United States

The United States received a Basque emigration of workers, long-lasting and concentrated in a single trade. For more than a century, from the first Basques of the gold rush to the last sheepherders hired in the seventies, those who came were above all single men from rural Bizkaia and Navarre, who followed one another in a chain behind a father or an uncle, with three-year contracts and the intention of going back. Many stayed, and the life they built around the boardinghouses and the mutual aid societies is the origin of a community that today has thirty-six recognised entities, its own federation, a museum, a university centre for Basque studies and a festival that brings together tens of thousands of people.

Some of the first did not even come from Euskal Herria. They came from the River Plate, drawn by the California gold. Juan Miguel Aguirre, from Etxalar, had emigrated to Montevideo in 1845, and four years later he was in San Francisco, where around 1866 he opened what is considered the first Basque hotel in the city.⁷ Pedro de Altube arrived from Argentina in 1850 (see Basques in American history).¹

What settled them in the West was not gold but sheep. In 1854 Domingo Amestoy and Abel Stearns set up a sheep ranch in southern California. By the end of that decade Basques were already moving through southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, and by around 1870 they had reached Arizona, New Mexico, northern California and Nevada.¹ In Nevada, the Basque population in the census went from 181 people in 1900 to 971 in 1910.²

What first took them to Idaho was silver, with the strikes at De Lamar (1889) and Silver City (1890). They did not last long in the mines: they soon moved on to supplying the mining camps with beef and lamb. Those who reached the Boise area were mostly Biscayans from the countryside, and they came in a chain, behind a father or an uncle.⁴

The largest flow, according to the Auñamendi, came between 1900 and the thirties. Most of them were single men, with a three-year sheepherding contract and the idea of going back.¹ Then the door narrowed. The immigration law of 1924 limited to 131 the number of Spaniards who could enter the United States each year, and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, according to the Auñamendi, left out the rights of the Basque sheepherders.¹

It was the ranchers themselves, who still needed sheepherders, who opened it again. Between 1942 and 1961 the so-called sheepherder laws allowed some 383 Basques to obtain legal residence, and in 1950 Nevada senator Patrick McCarran obtained permission to recruit Spanish sheepherders on renewable three-year contracts.¹² In 1960 the California Range Association created the Western Range Association, national in scope. The selection was made at the American consulate in Bilbao, and that is why those chosen were Basques. According to the Auñamendi, 5,495 applications for sheepherders were processed between 1957 and 1970, and before 1965, 95% of them were for Basques, above all Biscayans and Navarrese. In 1966 there were some 1,200 Basque sheepherders at work.¹

By the end of the sixties, with the Spanish economic recovery, fewer and fewer people wanted to leave. In the seventies the association looked for sheepherders in Bilbao and Donostia-San Sebastián, and later in Peru (1971) and Mexico (1973). In 1976, of 742 sheepherders hired, only 106 were Basques. The emigration came to an end because of the wages already being paid in Euskal Herria, the lower demand and the competition from cheaper South American workers.¹