Hers was among the first Hispanic families on Hilton Head. She’s turning 100 today
The matriarch of a Hilton Head family who says they were among the first Hispanics in the area remembers her first years on the island as “tranquilo,” meaning calm.
Sofia Maybet Aranda looked back ahead of her milestone 100th birthday on Tuesday.
“It was a different time,” Aranda said of the area during an interview translated from Spanish. “There was nothing on the island. There wasn’t a mountain of people.”
When she and her family first came to the island in the 1980s, they were among the first Hispanics, said one of Aranda’s three daughters, Brenda Aranda Henniger.
Census data from 1980 shows that the population on the island was 84.9% white and 14.5% Black. Information about what race or ethnicity made up the remaining percentage of the population was not immediately available. As of July 2022, Hispanic families make up about 14% of the island’s population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Culture shock and learning the language is what the family, consisting of Aranda, her husband, and the couple’s five children, struggled with the most at first when they came from New York, where they had lived since 1965 after coming from Honduras, Aranda Henniger said
“No one understood the language, and it was hard to even find the food you like in the grocery store,” she said. “Now, you look, and they have food from different countries.”
At that time, their neighborhood off Wild Horse Road, now dotted with trailers and other homes, was practically empty. There was a grocery store, Aranda said, but most of the shopping had to be done in Beaufort or Savannah, a far cry from what the island is today. The move, which Aranda and her husband, Gertrudis, made to be closer to family after his eldest son married a Hilton Head native, was “not easy.”
“I didn’t buy anything,” Aranda said of her efforts to save for their Hilton Head home. “I never carried more than $5 in my purse. We worked hard.”
Finding a community
Two days into their new life on Hilton Head, Aranda’s husband passed away.
“When you think you know your life, God changes it,” she said.
To get to know her new home, and in typical New York fashion, Aranda said she went on daily walks. It is on one of those walks that she accidentally stumbled upon her “community.”
“I went walking every day, and one day I met a woman in her car going to church,” she laughed. “She said, ‘Do you need a ride to church?’ And I got in!”
From then on, Aranda went to daily Mass at the Crazy Crab restaurant, which, at the time, was affectionately dubbed the “holy crab.”
By March 1991, the church, now St. Francis by the Sea, had finished building and became like a second home for Aranda, who has two “yearbooks” filled with photos of the people who made up the parish in those early days. Flipping through the photos of familiar faces, Aranda can recount every name and countless anecdotes from years spent forging friendships. Today, the church has a Spanish ministry.
“It’s a small community but one with lots of respect and love,” she said.
100 years of wisdom
For her upcoming birthday, Aranda said her daughters have kept the festivities a surprise. What she is sure of, however, is that she’ll be surrounded by friends, family and good food. In her century of life, she said she has learned to appreciate her youth and her health, which she said are a “gift, but you have to appreciate it and make something of yourself.”
Aranda Henniger says her mother, at 100 years old, has an amazing memory and “runs circles” around the rest of the family.
“She never wants anyone to do things for her, which is the hardest part of getting older, I think,” Aranda Henniger said. “Some things you have to let go of and say, ‘I need help.’”
In maintaining her independence as she’s reached this milestone, Aranda said her best advice would be to safeguard your health. That means getting enough sleep and eating right, no matter how much you enjoy chicharrónes, a fried pork dish.
“In life, there’s a time when there is trouble,” Aranda said. “The years are not easy. It depends on how you take care of yourself and those around you.”
