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Cinthya Breaux Sites, James Villatoro, Suzanne Mocery, Daren Romero and Juan Manuel de Molina in the municipal archive in Malaga.
From the US to find their roots in Alhaurín
ALHAURÍN DE LA TORRE

From the US to find their roots in Alhaurín

One is the treasurer of New Iberia's Spanish Association, which was created to maintain contact between the two towns that have been twinned since 2009

FERNANDO TORRES

Friday, 12 July 2019, 08:35

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When they got on the plane they didn't know what to expect, but now they feel they have come 'home'. "When we go back to New Iberia we are going to recommend that everybody there does what we have done," say the three residents of this town in Louisiana which was founded by people from Malaga 240 years ago.

What they did was take a trip organised by the Sites Travel agency in America, Alhaurín de la Torre council and Juan Manuel de Molina, a local historian and researcher. It was a chance to travel back to the roots of a culture which until ten years ago these Americans knew nothing about.

Close links between two towns which have been twinned thanks to their history

  • The connection between Alhaurín de la Torre and New Iberia is recent, even though it is over 240 years since the ships left Malaga for Louisiana to populate the lands of that recently acquired territory. This visit, although not the first, has been the most genealogical in character, expanding the links which have arisen between the two towns thanks to their shared history.

  • Cinthya Breaux Sites, who organised the trip, explains that the key to this journey lies in knowing about the different groups of people who emigrated to Lousiana.

  • "I have found out that some of my ancestors were Acadian and from the Canary Islands," she says. "I always dreamed about returning to their homeland". That led her to specialise in this type of tourism, because she was sure that many other people would share her "internal need" to find out more.

  • The Sites travel agency is organising more and more journeys of this type and the links between these two twinned towns have strengthened even further as a result of this visit, because she has now had the opportunity to see Alhaurín de la Torre and other parts of the province in person.

  • In fact, the mayor of Alhaurín de la Torre, Joaquín Villanova, announced during the official reception for the visitors that he will be leading a committee to New Iberia to promote Alhaurín customs and traditions there. The councillor for Tourism and Festivals, Enrique García, says the trip will mark a before and after in terms of the town's tourism profile.

  • Several schools in Alhaurín de la Torre already organise exchange trips for their pupils and those from schools in New Iberia, so the links are becoming closer and closer despite the ocean which separates the two towns.

New Iberia and Alhaurín de la Torre have been twinned since 2009, after De Molina's research showed that the American town had been founded by dozens of families from Malaga, many of them from Alhaurín de la Torre, Cartama and Malaga city. Over time and history, these Spanish roots were gradually eclipsed by those of the French, but in the archives it is perfectly documented that the Garrido, Villatoro and other Malaga families were the first settlers in the area, although nowadays those names have evolved and have become, for example, Gary and Viatore.

Different reasons

The visitors are Suzanne Mocery, James Villatoro and Daren Romero, accompanied by Cinthya Breaux Sites, who owns the Sites Travel agency which specialises in genealogical tourism. She is of French descent and last month she visited France to see where her family originally came from.

Suzanne Mocery has spent quite a lot of time researching her family tree. "I was very interested to know where my ancestors came from. I wanted to see for myself the similarities with New Iberia and to know why the Spanish didn't stay as a community in our area. That's what led me to get on the plane to find out," she says.

James Villatoro (originally Viatoro, from the French derivation) is directly descended from Alhaurinos. This is not the first trip of its type to be organised, but he wasn't able to come before.

"My grandfather could read, speak and write in Spanish. When I started to study the language I found it very easy, so I decided that the next time there was a chance to come to Malaga I wasn't going to miss it," he explains.

Daren Romero's interest in visiting Malaga comes directly from his mother. "She is 80 years old and has spent half her life researching her family tree," he says. For Daren, looking at this chart full of names written in black upon white paper was a cold, almost empty experience.

"There are a lot of Romeros, a lot of people called López. I could look right back and see Miguel Romero - he is the Malaga resident who set off to colonise the New World - and they were just names on paper. I needed to know more about them, find out who they were, what they did," he says.

Conclusions

What have these visitors discovered during their week in Malaga province? "The first thing I noticed right from the start was that we were somewhere very different, not just from the geography but also the customs," says Villatoro. However, he did find that the way of cooking in Malaga is similar to some recipes from New Iberia and the people "are very friendly and charming". He felt at home here. "I didn't feel like a foreigner, it really was like coming home".

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