Personal Narrative: My Personal Pilgrimage To Angel Island

For my personal pilgrimage, I would want to travel to Angel Island, where my great-great grandfather had to pass through in order to immigrate to America. As a result, it holds deep significance to my family and me, as well as a large amount of Asian-Americans living in the Bay Area. Angel Island is an island in San Francisco Bay just east of Tiburon. There are hiking trails around its mountain, Mount Caroline Livermore, as well as beaches and a variety of natural plants. In order to reach the island, one needs to take a ferry from San Francisco or Tiburon. Although Angel Island is beautiful today, it doesn’t have such a pretty past. Around the early 20th century, Angel Island was an immigration station, where many immigrants entering from the west coast had to pass through in order to enter America. If those immigrants were from Europe, they could pass through easily, but those immigrants who were not white, such as Asians and others, were …show more content…
My trip to Angel Island is more relatable to medieval local pilgrimages where the pilgrims traveled short distances than the long pilgrimages that attracted international visitors. In the past, the local shrines tended to attract more townspeople than foreigners, and the sites were ingrained in local identity and tradition, as it was a tangible miracle place that anyone from the town can see. Similarly, Angel Island isn’t exactly a world-famous monument such as Alcatraz, so it attracts more local people from the Bay Area than tourists from out of the area. Also, Angel Island has deep roots in Asian-American history in the Bay Area because many Chinese migrants who passed through the station to immigrate to America still live here