PINNICK KINNICK HILL: AN AMERICAN STORY

Mountaineers

MOUNTAINEERS v Mountaineers/Montañeros by Suronda González While I’m not related to Gavin González, the author of Pinnick Kinnick Hill, I too grew up among the Asturian immigrants who settled in north-central West Virginia’s Harrison County. My paternal great-grandparents, pursuing opportunities in West Virginia’s expanding zinc industry, emigrated from Spain between 1908 and 1914. As a child, I heard tales of life in Asturias, the journey to the United States, and Spanish immigrant life in West Virginia with “ferias,” hard work, and the sting of ethnic prejudice.1 During the early 1970s, a cousin from Asturias came to visit our family in West Virginia. In the much-loved Spanish tradition of nicknaming, she was dubbed “Miss Spain.” Like an international beauty contestant, she represented the entire country, our family’s native land. Miss Spain’s arrival was a moving event for my great-grandmother, who never returned to her homeland after leaving in 1914. Miss Spain was the only family member my great-grandmother would ever see of those left behind some sixty years earlier. Family gathered from Ohio and Pennsylvania to celebrate. For me, however, Miss Spain’s visit was my first tangible connection to a place that until that time seemed imaginary. A descendant of these Asturian immigrants, I became part of the “Appalasturian” network that connected Spaniards in the region to those who settled elsewhere, to those who returned, and to those who never emigrated. Miss Spain’s visit narrowed the geographic and psychological divide between two worlds that share a common history. Despite the long historic connection between West Virginia and Asturias, understandings of the relationship are still unfolding. Tied together by immigration , Asturias and West Virginia also share an important industrial history. Both have experienced the boom of exploiting mineral riches, and the economic stagnation wrought by industrial decline. Moreover, both are currently facing the environmental consequences of their industrial pasts. Both have a rich history of labor organizing and unrest. And like Appalachia, Asturias is sometimes characterized as a region populated with backward mountain people. As our histories are revealed, we continue to learn from one another, and to cultivate the community and personal networks laid down by our ancestors nearly 100 years ago. When most people think about the “huddled masses” arriving on American shores during the early twentieth century, and the various places where they settled, Spaniards and West Virginia are not usually the first thoughts that spring to mind. The reasons are twofold. First, most historical accounts of Spaniards in the New World focus primarily on “discovery” and conquest without giving much attention to later Spanish emigration.2 Despite the growth of immigrant and community case studies since the 1960s, there has been no MOUNTAINEERS vi full-scale treatment in English of Spanish immigration to the United States.3 Secondly, the presence of foreigners in Appalachia is often obscured by popular stereotypes that paint the region as cut off from outside influences, home to an imagined homogeneous people descended from early pioneer settlers. Such distorted interpretations of Appalachia overshadow its rich immigrant history and are appropriately described as a simple case of “ethnic denial.”4 Still, the story of foreigners and Spaniards in Appalachia is not lost. Over the last forty years, regional scholars have devoted increasing attention to the ways immigrants shaped Appalachia’s past and present. Many of these works, however, examine early immigrant groups like the Swiss and Germans who came prior to 1880. Community studies of southern and eastern Europeans, who entered the U.S. by the millions between 1880 and 1920, are only beginning to emerge.5 In large part, what we do know about these groups stems from the rich body of oral histories and important documents collected by immigrants, their family members, and neighbors, who preserve Appalachia’s immigrant past and broaden understandings of this generation’s role in our history. Such is the case with Gavin González’s memoir Pinnick Kinnick Hill. Written some twenty-five years ago, the original manuscript and research notes were carefully stowed away in an old suitcase until recently. González’s story, which recounts the lives of Spanish immigrants who settled in Harrison County, West Virginia in the early 1900s, is a historical treasure that enriches understandings of Appalachian, U.S., and Spanish history. Through a thin coating of fiction, González’s richly descriptive work chronicles the lives of those who left their homes in Asturias to...