This article originally appeared in Basque and Spanish at Euskalkultura.eus on November 23, 2021. In memory of Gorka Aulestia (1932-2021) Pete Cenarrusa passed away on September 29, 2013 at the age of 95 in Boise, Idaho. With him we lost possibly one of the last figures of his time to go down in history for […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario on October 9, 2019. The bertsolaris Fernando Aire Etxart “Xalbador” from Nafarroa Beherea and Mattin Treku Inharga of Lapurdi arrived in the United States in June 1960 to participate for a month in the Basque festivals of La Puente, Bakersfield (both in California), and Reno (Nevada), […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario on December 11, 2019. After the surrender of the US armed forces on May 6, 1942, in Corregidor, Japan was free to extend its military occupation throughout the Philippine archipelago. The Philippines was the only Pacific country with a solid and consolidated Basque and Navarrese community […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario on November 27, 2019. “The air attack on the airfields of the main island of the Philippines, Luzon, took us all by surprise and the ‘P-40’ fighters were destroyed on the ground the first day, without being able to take off.” Thus begins the first-person account […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario on December 25, 2019. Discussion of the Basque participation in the Merchant Marines of the Allied countries and more specifically in the United States during the Second World War (WWII), despite some non trivial efforts, have certainly been tangential, perhaps due to the immense scope of […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario on October 23, 2019. In contrast to the public commemorations of D-Day in Normandy, the Mariana island of Saipan attracts little or no institutional or media attention, despite its strategic importance in the Pacific Ocean theater of operations and the significance it had in the becoming […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at EuskalKultura.eus on July 23, 2021. Faced with the legend and the myth of Carranza and his group of “Basque code talkers,” the real events of those Americans of Basque origin, Basque of flesh and blood, with Basque names and surnames, have to be vindicated by Basque historiography as […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario on January 16, 2020. On December 14, 1944, two days before a large-scale German offensive began in the Ardennes and just four days after his 33rd birthday, the Basque-Californian soldier Alfred Starr Etcheverry wrote what would be his last letter to his wife Marion Hazard and […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at EuskalKultura.eus. Having just turned 19, the young Basque-New Yorker Julián Oleaga Garayo, slight of build, found himself with hundreds of his compatriots literally up to his neck in water – laden with equipment that almost equaled his own weight – starring in one of the most momentous episodes […]
This article originally appeared in Spanish at EuskalKultura.eus. A history of the Gernika Battalion (Pointe de Grave, 1945). When one of the authors of this blog, Guillermo Tabernilla, published the book Basque Combatants in World War II, we learned, for the first time, details of the Gernika Battalion that had not yet been treated by […]
