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STAFF PHOTO BY ELUS LUCIA
Michel Antoine Goitia-Nicolas stands beneath a Basque flag and next to the region?s coat of arms outside his Tchoupitoulas Street home Wednesday. Goitia-Nicolas, whose ancestors come from the Basque region between Spain and France, hopes to start a local support group.
N.O. ROOTS PUZZLE FINDS LOST PIECES
From political heroes and saints to old street names and spicy concoctions, the Basque people?s Spanish-French heritage runs deep in local history
By Joan Treadway
Staff writer
Soon after he moved to New Orleans almost a decade ago, Michel Antoine Goitia-Nicolas, entered a grocery store and found a jar of spices labeled ?Zatarain.? Immediately, the Chicago native, who is of Basque and Greek heritage, recognized the name as Basque.
Around the same time, he was riding a bu3 along the Mississippi River when it passed a street named Sora-paru, which he realized had evolved from the Basque sur-
name Sorapuru.
These were among the first inklings he had that other Basques, the inhabitants of the region in the Pyrenees
?lnn?- tba
Spanish border, had arrived in Louisiana before him. But he didn?t think many had come until he began researching old port entry records two years ago and found that thousands of people with Basque names had immigrated to New Orleans in the 1700s and ISOOs.
That was enough to get him started on a book about the Basque history of Louisiana
that he expects to finish next year and that will be published by the University of Nevada in Reno, where he 1 spent two years at the univer-sity?s Center for Basque Studies. It will be the first comprehensive book on the subject, said Collin Hamer Jr., head of the Louisiana division of New Orleans? main public library.
Positive reactions
As Goitia-Nicolas pored over genealogical records and local telephone books, he found that many of the descendants of the early arriv-
als are still around. During the past three months, he has contacted about 500 of them, in preparation for a meeting June 7 that he hopes' will lea? ~to iormauon ot a social an3 cultural club of local Basques, part of a national network of similar groups. The event will be held at 6 p.m. at St. Francis Xavier Church in Metairie. named for a saint fie believes to be of Basque herT-
tage.
Through the book and through the club, Goitia-Nicolas, 37, an Uptown resident
See BASQUE, B-2