A Little About Me

My name is Pablo Rodriguez born in Miami, and both of my parents are of Basque ancestory, in particular my mother's. My father is from Cuba, with Basque and Sefardic Jewish background. My mother's family had lived in various parts of the western United States from Louisiana to Arizona, but originally coming from Donostia (San Sebastián) area of the Basque Country. I learned what I know of the language from my Amona (Grandmother) while she was alive. Growing up though we mostly spoke Spanish as my father did not speak Basque and the subject of that strange language that Grandma spoke was never discussed. I lived many places in my life including Samoa, Philippnes, Hawai'i, California, back to Miami and now in Atlanta (only for a moment). My interest in Basque began about 10 years ago at the time that I returned to the United States, the doctors did various test on me to make sure I had not picked up any exotic disease in the foreign lands, everything checked out perfectly fine. But they did inform me that I had O Rh negative blood and that it was special and somewhat rare. So me being inquisitive, did the research for see what that all meant and the Basque came up again in my search. So I remembered back how the family had talked of this place in between Spain and France known as the Basque Country. I began to look back through my life and realise, this is why I always felt different from everyone else. I had felt like an alien, and indeed I had always been interested in the subject of aliens, Atlantis, spirituality, fate of humanity and a general awareness not as other people. All of these unique traits I read were related to being Basque and my blood type. So had now been answered many of the questions of my childhood, underneath my curly red hair was this head so full of thoughts and questions of my existence which would over the next 10 years be answered. This also made a yearning deep within to find others like me, other Basque people. This yearning continued on as I went back to Miami, got involved in music there and looked for other Basque people. But I was saddened by the lack of Basque people who spoke the language or even knew what it was. As the years went by that yearning stayed in the back of my head the ideas being turned into music that I wrote. Then when I came to Atlanta I was in total culture shock, I was depressed and in desperation to find just one soul like me, it also had seemed that I crossed some other path of another. With tears in my eyes over the recent tragic event in Miami and my great loneliness, I typed into Google something about Basque Buddhist on MySpace (I was also alienated because of my religious ideas). The most amazing search result came up, after going through several pages. Which brings us to right now, Holly and I and a book we are working which we hope will inspire and teach people who really want to know about the Basque experience.

Comments

Yes! A language I can understand! Seriously though, there a lot of Cuban with Basque heritage, but I don't think they always know as it was the case with my family. I always thought that our name Arencibia was Spanish, but it turned out it wasn't.
My father said that when he looked in Spain, he could't find our code of arms, no we know why. Remember that the Basque people lost their country about 200 years ago. I'm sure many people just left for other places in Spain.
Feliz 2009 Pablo!

Un prospero año nuevo! Recuerden vestir de negro el dia primero de Enero, recordando la muerte de la libertad de Cuba!!

Happy New Year! Remember to dress in black on the first of the year, in remembrance of the end of Cuban freedom!!
Tal said…
Shalom Pablo, good to see you have a blog! Happy (late) New Year!
Tal

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