Professor's book features Basque boardinghouses

For her book, Home Away From Home, Jeronima Echeverria spent more than 10 years documenting the history of Basque settlement and attending Basque gatherings in the 11 western states.

The reference "Old West" conjures up imagines of cowboys and cattle ranches, but Dr. Jeronima Echeverria's new book presents a different cultural perspective of the West - Basque sheepherders and family boardinghouses called "ostatuak."

Echeverria, associate dean of the College of Social Sciences, recently wrote Home Away From Home, published last year by University of Nevada Press. The book illustrates Basque boardinghouse history and discusses the boardinghouse as an ethnic institution that welcomed Basques to the American West.

Not only is the book a labor of love for Echeverria, but it also serves the historical purpose of documenting an era that has all but vanished.

For more than a century and a half, newly-arrived Basques relied upon boardinghouses for food, shelter, friendship, arranged jobs, recreation, translators and much more.

"To the Basque sheepherders, the boardinghouse offered lodging during rare holidays in town, and for those who never established families, it offered a home after retirement," said Echeverria. "The boardinghouse is perhaps the most distinctive institution that shaped Basque immigrant life and served as the center of Basque communities throughout the west."

Echeverria said that Fresno's Basque population in the early 1900s was fourth largest of California's top five Basque communities.

"The ratio of Basque men to women in Fresno County back then was nearly four to one," said Echeverria. "More than 86 percent of the Basque population at the turn of the century was involved in sheep or cattle raising."

Today, Fermin and Margaret Urroz's Basque Hotel and J.P. and Manuela Etchechurry's Santa Fe Hotel are the only ostatuak remaining in Fresno.

Echeverria said that the Basque and Santa Fe hotels have served as meeting places over the years before the Basque Club purchased its own building. "The two remaining ostatuak continue to take in boarders, although the rooms are no longer filled to capacity," said Echeverria.

Western historian Richard Etulain from the Center for the Study of the American West said Echeverria is the first historian to write a meticulously researched, well-written book about the Basque hotels. "Except for the Basque sheepherder himself, nothing better represents the early years, uniqueness and endurance of Basque culture in the American West than their boarding houses," Etulain said.

Echeverria is now compiling an anthology on the role of Basque women in Basque global diaspora. She expects to publish the anthology in 2002.