Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.1]

Chapter Four

Nicasio's apartment was across the San Francisco Bay in the downtown district of Berkeley. It was considerably more pedestrian and modest than Daniela's stately home, but a brusque bicycling distance to the UC Berkeley campus. His flat on Addison Street was comfortable, convenient, and not much more. He had lived there, alone, on the top floor with a spacious balcony covered with plants since becoming a graduate student at Cal.

Proving himself worthy as a history honors student in Early Modern European studies, focusing on the Spanish Empire, he was now in his third and critical year as a PhD candidate in History. And having spent the last years completing his coursework with emphasis in the Age of Global Voyages, he was beginning the writing phase of his dissertation.

For the past seven years Nicasio's had been a life of maintaining scholarships, writing sporadically for academic journals, and tolerating demeaning, part-time campus work which helped to defray the costs of his tuition, his rent and a meager student life-style. Much of his efforts had been in procuring a recent hard-won fellowship as a teaching assistant and lecturer for an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley. This victory he deemed only as temporary, however, until he completed his doctoral degree through the final writing of his thesis and sought a tenure-track assistant professorship at any of the system's nine universities. The teaching assistance post was an honor but still provided hardly enough income to survive well in the expensive sphere of San Francisco—and one of the top four research institutes in the nation.

Nicasio's historical journal writing and critical reviews in his research areas—Early Hispanic California, and California Coastal Exploration, had served him well academically over the past years. It gained for him recognition by the faculty members of Berkeley's prestigious History Department, and particularly a full professor who was involved with postdoctoral research for the California Studies Center, Dr. John Simons. This elderly man was a seasoned professor, teaching courses in Modern European Studies and himself was a specialist in California Coastal exploration and the Spanish Mission Period.

Nicasio, by the requirements of his department also had to be language proficient in Spanish, for which had had fortunately grown up bilingual in the Bay Area. A number of his elective graduate courses, by requirement and his own choice, were from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese—specializing in romance literature of the Medieval and Renaissance Period. Currently he was making ends meet being a lecturer for a lower-division course which satisfied the American Culture requirement of the Berkeley Undergraduate Department. It was a history class designed and mentored by his graduate adviser, Dr. Simons. Its title was History 128 AC, California's Mission Period: Enterprise and Extermination.

Like just over one-half of the entire state of California's population, Nicasio was of Hispanic origin, sometimes called 'Latino,' though in his case, along with a unique and serendipitous mixture of immigrant Russian, German and Castilian colonial blood. The Spanish heritage of his family dated originally back to the historic Ornate expedition of original Castilians who colonized Santa Fe, New Mexico in the late sixteenth century. His father had settled into the 'Golden State' of California just after WW II with the boom in the aviation industries. As well-built and athletic of stature, Nicasio was also of a mild disposition and wore his Spanish pedigree handsomely.

The graduate's student's bilingualism and academic prowess in Spanish and English had advantaged him both in high school and at Cal, where he was on a full scholarship based on merit and need. Nicasio was proud of his Hispanic roots and took delight in excelling within an ethnicity which had been disenfranchised for so many generations—particularly in California, where the landscape for generations had become overpopulated by illegal immigrants from Mexico. The USA itself had become a country where the 8th and 9th most common surnames—Garcia and Rodriguez had quickly and silently risen from 18th and 22nd place nationally in only a few decades.