Family Ties in Contemporary Basque American Fiction

We pass...through the love of our family... to love Mankind.

J.H.B. de Saint Pierre, Studies of Nature (Henry Hunter, trans., 1796)

The present article focuses on family ties as one of the most recurrent topics in contemporary Basque-American fiction, with an emphasis on the interaction between descent relations and consent relations in Basque immigrant families in the American West. In fact, the leading Basque-American writers of the last few decades, including Robert Laxalt (1923-2001), the most accomplished literary interpreter of the Basques in the United States, have often underscored the tension between loyalty to family ties and the individual’s search for his/her own individuality as one of the central themes in Basque immigrant experience. Although contemporary Basque-American writers do not share a common perspective on the role of the family bonds in the immigrant experience, the influence of the Basque family heritage pervades most of their books. Even those writers who represent the newest generation of writers, such as Gregory Martin or Martin Etchart, are particularly interested in exploring the weight of family ties in Basque American communities.

Any discussion of the role of family ties in contemporary Basque American fiction should inevitably begin with an analysis of Robert Laxalt’s Basque-family trilogy. In fact, after the impressive success of Sweet Promised Land (1957), the book that put an end to the literary invisibility of the Basque immigrants in America, Laxalt extended his reputation as the literary spokesman for the Basque-American community, with his superb trilogy of the Indart family, composed of the novels The Basque Hotel (1989), Child of the Holy Ghost (1992), and The Governor's Mansion (1994). This trilogy is basically the story of a Basque immigrant family in the American West told by a second-generation son, Pete Indart. The similarities between this family and the author's own have been highlighted by different authors (see, for instance, Glotfelty 1998: 127, or Etulain 1999: 223-226), and Laxalt himself has conceded that “the story is mostly autobiographical" (2001: 186). Nevertheless, he has also emphasized the fictional characteristics of these books. See, for example, the way in which he refers to The Basque Hotel, the first volume in the trilogy:

Pete isn't me, although I suppose part of him is me, but not entirely. The story is drawn from people I knew and the setting I knew- but the events are invented. I knew these people. Then I created different situations to fit them. (Land 1989: 27).

In Laxalt's trilogy family becomes the pivotal reference, the main common thread of the three volumes. These novels offer different perspectives on family relations in a Basque household, but they all stress the tension between the power of family ties and the individual's desire to develop his own personality. In fact, the Indart saga illustrates the conflict between the concern for one's racial, ethnic and familial heritage and the natural desire to choose one's own destiny, even if this means departing from such a heritage. Or, to use Werner Sollors' terminology (1986: 5-6), we can view Laxalt's trilogy as an exploration of the tensions between "descent" and "consent", between ancestral or hereditary bonds and self-made or contractual identity.

The first volume of the Indart saga, The Basque Hotel, is a novel focused on the rites of passage that the adolescent Pete must face on his way to reach manhood. This initiation experience takes place in a very particular context: a Basque immigrant family fighting for acceptance in the American West during the first decades of the twentieth century. Laxalt's main interest does not lie in the first generation of immigrants, but in the behavior of the generation born in America, represented by young Pete, the narrator in the novel. Laxalt illustrates the contradicting influences that work on this teenager while growing up in Carson City. Thus, on the one hand, Pete's Basque family atmosphere constantly links him to an ancient heritage that he is often unable to understand. On the other hand, he longs for integration into American society, where he suffers prejudice and discrimination due to his immigrant family background.

The protagonist of The Basque Hotel undergoes a process of change from innocence to experience, from childhood to adulthood. This initiation process, symbolized by the passing of the seasons, also transforms gradually his attitude to his Basque heritage. Thus, at the beginning of the novel Laxalt emphasizes Pete's inability to come to terms with this heritage. He finds it difficult to understand the role that immigrants are supposed to play in American society, and he only wishes to grow up like most kids of his age. Pete's acceptance of American standards cannot be regarded as a rejection of his ancestry. It is simply that his family's Basque heritage often appears to him as a code whose meaning he is unable to grasp. Besides, Laxalt also shows in the novel that being ethnic was not fashionable at that time in America. Thus, he includes different references to the ethnic prejudice that Pete, as a son of immigrants, has to endure in America. For instance, we can see that he is tagged as the son of bootleggers because his parents serve some wine and whiskey at their hotel during Prohibition.

