United States

This chapter tells the lives of some Basques, and children of Basques, who left their name in the history of the United States: a New York hotelier, a rancher who came from Argentina, two brothers from Nevada, an Idaho politician and a historian of the exile. It ends with the monument that Reno raised to the sheepherders, the ones with no name of their own on this list.

Valentín Aguirre, the hotelier of Cherry Street

Valentín Aguirre was born in 1871 at Monte Sollube, near Busturia (Bizkaia). He was ten years old when, after his father died, he left home to work on the Alceda, a ship of the Sota shipping company, on which he sailed to ports in Central and South America. He spoke only Basque; he learned Spanish on board. In 1895 he stayed on in New York, where he worked on the Staten Island ferry and as a stoker on the harbour tugboats.⁵

Fifteen years later, with his wife, Benita Orbe, he opened the Santa Lucia Hotel on Cherry Street and a travel agency. He was one of the thirteen founders of the Centro Vasco-Americano and its president for many years.⁵

Pedro de Altube, from Argentina to Nevada

Pedro de Altube arrived in California from Argentina in 1850, bought cattle and drove them to Nevada. In the early 1870s he settled with Jean Garat in the northeast of that state, where he founded the Spanish Ranch, in Independence Valley.¹² With his brother Bernardo he built a sheep empire, and he looked for workers among his own people: he recruited Basques through his kinship networks.⁹ The Auñamendi records the nickname he was known by: “Father of Basques in America”.²

The Laxalts, a governor and a writer

Paul Laxalt was the son of a father from Zuberoa and a mother from Lower Navarre, and he became governor of Nevada, senator in Washington and chairman of the Republican Party. He was a close friend of Ronald Reagan and ran his presidential campaign. Thanks to his efforts and those of Pete Cenarrusa, Reagan received lehendakari Ardanza at the White House during his visit to the United States in 1988.¹⁴

His brother Robert Laxalt was the writer who best told the Basque side of Nevada.¹⁴

Pete Cenarrusa, the Idaho politician who spoke Basque

Pete Cenarrusa was born in Carey (Idaho) on 16 December 1917, the son of Biscayan immigrants. He entered the Idaho House of Representatives in 1950 and was its Speaker three times, and in 1967 he was appointed Idaho secretary of state, a post he held for almost 36 years. He kept his Basque all his life and travelled to Euskal Herria more than fifteen times. With his wife, Freda, he created the Cenarrusa Foundation for Basque Culture. He died in Boise on 29 September 2013.¹⁵

Jon Bilbao, from exile to Basque studies

Jon Bilbao Azkarreta was born in Cayey (Puerto Rico) in 1914 and as a child went back with his family to the Basque Country. He fought as a volunteer in the Basque battalions, and after the fall of Bilbao he went into exile. In 1938 he came to the United States, where he joined the Basque delegation and was sub-delegate in Boise. Later he devoted himself to study: he compiled the Eusko Bibliographia, promoted with William Douglass the Basque studies programme of the University of Nevada, Reno, and wrote with him Amerikanuak. Basques in the New World (1975). He died in Getxo in 1994.⁸

A monument to the Basque sheepherder in Reno (1989)

On 27 August 1989 the National Monument to the Basque Sheepherder, the work of the sculptor Néstor Basterretxea, was unveiled in Rancho San Rafael Park in Reno. It remembers the Basques who from the late nineteenth century went to the West to tend sheep, a job that most Americans shunned because of its isolation, its hardship and its poor pay.¹⁶