Trip of the Tongue (25 page)

This process was hastened by decreased contact with the old country and increased association with the new. Immigration to the United States from Basque Country slowed during World War I before being cut off almost completely with the passage of the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. The latter act allowed only 131 new immigrants from Spain to enter the United States each year.
^au
Although there was an uptick in new arrivals after laws were passed to help lure back sheepherders in the 1940s and 1950s, Basque immigration would never again rise to its pre–World War I levels.

It was the rise of the sheepherding industry that brought the Basque to America, but in many ways it took the fall of the sheepherding industry for these Basques to become American. Not only did this push Basque Americans into industries where they would have more contact with and need more proficiency in English, but it also discouraged further immigration. Without a regular influx of native Basque-speakers, Basque American communities assimilated even more rapidly. Though the ancestors of Basque Americans may have gone for decades without learning English, today the overwhelming majority of Basque Americans speak only a few words of Basque—if, indeed, they speak any at all.

If you want to hear Basque in America, though, you can find it at a Basque festival. It will likely be nothing like the immersive fluency you would hear in another country. But you will at the very least notice the frequent use of Basque greetings. When I was there, festival-goers in Elko often greeted each other with
kaixo
(pronounced “KAI-sho”) and parted with an affectionate
adio
. You'll probably also hear a lot of the specialized words that are still used to describe festival activities and events. Some festival-goers, for example, will refer to the woodcutting competition as
aizkolaritza
or the ribbon folk dances as the
zinta dantza
. Many men carry around a
zahato
(sometimes called a
zahako
)—a wineskin traditionally used by shepherds—on their belts.
^av
And almost everyone plays
pilota
, or handball.

The Basques were the first to use rubber from the Americas to add bounce to the
pilota
, a ball that previously had been made out of leather and string. This new and improved
pilota
was perfect for hurling or hitting against a wall, being both bouncy and painfully hard. Naturally, the combination of speed and danger proved a popular one, and soon
pilota
(or, more colloquially,
pelota
) was a common activity at Basque gatherings. Americans are more familiar with one particularly fast-paced version of the game that was given the name
jai alai
, from the Basque for “merry festival.”
^aw

(
Jai alai
, by the way, is typically pronounced “HIGH-lie.” This may be old news to most, but I actually didn't realize the
j
wasn't pronounced the way it looks until I saw the third season of
Mad Men
.)

Basques also have a long tradition of so-called rural or country games (
herri kirolak
). These games are based on activities that were once part of everyday life in Basque Country, such as chopping wood, drilling holes, or lifting bales of hay. In order to maximize the entertainment value of these competitions, the games usually also incorporate some element of danger or absurdity. In Basque-style woodcutting competitions, for instance, competitors don't swing at the log from a secure position on the ground. Instead competitors are required to stand on top of the log they are cutting. If they want to maintain balance, then, they are forced to aim their axe at a point between their feet.

I saw more than a few of these
herri kirolak
on the first full day of the festival, which took place at the Elko County Fairgrounds. I arrived to find a healthy crowd milling about and taking their seats while concessions volunteers scurried around in T-shirts that read “Got Picon?” A few people lingered at nearby booths that were selling Basque paraphernalia such as berets and kerchiefs, but most attendees were interested in catching up with old friends and watching the competitions that played out in front of the grandstand over the course of the afternoon.

The afternoon featured a full program: in addition to the woodcutting, there was also weightlifting and weight carrying. In weightlifting contests, each competitor would pick up a 225-pound cylinder, lift it up to his shoulder, and then drop it to the ground, where it would land relatively gently on an old tire. Whoever lifted the cylinder the most times in three minutes was declared the winner. Weight carrying was less a test of pure strength than it was an endurance competition. Contestants each had to carry two 52-pound weights back and forth between two cones until they could go no farther. These weights, which look like small boxes with handles, were laughingly referred to by the spectators as “Basque suitcases.”

I also watched a number of dance performances and two tug-of-war contests featuring Elko high school students. The girls' tug-of-war pitted the varsity cheerleaders against the junior varsity cheerleaders. Even though I went to a school where the cheerleaders were actually not mean or bitchy at all, I nevertheless felt a surge of instinctive animosity when the varsity cheerleaders walked out. They looked smug, I thought, and their hair was too pretty to be trusted. I cheered embarrassingly loudly when the scrappy junior varsity team won.

There was also a sheepdog demonstration that was almost canceled due to “technical difficulty with the sheep.”

My favorite event of the day by far was the mixed relay, which combined weightlifting, weight carrying, wood chopping, and sprinting to retrieve cans of beer. In the old country, I was told, the contestants would have sprinted to retrieve ears of corn instead. This version, I decided, sounded much less fun.

I sat in the grandstand throughout the long afternoon, watching the festival-goers nearly as much as I watched the festival itself. I saw young families, teenagers, and garrulous twentysomethings. Scattered throughout the crowd were pockets of older men in matching Basque Club button-down shirts. The Ariñak dancers had performed early in the afternoon but had afterward dispersed throughout the bleachers, their costumes looking less like costumes and more like clothes among the kerchiefs and berets.

Before I came to Elko I had read somewhere the suggestion that festivals were so prominent in Basque culture in part because the Basques lacked a vigorous literary tradition. I remember I circled the paragraph with a pencil and wrote “interesting” in the margin as if I knew what the author was talking about. It's an absurd suggestion, of course. The English have Shakespeare, but they also get together each year to watch a bunch of half-naked halfwits chase a wheel of cheese down a hill. People just like to get drunk together. It has nothing to do with whether or not they have things to read.