The Basque Hotel also shows how its protagonist becomes gradually aware of his ethnic background through a series of formative experiences. Pete's journey from innocence to experience is also a journey from ethnic ignorance to ethnic awareness. He learns about the history of his family in the Basque Country and the hardships suffered by his parents in America. Only through this knowledge does young Pete start to understand his family's old-country values and traditions. Laxalt does not mean that this character is headed for a total identification with his ethnic heritage or his family ways. In fact, as he grows up, Pete experiences a process of individuation, of psychological separation from the family. However, this phenomenon coexists with a more understanding and mature approach to his family and his heritage. Therefore, the novel should be viewed as the account of a dual process in which the individual experiences both identification with, and separation from, his family and his ethnic heritage (Rio 2003a: 73).

In Child of the Holy Ghost, the second volume of the trilogy, Laxalt resorts to the same narrator, now a grown-up, to explore the Basque heritage of this immigrant family. Pete's journey to the land of his ancestors in search of his roots represents a common attitude among those descendants of immigrants who, although they feel at home in America, look to recover their roots. In fact, we can say that Pete's pilgrimage to his family's Basque land may be regarded as a natural consequence of the immigration process. Children of immigrants, once they have become adults and have achieved their integration into American society, often fear the dissipation of their heritage and long for some kind of continuity with the past. This phenomenon will be much more common in the third generation, that is, among the grandchildren of immigrants, according to Hansen's famous principle or "law" of third-generation interest: "what the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember" (1952: 495). However, this principle should not be regarded as a universal one because, as Werner Sollors has argued (1986: 219), it is possible to be second generation and act third generation.

Child of the Holy Ghost offers an interesting account of the struggle of Pete's father, Petya, to endure loneliness and temptations in the American West. Nevertheless, the most remarkable sections of the novel are the ones devoted to analyzing the power of family bonds in the Basque Country, and in particular, the peculiar circumstances of the birth and upbringing of Pete's mother, Maitia. Laxalt evokes the ancestral relevance of family bonds in the Basque Country at the turn of the century, stressing the devotion of the Basques to their families. Although Child of the Holy Ghost highlights the transcendence of family ties in the Old Basque Country, this novel also shows that these family bonds are subordinated to an ancient code of honor which prescribes "a good name, or no name at all". Laxalt uses the fact of illegitimacy and its painful consequences for both the grandmother and the mother of the narrator to illustrate the preeminence of respectability above blood relationships in traditional Basque families. Thus, the novel describes how defiance of the moral code means for Pete's grandmother and her daughter the loss of society's supporting threads and even the break with their kin. So, illegitimacy works in the novel as a powerful cultural taboo which conditions the development of the individual's own personality in a society where "a good reputation is worth more than a golden belt" (1992: 14). Laxalt stresses the conflict between this traditional code and a modern American mind which disregards illegitimacy as "Middle Ages nonsense" (1992: 5). He even includes at the end of the novel the image of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of the final emancipation of the narrator's mother from the stigma of illegitimacy (Rio 2003a: 76).

In the third volume of the trilogy, The Governor's Mansion, Laxalt employs a modern American setting to explore the impact of politics on the same tradition-bound immigrant family. Again, the story is told from the point of view of Pete Indart, who plays an active role in the political career of his brother Leon in Nevada during the 1960's. The main sources for the book are actual political events experienced by the author assisting his brother Paul Laxalt, former Nevada Governor and U. S. Senator.

In The Governor's Mansion Leon Indart's successful political career represents the triumph of the descendants of immigrants, of the second generation whose struggle for integration and acceptance is rewarded by American society. Laxalt portrays the Indart family as a closely knit unit where each of its members contribute to the well-being of the others. This self-imposed discipline of duty to the family group, a traditional Basque trait, is represented as a fundamental factor for immigrants bound to overcome prejudice in the New World. In particular, Laxalt stresses the importance of family loyalty and family devotion to face the negative dimensions and turmoil of the political world. Thus, the novel shows the sacrifice of individual careers by different members of the Indart family in order to contribute to a common goal: the political success of the eldest son, and therefore, of the family as a whole. This willingness to subdue one's personal views and aims to the betterment of the family should be regarded as the supreme example in the novel of the impressive past power of family ties.

