Cell phone shoptalk in the Big Easy
April 7, 2003 | 12:00am
History tells us that the very first Filipino illegal immigrants in America or TNTs (tago nang tago) were not the hapless tourist visa overstayers of the present day, fleeing economic dead-ends or political persecution or broken marriages back home to crowd into the land of milk and honey.
No, TNT-ism is a proud tradition of ours that goes much farther back – all the way back, in fact, to the days of the galleon trade between the two Spanish colonies of Mejico and Las Filipinas, when some of our sailors used to jump ship while anchored off the inland port city of New Orleans.
These refugees made their way into the inland and bayou communities of Louisiana where they gained uneasy acceptance, being neither fully white nor black. It is said that during the Jim Crow years of racial segregation in the South, the Filipinos of Louisiana were not obligated to sit at the back of public buses, as black people were.
Well, at least our compatriots were given the benefit of the doubt – no small thing in a time and place when just one proverbial teaspoonful of Negro ancestry in your bloodlines marked you for second-class citizenship. Quaint classifications like "quadroon" (one-fourth black) or "octoroon" (one-eighth black) were in vogue back then, no more out of place in the American South than in Nazi Germany or South Africa many years later.
Canal is the fissure that splits both halves of the city’s personality. On one side are the gleaming glass towers of the business district, lined up in rows along Poydras Street. By day this is the commercial and financial hub of the entire Gulf of Mexico region.
At night is when the older, more interesting half of the city comes alive. On the other side of Canal sprawls the French Quarter, a vibrant palette of jazz and blues, alcoholic revelry on the streets, and spice-drenched food from the Cajun and Creole kitchens of the region. It is a neighborhood like no other in the States, a French/Napoleonic outpost in an Anglo-Saxon sea.
Up on the narrow balconies, drunk young women are baring their breasts and bottoms in exchange for multi-colored bead necklaces flung at them by the men on the street. One enterprising lady goes even farther with a full frontal display, letting everyone see that – among other things – she’s no natural blonde.
There are bars that cater to every possible musical taste. One proudly announces itself as "dedicated to the preservation of jazz" while another is serving up a fairly competent R&B group. Of course, there are also rock and rock-a-billy establishments, where the quality of the music matters far less to the youthful patrons than the decibels and the copious liquor.
The crowds may be loud and drunk, but violence is rare even with no police around. That night the mood is especially high-spirited, as the 48-hour deadline laid down by President Bush to the Iraqis has just expired and it seems clear that the nation is off to yet another war. A Shriners parade down Bourbon Street is lustily cheered on, the wizened veterans being acclaimed by the young onlookers who may soon be filling their shoes in battle.
Concurrently with plenary and break-out sessions, a huge trade show features the latest goodies from the stalwarts of the wireless industry – combination videocam-handsets, base stations from Nortel, cool games from Sony Ericsson, billing and power systems, the works.
At last year’s wireless conference, apparently, the focus of discussions was the advent of third-generation or 3G cellular technology, and whether CDMA or GSM was the better migration path to that Holy Grail. This year, the issue du jour isn’t even cellular. It’s "WiFi," a catchy short-hand for the wireless propagation of data based on well-accepted local area network or LAN standards.
This shift in preoccupation confirms that the industry is inexorably moving in the directions of broadband and data, year in and year out. The challenge posed by "WiFi" is how to interoperate cellular and LAN technologies, two vastly different animals, into a seamless experience for the user wherever he is – with a cell phone in his car, with his laptop in a restaurant, or surrounded by all his electronic gadgets at home or in the office.
The first day features the CEOs of Nokia, LG, and Motorola, all of whom flash the latest prototype handsets from their companies. From the chipset manufacturers, the heads of TI and Intel boast of their cutting-edge research, including future device batteries that will be powered by one’s body heat.
On the second day, a cluster of telco CEOs assemble into a panel to make fearless forecasts about what the future will bring. It soon becomes evident that the United States lags behind Asia and Europe in its usage of more advanced cell phone features. Even texting – already a fixture of Filipino social life – isn’t common there, partly because the American carriers haven’t yet interconnected their respective short messaging services, or SMS.
This occasional backwardness produces some disappointing forecasts from the Americans. The CEO of Nextel, for instance, fearlessly forecasts that texting will never take off in the States, even if it already has in Europe, because voice calls are so cheap and convenient and will therefore always be preferred by American customers who by nature are always on the go.
The poor guy still doesn’t get it. He’s missing the whole point behind the cellular revolution, which is really the continuous formation of ad hoc communities on the fly, especially among the young. So don’t go looking for Nextel’s banners in the forefront of the cellular industry anytime soon.
It clearly pains him to talk about the AOL Time Warner merger going bad – which cost him billions of dollars in stock market value – and yet he can still make jokes about being down to only his last billion or so. At the end, his comments against the second Gulf war earn him a respectable round of applause from the delegates, many of whom are foreign visitors clearly unsympathetic to the Bush version of events.
The afternoon overlaps with the start of another conference, this time for Microsoft developers, and so we’re allowed to sit in as the Great One himself, Bill Gates, addresses a jam-packed crowd of enthralled fellow nerds. The novelty of being in the presence of the world’s richest man wears off quickly, however, as his nasal drone lulls you into jet-lagged sleep.
There are no caddies there to carry your clubs or size up the greens for you. There are, however, water hazards which feature live alligators, swimming around or sunning themselves in between meals. We take photos of each other posing beside some of them, not too close in case they’re in a mood to snack.
My score that day is atrocious, certainly not worth mentioning in this column. It’s all the fault of the alligators, of course.
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