After a weekend in Elko, though, I can't deny the role the festivals seem to play in the preservation of Basque culture in America. Many of the attendees I met spent each summer going from festival to festival, checking in with various cousins and second cousins and in-laws, listening to Basque music and watching Basque sports, wearing Basque clothing and eating Basque food. Despite being (and despite having been for a long time) a significant cultural minority with a geographically dispersed population, the Basques in America have nevertheless managed to retain an impressive level of cultural cohesion. Lest we forget, this is a country where an immigrant group can assimilate so completely that the act of going to the gym, tanning salon, and Laundromat becomes a cultural touchstone.

For centuries language has been the primary mode of distinction between the Basques and their French and Spanish neighbors. As such, the Basque language is deeply entangled in issues relating to Basque identity, independence, and nationalism. It is not immaterial that
euskara
, the Basques' own word for their language, forms the basis of the name of their people (
euskaldunak
—literally, “ones who have Basque language”) and their homeland (
euskal herria
—“land of the Basque language”).

Like so many other minority languages throughout history, the Basque language has been regularly subjected to assimilatory pressures and repressive policies. Over the course of his thirty-six-year rule, Francisco Franco ruthlessly suppressed the Basque language, banning its use in public places and at official functions and forbidding its instruction in schools. At best, those who spoke Basque in public could, like fifteenth-century Moors, expect to be admonished to
hable usted en cristiano
, or “speak Christian.” At worst, they could be arrested. Though restrictions on the language were not uniformly enforced for the duration of Franco's rule, the general policies remained largely the same. Prohibition of its use on TV and radio and in newspapers remained in place until Franco's death. Franco's focus on language policy, however, actually ensured that the preservation and, later, revival of the Basque language would become a key focus of the Basque nationalist movement.

One way the language was kept alive under Franco was through the establishment of underground Basque-language schools known as
ikastolak
. Today
ikastolak
operate openly and are a part of everyday life in much of Basque Country, but their mission remains the same. Educators are tasked with the promotion of multilingualism and multiculturalism, but their pedagogical emphasis is primarily on the promulgation of Basque language and culture.

Basque has also been safeguarded by the Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of the Basque Language.
^ax
The academy was founded in 1919 to protect, preserve, and promote the Basque language, but its efforts came largely to a standstill under Franco. It wasn't until 1968 that the academy began to exert a substantive effect on the Basque language, laying out a number of systematic prescriptive rules for the language. While many of their guidelines were controversial, by focusing their efforts on a single version of Basque instead of on its many different dialects, language advocates have been better able to concentrate their resources.

These efforts have not been in vain. The number of Basque-speakers in Spain did drop precipitously under Franco, but the decline no doubt would have been even greater were it not for the
ikastolak
, the Euskaltzaindia, and other policies meant to encourage the use of Basque both in and outside the home. The campaign appears at the very least to have stanched the wound, and there are even signs that the language is actually gaining ground. Over the past three decades, the proportion of bilingual Basque-speakers in Basque Country has actually risen substantially, from 21.6 percent in 1981 to 37.4 percent in 2006. In Gipuzkoa, meanwhile, the percentage of Basque-speakers ticked up to 51.5 percent in 2001, causing the Basque Statistics Office to trumpet the “first Province with a Basque-speaking majority.”

Even so, policy makers in Basque Country are hardly able to rest on their laurels. The language still has fewer than a million speakers, and although it may be the majority language in isolated portions of Basque Country, it is by far the minority language in France and Spain. Though it may not yet qualify as an endangered language (along the lines of, say, any of the United States' indigenous languages), UNESCO's most recent
Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
does classify Basque as “vulnerable.”

Despite the strong support within Basque Country for the use and study of their traditional language, proficiency in Basque is no longer a reliable marker of the Basque people. There are Basque-speakers who are not Basque; there are Basques who are not Basque-speakers. The language itself reflects this new reality, and the use of
euskaldunak
is giving way to a host of new modes of identification, terms like
euskaldun zahar
(“old Basque,” a native speaker),
euskaldun berri
(“new Basque,” a Basque learner), and
euskotar
(ethnic Basque).

Meanwhile, in the United States the language is on its last legs. In the 2000 U.S. Census, 57,793 people identified themselves as “Basque.” Only 2,513, however—a mere 4.3 percent of that number—reported speaking Basque at home. And only 355 of these Basque-speakers lived in Nevada, once the center of the Basque-dominated sheepherding industry; there were only 95 in Elko County. To be sure, the loss of a satellite language community is not the same as the loss of a core language community. Were Basque to disappear in the United States, it certainly would not be a cultural calamity on the scale of, say, the disappearance of Navajo or Gullah. Nevertheless—and perhaps because of the awareness engendered by the tyrannical policies of Franco—Basque Americans are more proactive than most immigrant groups in the promotion of their traditional language.

In the absence of continued immigration from Basque Country, the only realistic future for the Basque language in the United States is as a second language. And though festivals have managed to preserve personal and cultural ties among Basque Americans, they have been less than successful at encouraging the study of the Basque language. As anyone who has ever attended Hebrew school can tell you, language isn't something that can be learned on the weekend. Sure, you can pick up a few words here and there, but you'll probably never be proficient, and you'll certainly never be fluent.

This is a fact that Basque American cultural organizations are well aware of. In addition to hosting their yearly festivals, these groups also encourage exposure to the language by supporting programs at the University of Nevada–Reno and Boise State, by distributing language-learning software to local Basque clubs, and by promoting events such as the “Day of Basque.” The motto of the North American Basque Organizations puts their mission most succinctly:
Ospatu
+
Hezitu
=
Betikotu
, Celebrate + Educate = Perpetuate.