Although Laxalt underscores in The Governor's Mansion the importance of the family as a secure and protective frame for the descendants of immigrants in America, he also hints that the sacred circle of family may work as an obstacle to the individual's personal development. When too many experiences are reflected through the family, the individual runs the risk of losing his own identity. This phenomenon is particularly common in such a context as American politics, where "all egos must be diminished to preserve the almighty ego of the candidate" (1994: 22). This sacrifice has a series of rewards, but in the long run it may destroy the individual's own sense of reality. And it may provoke a permanent loss of identity that cannot be compensated by the ephemeral glory and fame of the political world (Rio 2003a: 78).

Robert Laxalt's achievement in his imaginative writings on the power of family ties among Basque immigrants in America has not been equaled thus far by any other Basque American authors. However, other writers such as Frank Bergon, Monique Urza (Laxalt's daughter), Gregory Martin and Martin Etchart, have written insightful portraits of the role of family bonds among Basque immigrants in the American West. Frank Bergon (b. 1943), for example, is going to resort to his Basque lineage to explore the matter of ethnicity in his fiction. Bergon’s first novel, Shoshone Mike (1987) recreates the so-called “last Indian battle”, a tragic incident in northwest Nevada in 1910-1911 in which Shoshone Mike and part of his band were killed in revenge for the murder of four stockmen- three of them Basques. One of the main characters is Jean Erramouspe, the son of one of the murdered Basque sheepmen. The novel includes a series of references to Jean’s parents, whose lean and harsh life in California and Nevada represents that of the first generation of Basque immigrants in the West. Thus, the novel addresses such topics as the inevitable employment as sheepherders of these immigrants due to their ethnic origin (1987: 21-22) or their first steps towards assimilation, for example, encouraging their children to learn English (1987: 18). Anyway, Bergon focuses on Jean’s sense of loss, illustrated by his inability to come to terms with his family legacy, in particular, with his ethnic heritage. In fact, Bergon utilizes Jean Erramouspe to show the extension of prejudice and discrimination against the Basques in the American West in the early twentieth century. Thus, the novel contains different references to the growing rejection towards foreign sheepherders and a series of insults related to the Basque language, to the sexual life of the sheepherders, to their smell or to their racial features Because of that, it is no wonder that Jean Erramouspe claims in the novel that “to be a Basque [...] was to get other men’s rejects” (1987: 16).

In Shoshone Mike Bergon refuses to portray Jean Erramouspe with the members of the posse to avenge his murdered father. Certainly, it would have been more novelistic and dramatic to include Jean in the posse, but as Bergon was told by surviving sons of the murdered sheepherder, “Nevada cowboys at that time would not have allowed a Basque to ride with them” (Río 2001: 62). In the end, the whole idea of revenge in the name of the father is rejected by Jean himself: “If he’d been there with the posse to shoot old Shoshone Mike in the head, what difference would it have made? His father would still be dead” (1987: 264). In this sense, we may argue that Jean moves from his firm belief in taking an eye for eye, to the acceptance of the death of his father as the result of a tragic misunderstanding rooted in a conflict between two cultures unable to communicate between each other due to the resilience of widespread prejudices and attitudes.

The Basque presence in the American West also plays a prominent role in Bergon’s third novel, Wild Game (1995). Its protagonist is a contemporary Basque American, Jack Irigaray, a wildlife biologist and game warden whose conflictive relation with his Basque heritage Bergon examines in detail. Jack Irigaray represents Bergon’s own generation, a generation who, due to their cultural assimilation by mainstream American society, was raised almost unaware of their ethnic consciousness: “when Jack was a kid, they were all just Americans, and not even hyphenated ones. [...] He was just another Westerner- a Nevadan” (1995: 3). However, when these Basque Americans became adults, they felt the need to rediscover their immigrant roots in order to transmit this heritage to their descendants. Because of that, the newest generations of Basque Americans in the American West, represented in the novel by Irigaray’s girls- “who sang Basque songs and danced the jota at the Zazpiak Bat Club” (1995: 3), will become more conscious of their ethnicity.

Bergon also underscores in Wild Game the transformation of the Basque American communities in the West. For example, the traditional unity of the Basque family is no longer taken for granted in the new generations, as illustrated by Irigaray’s failure as a husband and his divorce from Beth. Jack Irigaray’s own lifestyle, as a biologist and game warden, also epitomizes a hybrid existence between the past and the present and the interaction of two conflictive family influences. Thus, on the one hand, Irigaray seems to adapt his father’s view about the need to abandon the archetypal lifeways of the Basque immigrants: “the real world was one where people taught school, sold cars, ran restaurants, managed casinos, wrote books, and even governed the state” (1985: 80). On the other hand, Irigaray cannot hide his admiration for Pete, his uncle, who epitomizes the old way of life of previous generations of Basques in the American West. He stands for those Basques who decided to stay on the land, running cattle and sheep (1995: 80). His death in the last part of the novel seems to represent the closing of an era, the end of “the tough, lonesome world of Basques herding sheep in desolate hills and buckaroos following chuck wagons and sleeping in bedrolls” (1995: 80).

