Nov 12, 2024
Nicole
Salaver is the kind of person I wish I had met long
before that happened.
In this episode, meet Nicole. She's
the program manager at Balay Kreative these days.
But her San Francisco roots go way, way back.
Her maternal grandfather came to the
US in the 1920s. He was one of the first Filipinos to own a
restaurant and pool hall in Manilatown (please see our episode
on Manilatown
Heritage Foundation). He was a manong who lived at the
International Hotel. Stories that Nicole's mom has told her were
that he was more or less a mobster, paying off cops to keep his
place safe.
Nicole's maternal grandmother
came to the states in the Fifties with her first husband. But he
was an abusive alcoholic, and so her grandmother divorced him. She
turned to the government for help for her and her four kids. They
sent the single mother and her family to live at what turned out to
be a brothel. But she wasn't aware of that at the time.
The two met at the I-Hotel, where
Nicole's grandmother helped the manongs with anything involving
English—paperwork for green cards, lawyers, visas, etc. It was just
a side hustle to her job at the US Postal Service. She knew all the
manongs, but fell in love with Nicole's grandfather. They married
and had three kids, including Nicole's mom. Her mom was born in the
Sixities and grew up in the Seventies in San Francisco.
Her dad's parents arrived in the US
in the Fifties, after World War II. Her paternal grandfather was a
merchant marine who cooked on a Navy ship. He met Nicole's
grandmother on one of his voyages back to the Philippines and
brought her back to the US. They had two boys—Nicole's dad and her
uncle.
Nicole says that her dad grew up a
hippie in Sixties San Francisco, and retained that sensibility
throughout his life. He worked for SF Recreation and Parks, smoked
weed, and made art. He met Nicole's mother at a collage party while
playing guitar in his brother's band. More on Patrick Salaver,
Nicole's uncle, later. Nicole, an only child, was born at St.
Luke's hospital in 1980.
Her mom and dad lived in the
Excelsior, where Nicole grew up. She went to Guadalupe Elementary.
Her parents were agnostic, but her Catholic grandmother enrolled
her in a Catholic school without telling them. Nicole's mom pulled
her out on Day 1 and got her into public schools. She was supposed
to go to Balboa High School, but it was the Nineties and that
school was going through a rough time (see our episode
with Rudy
Corpuz from United Playas for more on that
story).
And so the family moved down to
South San Francisco.
From here, we sidebar to talk about
The City of Nicole's youth, in the late-Eighties and early
Nineties. She laments the massive loss of art and community that
tech money wiped out. And she reminisces about taking Muni all over
town. They went to film festivals, galleries, museums,
restaurants.
In her high school years, Nicole and
her friends came to the Haight a lot. She'd also attend as many
Filipino events as she could—Pistahan, Barrio Fiesta, and more. Her
mom was a dancer and her dad a musician. They pushed her to do one
of those two things or visual art. Of them, she gravitated toward
art, but as she got to her teen years, she decided that acting and
writing were more her jam. That all started when her uncle, Patrick
Salaver, gave her a video camera when Nicole was 12.
Nicole was and is a fan of "Weird"
Al Yankovic. She says she digs quirky humor. She watched lots
of SNL, In Living
Color, Golden Girls. Using the camera her uncle
gave her, she and her cousin created soap operas, commercials, talk
shows, SNL-type sketches, and more. But despite
loving creating that stuff, she saw that her parents' art was just
a hobby. It didn't seem possible that it could be a
career.
It wasn't until her dad passed away
suddenly that Nicole decided to pursue her art. She shares that
story with us.
She'd been performing a one-woman
show about her grandmother, who had Alzheimer's, at Bindlestiff. She was
taking classes from W. Kamau Bell and doing stand-up comedy,
opening for big names like Jo Koy, Ali Wong, and Hassan Minaj. Then
she got a call: "Your dad is in the ER. You should go." During a
botched tracheotomy, his heart stopped.
By the time doctors got his heart
beating again, he was brain dead.
Prior to that, not knowing that it
would be the last time she saw her dad, she recorded him. He told
her that she should move to New York, follow her dreams, and never
work for "the man." One of the last things Nicole's dad said to her
was, "If you stop doing art, you will die."
Three months after her dad's
funeral, Nicole quit her job and moved to NYC.
Check back next for Part 2 with
Nicole Salaver.
Photography by Mason J.
We recorded this episode at Balay Kreative in October 2024.