Category Archives: People

Great Basque Football Player Dies

Ok, maybe not quite what you think.  The Aug 30 edition of The Gazette reported on the death of Sam Etcheverry, one of the greatest quarterbacks of the Montreal Alouettes and the Canadian Football League (CFL).  He also coached the Alouettes to a championship of the CFL. Sam was born in Carlsbad, NM.  What the […]

Being Basque

Last month, my family and I were up in Idaho to visit grandparents.  While visiting amuma and aitxitxa (now affectionately known as “txitxi”), a couple of dad’s buddies got together at the Txoko Ona, their Basque center in Homedale, to eat and play cards.  They’d planned it a bit, but it wasn’t an overly involved […]

Euskal Kazeta — Basque News

To Basques in the US, Nancy Zubiri is well known.  Author of A Travel Guide to Basque America, there is probably no one who knows better both the current landscape of Basque America or how that landscape came to be.  Thus, it is very fitting that Nancy has just launched a new project, an online […]

Sails of Fortune by Christine Echeverria Bender

Having read Laurence Bergreen’s description of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, Over the Edge of the World (see this post), I was very interested in Christine Echeverria Bender’s take of the same voyage, Sails of Fortune, partially because I found Bergreen’s account so fascinating, but also because I knew Bender’s would cast a more favorable […]

Over the Edge of the World by Laurence Bergreen

I originally wrote these thoughts in August of 2005 and thought I’d posted them here, but just realized I hadn’t.  In looking back, there are clearly some errors in what I wrote, which I’ve corrected. Over the Edge of the World, by Laurence Bergreen, tells the story of the first voyage around the world, the […]

Basque Canoe

Jeremiah Saiz, whose ancestors are from the Basque Country, is a native New Mexican who has spent many years in Hawaii and is now living in San Francisco.  In a blend of his interests and his heritage, Jeremiah had his new canoe painted in Basque colors.  He also christened his canoe Aidegatxo, which in Lapurdi […]

Mikel Laboa: First notes for a march…

One of the pioneers of modern Basque music, Mikel Laboa, recently died (Dec 1, 2008).  Beginning in the 1960s, Laboa was a cornerstone of much that followed, from the rediscovery of traditional Basque instruments such as the alboka and the txalaparta to influencing even some of the hard rock and heavy metal bands that the […]

Link dump

I’ve been meaning to share this set of links for a while and just thought I’d “dump” them on you before I either forget or they get outdated. 🙂 Last.fm, an online music station of sorts, has a channel dedicated to Kortatu and similar artists. I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet, […]