Sunny Angulo
Sunny Angulo has one helluva life story.
In this episode, meet and get to know Sunny. Today, she does PROPEL San Francisco, a group promoting progressive policies rooted in pragmatism and effectiveness.
In Part 1, Sunny begins her own story with that of her maternal grandparents. Her mom’s mom, Amparo Espinoza (née Cruz), was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. Amparo’s dad worked on the railroad, meaning she lived a nomadic life when she was young. Eventually, her family made it to Northern California in is now Stockton.
Amparo’s husband was younger than she was. He was a gangster back in the day. Both came from big families. He grew up in poverty. He later did fieldwork.
Amparo was already an independent young lady. She helped take care of her mom (Sunny’s great-grandmother). She worked, which wasn’t common for women of that era to do. She had a car.
The two met at a dance hall social. Parents served as chaperones at these events, of course. He asked Amparo to dance, but had been so nervous to do so that he got drunk to muster the courage. Instead of dancing, Amparo helped her future husband back to his friend’s car. As they carted him away, he told Amparo that he’d call her. “No you won’t,” Sunny’s grandma said.
Sunny describes her grandpa as a handsome man, but full of pride and machismo. He asked Amparo out a few more times, and got more no’s. Then came the Korean war, and he got drafted to fight.
War changed Sunny’s grandad, as it often does. He had never left California. He returned from combat and was hanging out with friends in downtown Stockton when Amparo caught his eye. His friend assured him that she wasn’t married. This time she accepted his offer, not to dance, but to get married. They had two kids—Sunny’s mom, Susie, and her tia Helen.
Then we turn to Sunny’s paternal grandparents. Her dad’s dad is from Bogota, Colombia. Papi Angulo was orphaned when he was 16. He took a banana boat to New York City looking for his two older brothers. They had already enlisted in the military at that point. He wanted to join as well, but he was too young.
To pass the two years until Alfredo was eligible, he ran errands for a pharmacy and worked in an actual sausage factory.
Across the country at the time, unbeknown to him, in a little town called Shingle Springs in El Dorado County, Sunny’s grandma, Eleanor, lived on a cattle ranch. She was the youngest of three daughters in her family. Her lineage was Swiss.
Eleanor would be taken out of school to help her family herd hundreds of cattle from El Dorado to Upper Bassie hundreds of miles away. It was a three-day journey by horseback, which is how Sunny’s grandma made the trek. They’d spent the winter there, and months would go by when they didn’t see a human being who wasn’t a member of their family.
With her older sisters married and out of the house, Eleanor decided that marriage wasn’t for her. She went to Oregon to get a college degree in home economics. After that failed to grab her interest, she joined something called The Secretary Corps, which sent her to Italy. It was just after World War II, and there were still active military bases in the region.
Alfredo had enrolled and been sent to Italy. Where he was stationed, they had bowling competitions. Alfredo and Eleanor got partnered up and ended up winning and getting a huge trophy. The family lore goes like this: Alfredo told Eleanor, “Either we split this down the middle, or you marry me.” And so they got married.
When Eleanor called him, trans-Atlantic, to let her family know, she realized that she didn’t know her new husband’s name. Classic. Alfredo got stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato in the North Bay.
Now we turn back to Sunny’s parents. Raised in Stockton, her mom, Susan, came to San Francisco to go to college at USF on a scholarship. At that time, the school wasn’t integrated along gender lines. Women were separate from men. Her dad, Sam, also went to USF, on the men’s side. He came here to do ROTC, something he’d been involved with since high school.
Both of Sunny’s parents were resident assistants (RA) at USF. Susan also helped give campus tours to prospective students. And she worked in the school cafeteria. Sam would go there early in the day, owing to his ROTC schedule. He went on a date with Susan’s roommate, who told her that he wasn’t for her, but that Susan should try him out. They hit it off.
Some months later, but before they planned to get married, they had their first child—Sunny. The wedding was moved up before she was born. I ask Sunny whether she figured out the math on that when she was an adult, and she says that it was her sister who actually uncovered that truth.
