• Introduction

• Genealogical Overview

• The Osterling Tamburini (My Father's Family)

• The Álvarez-Calderón Granados (My Mother's Family)

• The Closing

FIRST PART

The Osterling – Álvarez-Calderón Family

A. My Parents

B. Our Neighborhoods

Where do I come from?

Results of my DNA analysis

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Who were Jorge's Ancestors?

Introduction

This is the story of my family in Perú and I will attempt to provide an overview of my immediate ancestors, on my father's side, the Osterling and Tamburini families, as well as on my mother's side, the Álvarez-Calderón and the Granados families.

Over the years, I have discovered that several of my ancestors emigrated to Perú from Western Europe: Sweden, Spain, Italy, and Great Britain. Overall, a common thread in my family history over the past three centuries has been a process of European immigration into Latin America, followed by the intermarriage of individuals from the most diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. A second common thread has been that most members of my extended families have always lived close to each other in the same city, Lima.

In the last four or five generations of my family, I have found persons from all walks of life, from the wealthy and the powerful to the poor and feeble. Mine is a Roman Catholic family, and several of my ancestors became members of religious orders, including my great-aunt Consuelo Álvarez-Calderón, better known as tía Connie, who spent all her adult life in a convent of cloistered contemplative nuns in Lima (i.e., Monasterio de la Visitación de María) and my great-aunt Zoila Osterling Moyano, who also spent part of her life as a nun. Several others, however, were far from being saints, with the usual shortcomings, struggles, and disappointments, yet they often had the qualities we think saints are made of —high courage, faith, and a commitment to fight for their ideals and dreams.

And so, I was born in Lima, Perú, on Friday, June 29, 1945, the second child of a middle-class White, Spanish-speaking, Roman-Catholic family, a few days after World War II had ended and the same day that President Truman approved a plan devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Japan. I, therefore, belong to the pre-baby boom generation.

My Family -- 1964 San Isidro, Lima, Peru	My Family -- 2002 Fairfax, VA, USA

I grew up in a relatively stable, middle class household in Lima that provided my three brothers, my sister, and me with a variety of educational and cultural advantages. When I was growing up, life seemed very predictable. I lived in the same house from the time I was born until I left for the Seminary eighteen years later. All five of us attended the same elementary school, the privately-owned American School of Lima, where my mother was the school’s deputy director (i.e., senior associate superintendent for Peruvian affairs), and where most of the students were children of American expatriates serving either in the U.S. Embassy or in some multinational corporation or bank.

Both my parents grew up, with limited means, in the 1920s and 1930s. My father was a career civil servant in the Municipality of Lima (i.e., Lima’s City Hall), for over thirty years until his 1967 death at the age of 56 when he was serving as Human Resources Director. While work in Lima's City Hall did not pay well, it was relatively unstressful and provided our family with a steady income. My mother, well ahead of her times, worked forty years as a teacher and as deputy director of the American School of Lima. She retired in 1989, at the age of 72.

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Front (left to right), Jorge, Emilio, Alberto.
Back, Dad, Grandfathers Emilio and Carlos
Miraflores, 1953

During their seven year courtship
Tarma, Peru, 1939

Genealogical Overview

My father had recently begun working at Lima's City Hall and lived at his father's house with his father and three single sisters (his mother had passed away). My mother studied education at Lima's Normal Superior de San Pedro, and lived with both of her parents, and five sisters. My future parents got married seven years later, on July 18, 1943.

During their seven year courtship, my mother finished two additional years of course work at Normal Superior de San Pedro to obtain her Peruvian teaching license, taught for two years (1938-1939) in the Andean city of Tarma, studied a year abroad at Smith College, in Northampton Massachusetts, and, after returning to Perú, spent two additional years (1941-1942) helping her brother Miguel (i.e., Miquicho) manage her father’s farm near Huancayo, Peru’s largest commercial city in the central Andean region. Her father’s farm had been rented since the late 1920s until the early 1940s.

During the late 1930s, both of my parents lived in Miraflores, already one of Lima’s upper-middle class suburbs. Located south of Lima’s old downtown historic district, Miraflores was already known for its handsome residences, beautiful gardens, fashionable shops, cafes, parks, and fine restaurants. Less crowded and safer than downtown Lima, its central park (Parque Central), with its benches and sidewalk cafes, was a popular place for relaxing and people-watching.

While many may believe that Latin American societies have a better track record in racial relationships than the United States, I regret having to say that this impression is wrong. While Peruvian society may look color blind on the surface, race and ethnicity actually dominate every aspect of its daily social and political life. Racism in Perú is still all-pervasive. My family dynamics have not been an exception. As a child, I was often reminded by my old spinster aunts and by society in general, that I came from a lily white, upper class family, and that I had to live up to its standards. What else could you expect from an Osterling Álvarez-Calderón? However, during family arguments, occasionally I heard someone fire a derogatory racial comment challenging in no uncertain terms the “purity” of the lily-white background of one of my parents. While I always found these insults absurd and irrelevant, among some members of my extended families, racial epithets such as Cholo, Negro, provinciano, Serrano, zambo were more important than I cared to recognize.

Looking back at my four great-great grandparents—Osterling, Tamburini, Álvarez-Calderón, Granados—I often ask myself what is my ethnic background and to which socioeconomic stratum do I belong?

Although I assume and was often reminded by my aunts that the four families were lily white, I am fully aware that they came from very different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and that the view of who they were was based on their micro socioeconomic environment.

On my father's side, for example, my Swedish great-great grandfather, Olof Österling, immigrated to Perú in the early part of the nineteenth century, during the 1820s. On my father’s maternal side, the Tamburinis, I do know that my great-grandmother, Josefina Balestrini, emigrated to Perú with her parents in the mid-1800s from Lago di Como, Italy. In Lima, she met my great-grandfather, Enrique Tamburini, whom my family believes was a first generation Peruvian. I theorize that the Tamburinis immigrated to Perú also in the early 1800s from Italy.

On my mother's side, I know that my Peruvian great-great-grandfather, Andrés Álvarez-Calderón Olaechea, was a highly successful Peruvian entrepreneur, member of Congress, and diplomat who held several high-level political positions with the government of Perú. Andrés amassed a fortune harvesting guano and in the shipping industry. Later, in 1869, he was appointed Peruvian Ambassador to Italy. He moved with his wife and twelve children to Rome, where he became a close friend of Italy's King Vittorio Emanuele II (1820 – 1878) who granted him the title of Count on February 29, 1872. I do not know when the first members of the Granados or Valle (my mother’s maternal side) families immigrated to Perú.

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