Patricia Steele

Patricia Ruiz Steele

As a young girl, Patricia watched her abuelita gathering her long hair into a knotted bun and tucking the ends carefully out of sight. Abuelita had the kindest brown eyes of anyone Patricia had ever known. Eyes that always held a smile.

Patricia grew up wanting to know why. Why did Abuelita and her family sail to Hawaii and then again to California? Why did nobody in the family know the full story? And why, when Patricia finally began to ask, was there silence about a diaspora that history had largely forgotten?

That curiosity became a decades-long journey as Patricia spent years researching the story of the 8,000 emigrants who sailed from Spain to Hawaii between 1907 and 1913. She joined a team to transcribe the manifests and presented the research at UC Davis in California and Cáceres, Spain. She was filmed in Spain and California narrating from her own work. Pasaje a Hawai'i opens and closes with her voice. She has since found her Spanish cousins in Malaga, Madrid, and Fuentesaúco. Guest rooms wait for her.

Patricia’s Spanish Pearls Series begins with The Girl Immigrant, the story of her grandmother Manuela's journey from Fuentesaúco to Hawaii and ultimately to California. Her Touching Spanish Soil trilogy is rooted in grief, healing, ancestry, and the country that has held her heart across the most defining seasons of her life. Her fiction books and other memoirs are written under the name Patricia Steele, inserting her Ruiz name only for her Spanish-inspired books.

While in Spain, she blogs on her website and is an active voice in the Hawaiian Spaniards community and the wider world of Spanish genealogy and heritage. She lives in Oregon, where she tends her garden, raises a glass to her Abuelita, and continues to shake the old stories loose.