Sunny was born in Letterman Hospital in the Presidio, where Susan and Sam lived at the time. After having their first kid, they moved over to Parnassus, where Sam was attending dentistry school at UCSF. After that, and following the arrival of her sister, the family moved to the Inner Sunset. Sunny goes on a sidebar here about how little her parents paid back in the Eighties vs. what folks paid 10 years ago or so. Of course, it’s even more exorbitant now.
Years later, when Susan was pregnant with Sunny’s brother, the US military stationed Sam in Germany. He went over ahead of his family, which meant that Susan traveled with two young girls (Sunny was 4 or 5, her sister was 3 or 4) while pregnant with her third child. She had never really left Northern California, to boot. Sunny thinks it was her first trip on an airplane, also.
The family lived in Aschaffenburg, Germany, but the nearest hospital was in Frankfurt. So that’s where Sunny’s brother was born. They stayed in Germany for a couple of years before returning to the US. Sunny had started school in Europe.
Susan was happy to be back. First, they went to Tacoma, Washington. But when they were in the US, no matter where they lived, the family always came to San Francisco for the summers, because duh. Visits to The City back then included the traditions of eating at Viking Subs (RIP) and going to a Giants game. They’d have birthday dinners at Delancey Street. They’d of course visit The Exploratorium. And they went to Cayuga Park and Ocean Beach.
Sunny talks about a cousin, years later, when she was a teenager and having a hard time, who lived in San Francisco. Sunny idolized her cousin. She lived in Dolores Heights and to young Sunny, was oh so glamorous. She was artsy and confident.
Sunny remembers a San Francisco where Crissy Field was still an airstrip. Even though she didn’t live here consistently until much later in her life, those frequent visits allowed Sunny to see how The City has changed over time.
When I ask Sunny to list her schools, still unaware of the rest of her life story, things get … interesting.
The story is anything but straight-forward. For her high school freshman year, her family was in Augusta, Georgia. Her sister assimilated well, but Sunny not so much. She says she hated it there. For their next move, the military gave her dad the option of a base in Louisiana or one in El Paso, Texas. He chose Texas, and it didn’t help Sunny’s discomfort. She started researching how to emancipate yourself from your parents. She was 15.
Life had changed for Sunny when she started high school. Self-esteem was low. She thought she was fat. She didn’t like her hair or her glasses or her skin. She developed an eating disorder. She and her parents fought a lot. She did some not-hardcore drugs.
By the time her sophomore year rolled around, Sunny and her parents were, as she describes it, “at war.” She was dating an older guy. Enough was enough. She wanted to free herself and move to Atlanta or San Francisco to be an artist. But before that could happen …
Sunny shares the incredible story of how her parents had her abducted and taken to Utah. Yes, you read that right. It’s really too much to go into detail about here, so please listen to this segment.
After a little more than two years at a facility in Utah, Sunny rejoined her family, who had moved to El Paso by then. It was Sunny’s first time in that Texas/Mexico border town. And it came on the heels of a family tragedy. A cousin of hers had passed away right before Sunny’s release from the facility in Utah. It was a complicated time, to say the least.
But she enrolled in the second semester of her senior year of high school nonetheless. She didn’t have any friends in her new hometown, but, she thought, at least she knew her sister. Turns out that her sister had told all her friends that Sunny was dead.
A contingency of Sunny’s rejoining her family was that there were rules, a contract of sorts. It meant she couldn’t go to prom. She couldn’t get a tattoo (we’ll get to that). She was counting down the days until graduation, and had already been accepted and even gotten a scholarship to go to USF, just like her mom did all those decades ago.
Sunny’s parents suggested a trip to San Francisco to check out the campus. Following that, they’d join other family for a summer vacation in Upper Bassie. But before they left El Paso on that trip, along with a friend from Georgia, Sunny got her first tattoo—of her zodiac sign, Leo.
Back home in El Paso, only a couple weeks until she was supposed to move to San Francisco to start college, Sunny’s dad wanted a word with her. Back on that summer vacation, an unknown family member had seen her tattoo. Her dad let Sunny know that, in getting the tattoo, she had broken the home contract (see above). He had scheduled an appointment to have the tattoo removed. She refused, and her dad told her that it meant she wasn’t going to San Francisco. And so Sunny resolved to return to her hometown on her own, using money she’d saved up from working.
Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Sunny Angulo.
Photography by Mason J.
