Chronicling the Basques: Recordings of Immigrants’ Lives Available on Internet

Generations after Basques from Spain and France came to work in the West’s sheep camps and boardinghouses, their descendants can hear their voices and glimpse their faces on the Internet.

The Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada in Reno and the Basque Museum and Cultural Center in Boise are chronicling the immigrants’ lives.

“They had fantastic experiences in their lives. We have social questions: Why did they leave the Basque country? What are their origins?” said Gloria Totoricaguena, an assistant professor in Reno.

The Basque immigrants came from a region straddling the Pyrenees mountains. They arrived in the American West during the early part of the 20th century, working often as sheepherders and later as ranchers.

The Boise area has the largest Basque population in North America with 15,000 people. Argentina has the largest number of Basque residents outside of the Basque homeland of Euzkadi.

In 1999, Basque leaders in Spain kicked off a four-year effort for those “diaspora communities” to collect histories of people and provided grants to finance the effort.

The Boise museum and the Reno center have interviewed Basques for years. Daniel and Mikel Chertudi of Boise continue to record the interviews, and the hundreds of records are being converted for the Internet.

The Boise museum will have about 400 interviews posted by this fall, said Executive Director Patty Miller.

The Web sites also include photographs, immigration documents and wedding certificates. The effort is called “Oroitzapenak,” which is Basque for “memories.”

Eventually, the other Basque communities will develop their own sites, museum curator Jeff Johns said.

“They can actually hear their ancestors or relatives,” said Jill Berner, a spokeswoman for the Reno center. “What a fabulous thing for a young Basque American girl to hear her grandmother talk about her experiences.”

The number of surviving Basque immigrants in the West is dwindling. Their children are also getting on in years.

Some lived through calamitous events, including the Spanish Civil War’s 1937 bombing of Guernica, their spiritual capital. German bombers flying on behalf of Francisco Franco dropped 130,000 pounds of explosives and reduced the village to rubble.

“There’s a sense of urgency to record these people,” Totoricaguena said. “The ones who were old enough to remember the bombing are now almost getting too old to remember.”

The immigrants often moved to areas where friends and relatives preceded them, she said. Many of the French Basques ended up in San Francisco. Boise’s population is mainly from the Spanish province of Viscaya, which includes Guernica.

Basque leaders have also sponsored books about the Basque ethnic clubs around the globe. Totoricaguena has written a book about Boise’s community and a chapter in another about New York.

Within five years, Totoricaguena will travel to the Basque country to interview the people left behind by their friends and relatives who moved away.

While Basques started migrating to America in the 1800s, it is this generation that is setting down their families’ stories, Miller said.

“It’s like many ethnic groups,” Miller said. “Grandfather chooses to forget his roots. The first generation is just trying to feed their families. The second generation is playing football and eating chorizo sausages. The third generation is looking back at their history.”

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On the Net:

Basque Museum oral histories: https://www.basquemuseum.com/oralhistory/index.htm

Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno: https://basque.unr.edu/