Apart from Robert Laxalt and Frank Bergon, we should name another relevant Basque American novelist in Nevada fiction: Monique Laxalt Urza (b. 1953), Robert Laxalt’s daughter. Her novel The Deep Blue Memory (1993) shares with Bergon’s Wild Game an important shift in perspective from the first-generation Basque sheepherder to his descendants in America, in particular to the third generation, the grandchildren of immigrants. This shift displays exceptional features in Urza's novel, mainly due to her use of a female perspective to portray the conflict between loyalty to one's ethnic heritage and Americanization. Urza is aware of the fact that gender has been often a neglected factor in Nevada fiction on the Basques. Even his father’s novels, with a few exceptions, such as Child of the Holy Ghost, tended to omit the experiences of Basque women. With The Deep Blue Memory Urza added her own voice to the family text, introducing a powerful combination of a female-oriented discourse and an insightful approach to ethnic issues.

The Deep Blue Memory may be regarded as the result of Urza's eager need to explore her own identity and, in particular, the roles of the American experience and the Basque heritage in it. Urza herself has referred to the whole writing of the novel as a learning process for her:

...when I sat down to write the book I just knew I had to try to put something down a paper and give a form to certain things I had experienced. Then at a certain point of the writing process I did realize that I was trying to figure out the basic identity complex between the Basque heritage and the American identity, and between the different role models (grandparents, parents...), and also the sense of family versus individuality (Río 1996: 5).

The Deep Blue Memory is based on the experiences of the writer's own family to describe the way in which different generations of a Basque family in Nevada come to terms with the immigration experience. The narrator of this story never discloses the surname of this family, but the family identity is not disguised in the book. However, we cannot forget that the book is a novel, as we may read at the beginning of The Deep Blue Memory, just before the epigraph: “This book is written as a piece of fiction”.

In The Deep Blue Memory Urza examines the complexity of the immigration process through different generations of the same family. She resorts to a juxtaposition of a series of images to show the conflict between the rewards brought by assimilation and acceptance into American society and the price to be paid for integration and success (Rio 2003b: 92-94). Urza also highlights in her novel the achievement of the narrator's family in America through the brilliant careers of the five children of the immigrant Basque sheep ranchers. Although the five brothers manage to obtain important rewards in their professional lives, it is Uncle Luke the one who best represents the success story of this Basque family. His meteoric political career, first as Nevada governor and later in the U.S. Senate, brings recognition and social prestige for the whole family, though the novel also shows that the price to be paid for success turns to be too high: the sacrifice of the invaluable privacy of the Basque family. As it was discussed earlier, this topic also plays a fundamental role in Robert Laxalt’s The Governor’s Mansion, a book published a year later than The Deep Blue Memory. Actually, it is possible to trace different intertextual connections between both books, though in Urza’s novel the meanness of politics not only breaks the family privacy, but it also puts into question its respectability.

Although Urza's novel may be viewed as a celebration of the power of the immigrant family and of loyalty to its heritage, we cannot forget that The Deep Blue Memory also emphasizes the importance of consent-based relations for the proper development as individuals of the descendants of immigrants. In fact, it is possible to say that the unity of the Basque family has to compete in the novel with the traditional American devotion to the individual's personal features. The book reveals the potential damage of an overemphasis on the family, on descent relations. The tragic end of Aunt Sondra illustrates the risks of a commitment to family that undervalues individual feelings (Rio 2003b: 96).

Overall, Monique Urza’s The Deep Blue Memory may be viewed as a fascinating exploration of the conflict between loyalty to one’s ethnic heritage and Americanization from a third-generation female-affirming perspective. This peculiar perspective is stressed by the peculiar bond between the female narrator and her beloved grandmother, who becomes a fundamental reference for the narrator’s own search for identity: “your body, your body that was old and good, it has been the thread. By which we have made our way through the labyrinth of the twenty years that were to come, that have come” (1993: 99).

