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Boiseans return to Ellis Island to celebrate shared identity
Amid a flurry of wet flakes - hemmed in on the north by a snow-blanketed Battery Park and the south by the icy slosh of the Upper New York Bay - we lined up, shivering. Hundreds of us, many from Boise and some from as far away as Spain and Quebec, had been cattle-packed into industrial metal gates that snaked around like a lower intestine before eventually spitting us out at the ferry for Ellis Island. Tall with curly blonde hair, I towered over the sea of short ladies with purplish-black bobs making small talk around me.
A casual onlooker could've mistaken most of the group as Spanish - dark features and loud, boisterous laughs - but the unfurled red, white and green Ikurrina flag at the head of the line said otherwise. They were Basque, and damn proud of it.
Like many of their ancestors from the little smudge of land straddling northern Spain and southern France had done decades before, the group waited - tired, huddled masses, so to speak - to make a reverse pilgrimage to Ellis Island. There, the Boise Basque Museum and Cultural Center's new exhibit "Hidden in Plain Sight: The Basques" was being unveiled.
Ninety years prior, on Aug. 21, 1920, my step-great-grandmother Luciana Aboitiz Garatea also made a journey to Ellis Island. When she arrived at age 15, Garatea stood stunned at the sight before her.
"[Ellis Island] was enormous. None of us had ever seen anything like it. It was a huge surprise to us, a tremendous surprise. We stayed right there. We were there for 11 days," explained Garatea in a video interview with the Basque Museum.
At the request of an aunt who ran a boarding house in Boise, Garatea had left her hometown, the small fishing village of Lekeitio in the Basque province of Bizkaia, on Aug. 8, 1 920. Travelling with a 19-year-old female acquaintance and a male chaperone, the three headed to America. But before their plans could be put into place, they had to navigate the whirling chaos of languages and ethnicities that was Ellis Island.
"All kinds of people were coming; we didn't have a place to sit or...