This is a translation of the newspaper article published the morning after the documentary premiere in Malaga by our friend, James Fernández.  This post does not replace my daily blog post, but to enable you to read the article if you are interested.

It is the end of the beginning, the dream come true of many Hawaiian-Spanish families.  They spent years searching for their roots, and now they have seen them made visible in a documentary film.  The Californians Steven Alonso, Patricia Steele and Albert Marques, descendants of Andalusians who emigrated to Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, were in Málaga yesterday to see the premiere of the film that retells the stories of their families, the stories of thousands of their fellow countrymen, who traveled aboard the SS Heliopolis, fleeing from misery and with the sole hope of a better world for their people.

They told me that my family arrived by ship from Málaga, but I didn’t know anything and I couldn’t find information anywhere.  When I started to ask myself who I am and where do I come from I found the book “SS Heliopois: la primera inmigración de andaluces a Hawai (1907)” by the historian from Malaga, Miguel Alba, on which this documentary is based, and that’s when I learned that my paternal grandfather was on that ship” recounts Alberto Marques in almost perfect Spanish, even though his family never spoke to him in that language.  Like Albert, Patricia Steele and Steven Alonso also spent years investigating that voyage that took their great-grandparents to the Pacific island, with the promise of fortune.  “I started research in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2012 when I came to Spain to meet my relatives.  The encounter was magical, as if they had always been in my heart. After all, they are my family” explains Steele, who has found parts of her story in Benagalbón, ALmogía y Fuentesaúco.

Thanks to Alba’s research, these three Californians have returned to the starting point of their origins to see the documentary “Passage to Hawaii, 1907-1913” which had its debut yesterday in the Cine Albeniz.  Directed by the filmmaker Eterio Ortega, the movie portrays the exodus of Andalusians, primarily malagueños, to Hawaii to work on the sugar cane plantations.  After hard years of great sacrifice, most of these Andalusians left Hawaii for California, where today their descendants live.  When they embarked on the SS Heliopolis, which left the port of Malaga in 1907, these families left so much behind that they hardly had the strength to tell their stories.  That is why, Marques recalls that he never knew that his grandmother was Spanish until he saw her scolding a nurse in Spanish.  “I never wanted to speak my language so that they wouldn’t discriminate against me” she confessed to him.  In the same way, Alonso laments that his parents “stopped speaking Spanish because they were subject to discrimination by the other children at school.”  But despite all of these difficulties, there is something that these Andalusians never left behind:  “My grandmother’s way of cooking was authentically Spanish” affirms Alonso, who admits that he feels completely at home when he is in Spain.

Together with Marques, Steele and Alonso, more than 40 people have taken part in this documentary, which now gives lives to so many families.  “This is not rational, it’s emotional, or sentimental; the work has allowed many families to get to know each other, and from now on, they will be even more united.  That is why for me, it is only the end of the beginning” said proudly Miguel Alba, the historian from Málaga.