Among the newest generation of Basque American writers, the most relevant voices are those of Gregory Martin and Martin Etchart. Gregory Martin is the author of Mountain City (2000), a highly acclaimed book on the everyday life of a small community in rural Nevada, with a particular emphasis on Martin’s Basque American family. The book was named a New York Times Notable Book and won a Washington State Book Award. Although family ties play a fundamental role in this book, Mountain City is not fiction, but a memoir about the summers Martin spent in this small Nevada town, his mother’s birthplace. At present, Martin is working on his first novel, a book set in southern Idaho in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Martin Etchart is a third-generation Basque American, born and raised in Arizona. He is the author of The Good Oak (2005), a masterful “Bildungsroman” where the value of family ties is enhanced. The novel, based on Etchart’s personal memories of his own youth, follows a grandfather and his thirteen-year-old grandson on a three-day sheep drive from Phoenix into northern Arizona mountains. Throughout the journey, both of their lives are changed, but especially the grandson’s. In fact, Matt Etchbar, the adolescent protagonist, develops a new bond with his grandfather, and he learns also about the value of coming to terms with his Basque heritage. Thus, the kid’s journey from innocence to experience includes a process of family awareness and also of ethnic maturation, of becoming acquainted with his own ethnic and cultural heritage. In general, the novel celebrates the power and rewards of family for the descendants of immigrants, and also the need to accept their ethnic heritage for their proper development as individuals.

All the different novels mentioned throughout this article illustrate the pivotal role played by family bonds in contemporary Basque American fiction. Certainly, their authors do not share a common perspective (actually, there are different generational and even gendered approaches) and besides the emphasis on descent-based relations often coexist with the recognition of the importance of consent-based relations in Basque immigrant communities. However, in most of these books family awareness becomes a fundamental element to understand the legacy of Basque heritage in America. This close interaction between family ties and ethnic awareness becomes particularly notorious among those Basque Americans who have witnessed the transition from immigrant to American-born in their own families. In fact, for these Basque Americans the search for their ethnic roots is often inexorably linked to the development of a more understanding approach to their family bonds.

Works cited

Bergon, Frank 1987: Shoshone Mike. New York: Viking.

----------------- 1995: Wild Game. Reno: U. of Nevada P.

Etchart, Martin 2005: The Good Oak. Reno: U. of Nevada P.

Etulain, Richard W. 1999: “Robert Laxalt: Basque Writer of the American West”. In Richard W. Etulain & Jeronima Echeverria, ed., Portraits of Basques in the New World. Reno & Las Vegas: U. of Nevada P. 212-229.

Glotfelty, Cheryll. 1998: “Robert Laxalt: Creating Culture in the Desert”. In Richard O. Davies, ed., The Maverick Spirit: Building the New Nevada. Reno & Las Vegas: U. of Nevada P. 115-132.

Hansen, Marcus Lee 1952: “The Third Generation in America”. Commentary, 14, November. 492-500.

Land, Barbara 1989: “An Interview with Robert Laxalt”. Nevada Magazine, November/December. 27.

Laxalt, Robert 1957: Sweet Promised Land. New York: Harper.

------------------1989: The Basque Hotel. Reno & Las Vegas: U. of Nevada P.

------------------1992: Child of the Holy Ghost. Reno, Las Vegas & London: U. of Nevada P.

------------------1994: The Governor's Mansion. Reno, Las Vegas & London: U. of Nevada P.

----------------- 2001: Travels with My Royal: A Memoir of the Writing Life. Reno: U. of Nevada P.

Martin, Gregory 2000: Mountain City. New York: North Point P.

Rio, David 1996: “The Miraculous Blend: An Interview with Monique Urza”. Journal of the Society of Basque Studies in America, 16. 1-14.

------------- 2001: “Basques in the International West: An Interview with Frank Bergon”. Western American Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring. 56-72.

------------- 2003a: “Robert Laxalt: A Basque Pioneer in the American Literary West”. American Studies International, Vol. XLI, No. 3, October. 60-81.

------------- 2003b: “Monique Laxalt: A Literary Interpreter for the New Generations of Basque Americans”. In Linda White and Cameron Watson, eds., Amatxi, Amuma, Amona: Writings in Honor of Basque Women. Reno: Center for Basque Studies (U. of Nevada, Reno). 86-98.

Sollors, Werner 1986: Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York & Oxford: Oxford U. P.