United States

This chapter tells of the life the Basques made for themselves in the United States once they had arrived: the trade they came to be identified with, the houses where they lodged and the societies they founded to help one another when someone fell ill or died. From those boardinghouses and those societies came the first forms of shared life in the community.

The Basque sheepherder: a trade and a stereotype

Sheepherding was a way to get ahead, and the newcomers knew it: they preferred to be paid in sheep, so that one day they might have a flock of their own. According to the Auñamendi, by the twenties many were already owners of livestock and land, with more than 40,000 head each. The same trade also brought them contempt: they were called vagrants, nomads and even an insult that translates as “dirty black Basque”.¹

That the sheepherder of the West ended up being a synonym for Basque can be explained in two ways, and the two point in opposite directions. The first is experience. The Auñamendi recalls that Basques and Irish were already working as shepherds on the Argentine pampa in 1830-1840, and that some pioneers of the West, such as Pedro de Altube, came from there.¹

The second is myth. The researcher Mariel Aquino holds that most of the Basques who emigrated to the United States had never tended sheep, and that it is doubtful any of them knew the open-range herding practised in the West. In her view, the ranchers did not prefer Basques for their skill, but because of the stories about their very ancient origins, which presented them as the pure aboriginals of Europe with herding in their blood.⁹

The boardinghouses: Basque hotels in San Francisco, Boise and New York

Sheepherder or not, the newcomer needed a roof, and he found it in a boardinghouse. The Basque boardinghouses or hotels (ostatuak) lodged the newly arrived and were the first social centre of the community, the place where it gathered, until the clubs took over that role.⁷

In San Francisco, the hotel that Juan Miguel Aguirre opened around 1866 was followed by others, and before the earthquake of 1906 the Hotel de France, the Europa and the Hotel des Pyrenees, among others, were already running. Some came much later: the Obrero Hotel opened in 1943 and lasted until 1993. By then the Bay Area community already had a centre of its own, and it had built it in 1982 not in the city itself but in South San Francisco.⁷

In Boise, the Cyrus Jacobs-Uberuaga house, built in 1864, became a Basque boardinghouse in 1910 and took in immigrants until 1969; today it is part of the Basque museum. On the same block, the Anduiza building (1914) had an indoor fronton.¹⁸¹³ And it was not only the capital: in the first decades of the twentieth century, the boardinghouses in the towns of southern Idaho were full of Basque sheepherders.³

New York was a place of passage. Many Basques on their way to the West, or coming back from it, passed through the city, and it was for them that Valentín Aguirre opened the Santa Lucia Hotel on Cherry Street in 1910. In 1919 there were at least four Basque boardinghouses on that same street.⁵

Helping one another: Boise in 1908 and New York in 1913

The boardinghouse gave bed and board, but when a lodger fell ill, was disabled or died unable to pay, the bill usually fell on the owner. It was several boardinghouse owners in Boise who created the Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos in 1908. The members paid a fee, and in return the society covered medical emergencies, disability and funerals. It was open to all Spanish and Basque men, and after the flu of 1918 many more joined.⁶⁵

Five years later, in New York, thirteen Basques, Valentín Aguirre among them, registered the Centro Vasco-Americano, Sociedad de Beneficencia y Recreo. They were helped by Italian friends, among them a young lawyer, Fiorello La Guardia, who would later be mayor of the city. Only men born in the Basque provinces and their sons could be members. In 1924 it had three hundred active members, and in 1928 it opened a building of its own at number 48 Cherry Street, the street of the boardinghouses, with an indoor fronton, a bar and a restaurant. When the buildings on the street were demolished it moved through several premises, until in 1973 it bought a building on Eckford Street, in Brooklyn. In 1980 it changed its name to Euzko Etxea.⁵

The two societies may have known of each other. Gloria Totoricagüena considers it plausible that they influenced each other through the Basques who lodged in the New York boardinghouses on their way to the West or back home, but she warns that there are no documents to prove it.⁵