and Juan Lejardi, who skipped Ellis Island and jumped ship in New York City. Lejardi, the eldest of a large family, left home at 15 or 16 to work for a dairyman in the Basque country before finding employment on cargo ships. During his second trip across the Atlantic, at the age of 18, Lejardi decided to jump ship and stay in New York City. “When he was ready to jump ship, he said he put on a pair of pants and then another pair over it, and a shirt and another shirt over. He was prepared because he wasn’t coming back,” said his son John. “They were docked so he wasn’t literally jumping. There was an individual on the ship who sent him to town with $5 to buy a pack of cigarettes. He bought the cigarettes and sent them back with someone else and kept the change. He always felt bad about that because he wanted to pay this guy back but he didn’t have any money.” Once in New York City, Juan met up with Valentin Aguirre, a Basque who ran a wellknown boarding house named Santa Lucia Hotel in Greenwich Village. Aguirre put Juan up for six weeks, providing room and board, then set him up with work as a cook’s aid. After Lejardi had saved up some cash, he went out and bought a presentable suit. “He bought a suit and had his picture taken and sent the picture back to the Basque country,” said John, laughing. “Later he found out, of course, they knew it all along; they knew he was taken care of by Valentin.” Boisean Miren Artiach’s father, Joaquin Renenteria, also jumped ship when he arrived in New York in his late teens. For reasons still unclear to Artiach, her father used a false name, Urza—the name of a family from his hometown of Navarniz—when he first arrived. Fortunately, he was able to head straight for Boise, where he had two brothers waiting for him with work opportunities. “His mother had to raise a family of six— four boys and two girls—basically by herself, because [his father] wasn’t able to work. For my dad, there wasn’t any possibility—with no education and with a family where the mother was the main support—that he was going to be able to do much [in the Basque country],” said Artiach. “So, he took that brave step to come here, and he was probably more fortunate than others in that he already had two brothers here.” But after a number of years working in sheep, construction and logging, Renenteria eventually returned to the Basque country. There he met Artiach’s mother, Trinidad Minteguia, a political prisoner under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and survivor of the 1937 bombings of Gernika. The couple returned to New York in 1948, when Ellis Island was no longer used regularly for immigration, and stayed with family in Brooklyn before eventually heading back to Boise. “I was born 11 days after my mom got to Boise, so this whole time on this trip over she was so sick. The trip was supposed to take them nine days and it took them 17 because the ocean was so bad,” said Artiach. With more than 12 million documented immigrants entering the United States through Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954, when the island officially closed as an immigration station, stories like Artiach’s, Lejardi’s and Garatea’s are abundant. But one thing that separates Basque immigrants from other nationalities who came in the first couple decades of the 20th century, is they did not, by and
12 | FEBRUARY 24 – MARCH 2, 2010 | BOISEweekly
large, immigrate because of religious persecution or national catastrophes. Migration has been a long-standing Basque tradition. “Most of the traditional territories of what we call the Basque Country, especially the ones where the Basque language and ethnic culture has been preserved, are farmlands … These farmsteads are the core of the Basque culture, it’s where the family traditions, where culture, mythology and religion are transmitted to generation after generation,” explained Ezkerra. But these farmsteads, approximately 40,000 that have been in the same locations since the Middle Ages, are only 20 to 25 acres apiece. In a rainy climate with steep hillsides and acidic land, 20 to 25 acres can only produce enough food to sustain one family. Which means each generation, only one heir inherits the entire family farmstead and the others have to pack their bags and move on. “What people have done since the mid1400s is assign the whole package—the farmhouse, the forest, the orchard, the fields—to only one chosen son or daughter. And what do we do with the rest of our siblings? You pay for the ticket and for giving them an education and sending them somewhere else to start a new life,” said Ezkerra. “So, the survival of this core element of the Basque civilization, the farmstead, depends on sending away all but one of the children, every generation.” After the discovery of the New World, those “sent away” Basques began migrating to new Spanish colonies in the Americas. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the vogue immigration destination had become the United States—where there was an ample amount of land out West. Many of those who left the Basque Country in the early 1900s for work opportunities—and, later, those who left because of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s—came out West to work with sheep outfits. The continuous flow of sheepherders necessitated Basque boarding houses where they could shack up. These boarding houses became epicenters for Basque culture, filled with Basque language, song and dance. Lucy Garatea, my great-grandmother, worked in her aunt’s boarding house when she first arrived in Boise, then in 1948 opened her own boarding house, the Plaza Hotel in Bend, Ore. Widowed 13 years earlier, Garatea ran the boarding house single-handedly from 1948 to 1963, cooking and cleaning for boarders and her four children. “Mom was a very good proprietress. She was extremely clean. She always had a good clientele and she became known for her cooking,” said daughter Rosie Williams. “Mom has fed politicians and all kinds of bankers. She entertained a lot of professional people because she was such a good cook. In the meantime, she still had to feed her little boarders and whomever else.” Boarding houses just like Garatea’s in various towns across Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and California were integral to keeping Basque cultural identity thriving for those who had recently immigrated from the old country. They were places where Euskara, the Basque language, was spoken, where Basque food was served and where many jotas were danced. “The boarding house played a great role in keeping our culture alive, because music and dance and food and language, those elements were kept alive in the boarding houses,” said WWW. B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M