United States

This chapter tells how the Basques of the United States went from meeting among themselves to letting themselves be seen, and how they organised afterwards: a federation of clubs, a Basque centre, a museum and a festival in Boise, a research centre in Reno. It ends with what the censuses say about how many they are.

From the private picnic to the Sparks festival (1959)

Before 1959 the Basques of the West were already getting together: there were annual picnics in Buffalo (Wyoming) from 1918, in Boise from 1933 and in Bakersfield from 1938. But they were gatherings of Basques for Basques. On 6 and 7 June 1959 the first Western Basque Festival was held in Sparks (Nevada), and some 5,000 people came from all over the West: the largest Basque gathering held until then. It was sponsored by Dick Graves, a casino owner whose wife and whose manager, John Ascuaga, were Basque, and it was organised by, among others, the state senator Peter Echeverria and the writer Robert Laxalt. According to the anthropologist William Douglass, until then the Basques of the West had tried to keep out of sight. After Sparks, more and more local communities organised festivals of their own.⁶

NABO, the federation of the clubs (1973)

Fourteen years later, the clubs went back to Sparks. In March 1973 their representatives met there and agreed to create a federation, and in August the first convention of the North American Basque Organizations (NABO), legally incorporated in Nevada, was held in Reno. The name was chosen with those who were missing in mind: North American Basque Organizations “rather than the Western States Basque Organizations, Inc. which had been adopted previously”, since there were Basque organizations outside the American West “which some time in the future might wish to join”. The bylaws, moreover, forbid the federation to promote any ideology or political cause. NABO began with eight clubs; there were eighteen in 1979 and thirty-six in 2007. The Euzko Etxea of New York, the old Cherry Street society, joined in 1993.⁶

Among other things, it organises mus and pelota tournaments and a summer camp for young people. The first Basque music camp was held in Boise in 1973, the same year as the federation, and since 2001 it has been called Udaleku. Even so, the federation does not reach everyone: the author of the study on NABO reckons that only one in ten Americans who declare themselves Basque in the census takes part in a club.⁶

Boise: the Basque Center, Oinkari, the museum and Jaialdi

In Boise, a good part of that life comes together on a single street. Euzkaldunak Inc. was founded in 1949 to build the Basque Center, at number 601 Grove Street. According to Totoricagüena, Boise was the second community in the United States, after New York (1928), to build a Basque centre of its own.⁴¹⁷

Dance went its own way. Twenty years after the first formal Basque dance group in the country was born in Emmett, in 1940, a group of friends from Boise travelled to Euskal Herria in 1960 and met the Oinkari dance group in Pasaia, which suggested they adopt its name. The Oinkari Basque Dancers performed for the first time at the sheepherders’ winter dance (the Sheepherders’ Ball) of 1960.⁴

On the same street, at 607, stands the Cyrus Jacobs-Uberuaga house, the old boardinghouse. The Basque Museum & Cultural Center was founded there in 1985, thanks to Adelia Garro Simplot, and since 1993 its main premises have been at 611. It is the only Basque museum in the United States and it houses an ikastola.¹³⁴

That same year, 1985, at a NABO meeting, Albert Erquiaga and Gerri Achurra met Jokin Intxausti, of the Basque Government, who encouraged them to organise a large international event. Two years later, in 1987, the first Jaialdi international festival was held, organised by Euzkaldunak and the Oinkari and directed by Erquiaga and Achurra. It was repeated in 1990, and in 2000 it brought together some 30,000 people.⁴ Today it is held every five years: for the 2025 edition the organisers expected between 30,000 and 40,000 attendees, and the next one is planned for 2030.¹²

Reno: the Center for Basque Studies

The sheepherders also ended up at the university. In 1967 the Center for Basque Studies was born in Nevada, today at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was created to study the Basques as part of the sheep industry that had shaped the development of the interior West, and it presents itself as the leading centre of its kind outside Euskal Herria.¹¹

How many they are

For a long time the census did not tell them apart. Until 1980, the United States census counted Basques as Spanish or French; that year it began to record Basque ancestry.¹⁹ In 1980, 43,140 people declared themselves Basque; in 1990, 47,956; and in 2000, 57,793.⁴ In 2000, the states with the most Basques were California (20,868), Idaho (6,637), Nevada (6,096), Washington (2,665) and Oregon (2,627).¹⁰ Totoricagüena warns that many people who consider themselves Basque did not tick it on the form, and that the real figure is higher.⁴

The official register of the Basque Government today recognises 36 Basque entities in the United States, from Seattle to Miami, among them NABO, the Boise museum and the Euzko Etxea of New York.¹⁷