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A Reminiscence: The Basque Hotel by Jeronima Echeverria (Dr. Echeverria recently completed her doctoral dissertation on California Basque's hotels for the history department of North Texas State University. She currently teaches at Fresno State University.) Among my earliest and fondest memories with my family are our Sunday outings at the Centro Vasco Hotel in Chino, California. Nearly every weekend we drove through Carbon Canyon's winding roads to visit with our southern California Basques at that ostatua. Spending a day at the hotel gave my father the chance to play pelota or mus, while my mother enjoyed seeing her friends and catching up on the week's activities.For us children, trying our luck with the jota, dining at long picnic tables under dense grape arbors, smelling the rich aroma of barbecued lamb, cognac and cigars, and listening to the men sing folk songs from their childhood made the outings memorable. Throughout the American West, Basque hotels and boardinghouses have played an important part in the lives of the Amerikanuak and their families as well. In recent decades, the ostatuak have provided meeting places for Basque families to celebrate special occasions: among them, weddings, birthdays, baptisms, and anniversaries. In earlier decades, however, the boardinghouses tended to cater to the newly arrived, often single, Basque male. Before 1910, when the majority of Basque immigrants were single young men, the hotels made the bachelor's transition easier in a number of ways. They offered shelter while helping them find work, loaned him storage space for his personal belongings while he was on the range or in the mountains herding sheep, and provided an atmosphere and social setting strongly reminiscent of Euskal Herria. In addition, the boardinghouses made his arrival smoother by helping him with travel arrangements between stops. For this reason, many ostatuak were located within a few blocks of railway stations. The first Basque boardinghouses in the United States appeared in California in the decades following the gold rush and tended to be outposts along travel routes used by miners and sheepmen. Earliest Basque-owned or operated inns could be found in San Juan Bautista, western Merced County's Sentinella Ranch, San Francisco's Power Street, and San Juan Capistrano's mission district. As Basque migration to California from South American and around the Tierra del Fuego increased, colonies of Amerikanuak began forming in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In both coastal cities, clusters of centrally located ostatuak opened by 1880 and created California's first two "Basque towns." Spin-off hotels from the two centers fanned out, eventually reaching other California towns such as Bakersfield, Tehachapi, Fresno, Los Banos, Merced, Santa Barbara, Bishop, Mendota, Firebaugh, Chino, Puente, Susanville, Alturas, and Stockton. California's Amerikanauk were not the only Basques to bring ostatuak to their new environment, however. Two nineteenth-century factors that encouraged Basques to move into the Great Basin states were the lure of good pasture in the Sierra Nevadas and the completion of a transcontinental railroad system that opened eastern markets to western businessmen. In addition, the railroads made it possible for Euskaldunak to enter the United States on the eastern seaboard, facilitating the east-to-west flow of Basque and non-Basque immigrants for the first time in our nations' history. As could be expected, Basque boardinghouses followed directly on the heels of increased Basque immigration. By 1920, many of the western states contained ostatuak, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington have all hosted Basque hotels or boardinghouses at some point in their histories. In addition, Valentin Aguirre's Eusko-Etxea appeared in New York City and welcomed many a Basque newcomer. Most Basques use the term "hotel" rather casually, assuming that others understand their meaning. Since ostatuak are rapidly disappearing from the western landscape, it might be useful to consider some descriptions and definitions. Basque hotels were certainly not hotels as we know them today. In the strictest sense, they were boardinghouses that rented exclusively to single Basque men. They also housed the hotelkeeper's family and occasionally a few employees such as serving girls and cooks. During peak years of Basque migration, hoteleros rented exclusively to Basques. Rooms were sparse but clean, wash basins and bathrooms were usually located at the end of the hallways, and hoteleros often bunked extra boarders in dormitory-style rooms rather than turn an Euskalduna down. Despite the fact that very few of us today would strictly define the described ostatuak as "hotels," the term persists in Basque-American vocabulary. The original boardinghouses, and a number of their modern variations, are still called hotels. The custom of using interchangeably the terms boardinghouse and hotel for the ostatuak seems to be nearly a century old. In Los Angeles, for example, city directories reveal that locals began calling the boardinghouses hotels around 1890, even though the location, address, and operator remained the same. In a sense, the informal approach toward defining the Basque hotels might reflect another characteristic of the ostatuak and those who visited them. Very often, old-timers describe a hotel or boardinghouse they visited decades ago, recall its address and the names of its hoteleros, yet fail to remember the name of the ostatua. It seems to be easier for an Amerikanua to refer to or remember the hotels by their operators' names rather than the actual name of the hotel. For example, the Oyamburu in Los Angeles, the California in Stockton, or the French in San Juan Capistrano were better known among Basques as Sorçabal's, Alustiza's, and Oyharzabal's. Focusing upon the hoteleros rather than the formal name of the establishment suggests the slightly "invisible" nature of this social institution. That is, while ostatuak were critical to the lives of early Basque settlers and their families, their importance was somewhat unnoticed. Rarely do old-timers fully credit the hotel system for maintaining their cultural identity, for helping them weather their first years in America, or for allowing them to network with other Amerikanuak. As may be the case with many important social institutions within other cultural groups, the ostatuak were so critical to a Basque's livelihood that they remained undistinguished from his setting. When reviewing hotels that sprang up throughout the United States, one can see that they were similar to one another in many ways. Most often, they were linear, two-story, wooden structures. The lower floor was usually comprised of a barroom, card parlor, dining area, kitchen, and quarters for the hotelero and his family. The upper story contained sleeping rooms along both sides of a hallway that ran the length of the building, with toilet and bathroom at either end of the corridor. One might find a pelota court alongside one wall of the building. Also, the complex might have livestock pens, a livery for visiting horses in the early years, a small hut for visiting sheepdogs, vegetable gardens, storage space for supplies, or workbenches for making repairs. In many ways, the ostatuak were reminiscent of the self-sufficient baserriak or farms of the Old Country, for they aimed to satisfy all of the Euskaldunak's needs in a foreign land. Despite the physical similarities among hotels, however, they differed slightly, depending upon location, clientele, and function. In reviewing the nearly 120 ostatuak found in California's history, one can see that categories or types of boardinghouses existed. For instance, José Aguirre's San Francisco boardinghouse established in 1866 was a transit hotel whose primary function in early years was to house travelers for brief periods. Because transit hotels, by definition, moved Basques in and out of their doors rapidly, they probably contributed to the development of other hotels in surrounding areas. Hotels such as those in Chino, Bakersfield, and Puente, generated as "offshoots" from Los Angeles' "Basque town," could be called spin-off hotels since they were created in this fashion. Another type would be the regional Basque hotels. San Francisco's "Basque town" hotels often served as vacation spot and honeymoon centers for many California and Nevada Basques and a few of her ostatuak became regional hotels, just as Ogden's ostatuak did for Basques living in the Great Basin states. Hotels with less potent drawing power that still attracted Basques from neighboring counties might be distinguished as semi-regional hotels, such as those found in Reno, Boise, or Stockton. In addition to the transit, spin-off, and regional hotels, a fourth type might be called the local hotel. Serving the needs of local herders and their families, these hotels were small-scale local center found at the country or town level. Examples of communities supporting local hotels would be Los Banos, California; Burns, Oregon; and Caldwell, Idaho. In some localities, larger Basque populations were able to support a number of hotels within one neighborhood district. Such clusters have been referred to as "Basque towns" and were established throughout cities in the American West. A characteristic unique to "Basque town" hotels is that, in these settings, the ostatuak tended to take on the Old-World identity of their hotelkeepers. In the 1920s, Stockton's "Basque town" had three French and two Spanish Basque hoteleros with their customers divided accordingly. Clearly, many of these ostatuak fall into overlapping categories. A regional hotel might also have served as a transit hotel and have been located in the middle of a "Basque town." While these categorizations are useful for discussion purposes, they should not be regarded as rigid depictions. A final and contemporary type of Basque hotel would be the tourist hotel, which must attract non-Basque clientele to survive financially. Tourist hotels are frequently modern restaurants housed in an old ostatuak building that no longer takes in boarders. Because of its nature, the tourist hotel caters to non-Basques interested in sampling Basque cuisine. Basque hotelkeeping in post-gold rush years was intricately related to the expansions and contractions of the sheep industry. Quota legislation in the 1920s began restricting immigration and severely reduced the number of herders joining their compatriots in the United States. The virtual disappearance of the Basque shepherd in recent decades has signaled the ostatuak's death knell. Today, very few Basque boardinghouses exist as they did half a century ago. Even so, families like mine have depended upon them for many of the same reasons earlier Euskaldunak did. Additionally, very few Basque hotels are mentioned in Basque-American histories. While we know that Basques transplanted from Argentina brought both ostatuak and open-range sheepherding techniques north from South America, a great deal of information on boardinghouses in the American West and eastern seaboard remains uncollected. To date, the histories of hundreds of such hotels have settled into unrecorded oblivion. If you also fondly remember an ostatua or two from your childhood, or know someone who might, would you kindly fill out the form below and return it to the Basque Studies Program? Perhaps then we can create a fuller history of the Basque boardinghouses and hotels in American history together. ************************************* Your Name________________________________ Address___________________________________ City, State, Zip______________________________ Phone Number(s)____________________________ Brief description of hotel, person, or relevant information: Mail to: Dr. Jeronima Echeverria Basque Studies Program University of Nevada Library Reno, NV 89557-0012 |
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