Take a walk through the streets of Boise and you’ll find a facade, an ikastola with teachers teaching Basque, a museum dedicated to Basque culture, and even the occasional ikurriña waving on the street. It is also not strange to hear surnames with a clear Basque resonance, to see bars serving kalimotxo or traditional dishes, and even, if you are lucky and go to the city in the right year, to enjoy Jaialdi, a festival with exhibitions of txingas, harrijastzailes. or aizkolaris, which attracts tens of thousands of people.

Nothing extraordinary so far. What’s fascinating is where Boise is located: the city is located in the heart of Idaho, USA, more than 8,000 kilometers from the Basque Country.

Basque with an Idaho accent. Boise is itself part of the Euskal Herria in the USA, although it is on the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles from the mountains and the Basque coast. This was demonstrated a few years ago by the program ‘Basques in the World’, where Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu brought a message to the American city. The cameras of the regional network visited, among other places, ikastola, a school with teachers teaching Basque lessons.

On the streets of Boise, Idaho’s capital, you can see a museum and cultural center dedicated to Basque culture, ikurriñas, traditional food restaurants, a fronton… There is even a Basque neighborhood in town, the Basque Block, “the center,” in the words of Visit Southwest Idaho. “It is a symbol of local Basque life and a popular meeting place for residents and visitors.” There were once two guesthouses here where immigrants who came to the United States to look for work stayed.

Like Vizcaya in the USA. “Boise has an entire city block dedicated to respect for Basque culture, restaurants serving typical products and dishes from the Basque Country, museums, facades, and even a school teaching in Basque,” ​​the Hispanic Council says. In the remote state of Idaho – there are plenty of them – there are even loyal Athletic fans who celebrate their successes just like any Bilbao fan, and San Ignacio de Loyola is also celebrated.

These are not the only bridges between the northwestern United States and the Basque Country. If the abundance of Basque surnames wasn’t another obvious clue, there are establishments in Boise where you can buy sausages from Pamplona or wine from Rioja. The bar also occasionally serves kalimotxo, or a mural referencing Picasso’s Guernica. The Basque Country has even left its mark in politics. In 2008, in the midst of the presidential campaign, the city’s mayor, David Bieter, a second-generation Basque, encouraged his neighbors to chant “Gora Obama” in an auditorium.

It shows the roots. If there’s any evidence of the extent to which Euskalherria is ingrained in Boise’s DNA, it’s Jaialdi, a festival dedicated to Basque culture that mobilizes tens of thousands of people. The event, which premiered in 1987, is held every five years and has gained such prominence that it now attracts more than 30,000 attendees, making it – its organizers claim – one of the largest events of its kind held outside Europe.

Visitors can enjoy txinga, harrijasotzailes, aizkolaris or handicraft exhibitions. The 2020 edition was hampered by the pandemic, but Idaho is now preparing for next year’s event, which will be held from July 29 to August 3. The celebration even caught the attention of the newspaper New York TimesThis explains why 35,000 people attended the celebration in 2015.

But… Why this connection? For a historical matter. To understand the connection between Boise and Idaho and the Basque Country, we must go back to the 19th century, when a group of Biscayan immigrants decided to find a life in the western United States. There they devoted themselves primarily to animal care and formed a vineyard that attracted more immigrants from Euskadi who decided to move to Idaho.

The result: strengthening of the overseas Basque community, a large integrated group of approximately 16,000 people according to data managed by the Basque Government in 2020. Considering Idaho’s nearly two million population as a whole, it is not a very high number, but they have planted a visible seed, especially in the state’s capital, Boise.

Beyond Boise. Boise is perhaps the most well-known and curious outgrowth of a much larger phenomenon: the influx of Basque immigrants to the United States between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The gold rush of 1849 encouraged the Basque people to engage in mining, traveling along the southern route to Argentina, Chile, Mexico and California,” recalls the Basque Museum in Boise.

Once on the other side of the Atlantic, immigrants found themselves faced with two advantages: a prosperous sheep industry devoted to the labor-intensive production of meat and wool, and, in the 1870s, a transcontinental railroad that allowed for fast, safe, and economical travel. in the west of the country.

Ease of travel allowed them, like many other European immigrants to New York, to travel to California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, or Wyoming. The wave of migration continued through the first decades of the 20th century and declined in the 1950s as the sheep industry weakened. Boise isn’t the only witness to that time. In 2020, Euskonews recalled the example of the Jordan Valley in the state of Oregon, where in 1940 the Basque community was one of the most significant in the population.

Pictures | Dmharris26 (Wikipedia), Eneko Bidegain (Flickr) and Nicolás Boullosa

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