Category Archives: People

Basque Fact of the Week: Fashion Designer Paco Rabanne

Despite its relatively small size, the Basque Country seems to produce a disproportionate number of leaders and innovators. A prime example is the world of fashion, where two world-renowned designers – Cristóbal Balenciaga and Paco Rabanne – got their start. Rabanne, who’s mother worked for Balenciaga, viewed himself as a disciple of the more senior designer. […]

Basque Fact of the Week: The “Basque Spitfire” Yolande Betbeze, Miss America 1951

Sometimes during my foraging of the Internet for interesting stories about Basque culture, I come across a cool tidbit like this week’s fact about Yolande Betbeze. Almost all references to her note her Basque ancestry. However, this is a case where I can’t really confirm her Basque heritage – it seems that her first immigrant […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Pío Baroja y Nessi

No Basque has won the Nobel Prize for literature. If there was ever a strong candidate, it might have been Pío Baroja y Nessi. He was a prolific writer whose influence extended to Nobel Prize winners such as Ernest Hemingway. However, he simply didn’t have the desire for self-promotion. He just wanted to write. His […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Robert Laxalt, the Voice of the American Basques

“My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills.” The opening to Robert Laxalt’s Sweet Promised Land resonates with so many of us, capturing not only the sheepherder life of his own father, but the experience of many Basque immigrants who made new homes in the American West. I discovered Laxalt’s books when […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Miguel de Unamuno

Sometimes, it seems that the very idea of being Basque is inherently full of contradictions. Perhaps this is a consequence of not having their own country, of being split into two different regimes with two different external cultures influencing them. Miguel de Unamuno is perhaps one of the most important Basque intellectuals, certainly of the […]

Basque Fact of the Week: The Great Basque Anthropologist, Ethnologist, and Historian Julio Caro Baroja

It hasn’t been all that long that Basque studies started delving into Basque prehistory and the myths and legends that shaped the Basque world view. José Miguel de Barandiaran Ayerbe was a pioneer in these efforts, but he didn’t work alone and his student, Julio Caro Baroja – the nephew of one of the greatest […]

Basque Fact of the Week: José Miguel de Barandiaran Ayerbe, the Great Patriarch of Basque Culture

The Basques converted to Christianity relatively late compared to many of their neighbors, and before that they had a complex and fascinating mythology that involved a myriad of creatures and powerful beings that impacted the daily life of the people dotting the Basque coast. Much of what we know about that mythology – and Basque […]

Francisco Carriedo???

Hey friends of Buber’s Basque Page! I got a query about Francisco Carriedo and if I knew anything about the man. He was a military officer who served as Capitan General of the Philippines back in early 1700s. He was the benefactor who supported the creation of Manila’s water system. But, that’s all I could […]

Reasons, a Poem by Harkaitz Cano, Translated by Elizabeth Macklin

The New Yorker recently published the poem Reasons, by Basque poet Harkaitz Cano. Actually, they published the translation by Elizabeth Macklin, but on their site you can also find an audio clip of both reading the poem. I’m copying the translated version below. I admit, I’m not much of a poetry reader, not really having […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Napoleon’s Nephew was a Linguist who Studied Basque

How does an aristocrat – a man born into privilege and titles, the nephew of one of the most powerful leaders of Europe – become one of the most important researchers of the Basque language? Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, extensively studied the regional variations of Euskara, establishing a critical map of the dialects. While […]