many different sports and all the women along the way who inspired her.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Carolyn and I talk about making decisions and intentionality vs. circumstance, need, and necessity. We then go on to talk more about Carolyn’s lifelong love of sports.
She shares the story of her maternal grandmother coming from The Philippines to live with them and how they’d watch games together. It was the days when, in much of the country, if you wanted to watch Major League Baseball, it was all Atlanta Braves, all the time (thanks to TBS, of course). Carolyn became a Braves fan, especially a fan of Dale Murphy. She watched football, too. She didn’t watch the Giants on TV much, because every game wasn’t televised in those days. But she could easily hop on Muni to see a game at Candlestick Park. Her dad often picked them up, showing up at the ballpark around the seventh inning, getting in free, and watching the end of the game with Carolyn and her friends and/or sisters.
We go on a short sidebar about bundling up in San Francisco—at Candlestick and if you just wanted to go to the beach.
In addition to Candlestick, she went to Warriors games a bit and also various sporting events at Cow Palace. Her dad learned how to bowl and would take his kids with him.
We fast-forward a bit to hear about Carolyn’s years in high school, when she went to the all-girl school Mercy High (which is now closed). Later, she took the same bus, the 29, to SF State that she had taken to Mercy. State was the only college she applied to. We talk a little about her decision not to leave San Francisco for school. In high school, she had decided that she wanted to be a sports writer. In fact, she aimed to become the first woman anchor at ESPN.
We rewind a bit to talk about some of the journalism Carolyn did in high school. She had her own column in the school paper called “Off the Bench.” She shares a fun story of calling the Braves’ front office to arrange for an interview with her favorite player—Murphy—the next time Atlanta rolled into town.
In her third semester at SF State, Carolyn got pregnant. Around this time, she also took her first Asian-American Studies class, something that kicked in for her and stays with her to this day. She dove in head-first. I ask Carolyn whether and how much of that history her parents were aware of. She says that, for them, much of it was just things going on in their lives in the city they came to—things like the strike at SF State or the demonstrations at the I-Hotel in Manilatown. Learning more and more about the history of her people in the US lead Carolyn to confront her dad. “Why did you bring us here?” she’d ask.
She ended up raising her first child, a mixed-race kid, as a single parent around this time in her life. She had figured that her son’s dad would bring the kid the Blackness in his life, and she’d bring the Filipino-ness. Her own ideas of how best to raise the kid had to evolve, and they did, she says.
She eventually returned to State and graduated. She lived in South City for a hot minute, held three jobs, and raised her son. She never felt that she couldn’t leave The Bay. It was more, “Why would I?”
Then, because if you know Carolyn Sideco, well, you know … then we talk about New Orleans.
New Orleans is why and how Carolyn came into my life. My wife is borderline obsessed with The Crescent City. I’d been there some earlier in my life, growing up not too far away and having some Louisiana relatives. Erin and I spent three weeks in fall 2022 in a sublet in Bywater, Ninth Ward. That NOLA fever caught on for me then, and I’m hooked.
Back home sometime after that, Carolyn came across Erin’s radar. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who seems to love New Orleans as much as I do and she has a house there!” Erin would tell me. In 2024, at a vegan Filipina pop-up at Victory Hall, we finally met this enigmatic woman. We ended up spending Mardi Gras this year at Carolyn’s house in New Orleans—Kapwa Blue.
“New Orleans has been calling me for about 20 years,” Carolyn says. One of her younger sisters lived there awhile. Her oldest son served in AmeriCorps there for three years and kept living in New Orleans four more. Carolyn and other members of her family visited often. This was around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit and devastated Southern Louisiana. A little more than a decade ago, Carolyn learned of the historical markers in the area that told the stories of Filipinos being the first Asians to settle in that part of the world. (Longtime listeners of Storied: SF might recall that Brenda Buenviaje hails from just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.) As Carolyn learned more and more of the Filipino history in the region, that calling started to make more and more sense.
Three years ago or so, her oldest son got married in New Orleans. That visit told Carolyn that she, too, could live there. Her husband devised a plan, and with some of Carolyn’s cousins, they bought a house in the Musician’s Village part of town, near the Ninth Ward—the aforementioned Kapwa Blue. They intended to bring that same sense of community her parents found and participated in back in San Francisco all those decades ago to their new neighborhood New Orleans. In addition to the house, Carolyn helped found tours of Filipino history in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Find Bayou Barkada Instagram at @bayoubarkada
Back in The City these days, Carolyn has her own sports consultancy called Coaching Kapwa (IG). “I call myself ‘Your sports relationship coach,’” she says. This means that she provides comfort and advice to anyone interacting with any of the various sports ecosystems. She aims to apply the idea of kapwa to an otherwise competition-driven sports landscape.
We end the podcast (and the season) with Carolyn’s interpretation of the theme of Storied: San Francisco, Season 7: Keep it local. She shares what that idea means for her here as well as how it pertains to her time in New Orleans.
We’ll be taking August off as far as new episodes go. I’ll be busy putting together the first episodes of Season 8 and getting ready for the season launch party/art opening. “Every Kinda People” kicks off at Mini Bar on Sept. 4. That’s also the theme of the next 20 or so episodes of this show.
As always, thank you deeply and sincerely for listening/reading/sharing/liking/commenting/DMing/emailing/subscribing/rating/showing up and really any type of interaction you do with this passion project of mine. If you’re not already, please sign up for our monthly newsletter over on the About page.
See you in September!
We recorded this podcast at Carolyn’s childhood home in The Sunset in June 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
