Blake Allmendinger is a professor of English at the University of California–Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, including Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West (Nebraska, 2021), The Melon Capital of the World (Nebraska, 2015), Imagining the African American West (Nebraska, 2008), and The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture. His newest book, Tongues of Settlement: Where the World Becomes Basque (Nebraska, 2025) was published last month.

Known for their cultural traditions, celebrated cuisine, and distinct language, Basque peoples originated in a small area in the Pyrenees Mountains called Euskal Herria, or the Basque Country. Over the centuries, large numbers of Basques have left their homeland to settle throughout Spain, France, North America, Latin America, and South Africa, accompanied by their unique language and literature.

Tongues of Settlement traces how Basque emigrants and their descendants have adapted to the Americas by interacting with the land and people, while inscribing their presence and producing a body of literature distinct from the literature of Euskal Herria. Blake Allmendinger explores the evolving relationship between language and place, analyzing forms of remembrance used to signify the Basque presence in numerous countries, especially in the western United States, where most immigrants settled and where their descendants currently reside.

I didn’t learn I was Basque until my father told me how my grandmother almost died while giving birth to my aunt. Grandma Mary was the daughter of a shepherd named Jean Arreguy, who emigrated from France to the United States in the late nineteenth century. After arriving in California, he signed a seven-year contract to work for a farmer near Bakersfield. When the contract expired, he was paid in sheep, instead of money, so he could start his own flock. No one knows exactly what happened next. Apparently my great-grandfather got in trouble and someone was shot. Shortly thereafter, he left California with fellow immigrant and shepherd Jean Erramuspe. They settled in southeastern Colorado, where my great-grandfather married a local woman. In 1901 the couple bought a farm where they tended stock, grew crops, and raised three children: Joanes (the Basque name for Jonas), Julie, and Grandma Mary. After her husband died in 1946, my great-grandmother married his friend. She died in 1968, followed by her second husband two years later. Joanes inherited the family homestead, and Julie moved to Grand Junction. My grandmother married Jerry Allmendinger, who owned a farm near Wiley.

Many Basques have a rare genetic trait called Rh-negative blood. If a Basque woman becomes pregnant by a man with Rh-positive blood, her body identifies the baby as a malignant growth and her antibodies attack the fetus, causing a spontaneous miscarriage. Although Grandma Mary didn’t experience any difficulties giving birth to my father, it was another eleven years before she was able to carry a baby to term. During delivery, she hemorrhaged and almost died because the small country hospital didn’t have a backup supply of Rh-negative blood.

Basques have the largest population with the rarest blood type on Earth. They also speak the oldest European language known to scholars. Euskara predates the Indo- European languages that spread across the continent during the Neolithic era, beginning in approximately 4000 bc. It’s a language “isolate” that bears no relationship to Spanish and French, the languages spoken in the two countries where the seven Basque provinces are situated, high in the Pyrenees Mountains. For centuries, Basques claimed their native tongue was the original language spoken by Adam and Eve. When Adam named the elements in the Garden of Eden, he forged a literal correspondence between the word and the thing.

Basques often say: Izen bat duena existitzen da (That which has a name exists). Today, regardless of their religious beliefs, Basques continue to associate language with place. The Basque region is known as Euskal Herria (The Place Where People Speak Basque). There is no exact translation for the root word herri. In English, it means nation, country, or village: a large space or a small one. This is an especially useful term for Basques, who have never had their own nation. Until the twentieth century, they were mostly villagers who worked as farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. Their herri was wherever Basque people lived.

The baserri (farmhouse or homestead) is also a Basque microcommunity: a self-sufficient space, virtually independent from other dwellings or villages. The traditional baserri was designed in the late Middle Ages for people living in agrarian areas. The ground level served as a barn for livestock and as a storage space for farm tools. The upper floors were occupied by the family, while the attic served as a granary bin. The farms were small, especially in mountainous areas. But they enabled families to grow their own food and sell the rest at the outdoor markets held each week in the village plazas. A traditional baserri had two staircases—one outside the house and the other inside the barn. When the Basques were attacked by invaders, they burned their exterior staircases to repel the enemy and save themselves and their language from extinction.

Each baserri had a name carved over the door, inscribed in a plaque on an exterior wall, or written on a lintel over a front-facing window. The name was often a toponym, referring to an outdoor locale or an object in nature. Families adopted this word as their surname, forging a linguistic, cultural, and geographic connection among nature, people, and home. Examples of Basque surnames include: Sara (timberland), Bidart (between the paths), Oihanzelai (wooded plateau), Larrun (good pasture land), and Goroztarzu (stony place planted with holly). A stillborn baby or child who died before being baptized was buried next to one of the homestead’s exterior walls. Others were buried in a family crypt in the village cemetery. These communal spaces were also inscribed with an owner’s surname, creating an extension of the ancestral home and establishing a genealogical link between the dead and the living.

The Basques, their homes, and their language were protected by fueros. In the early sixteenth century, Spain issued charters to the four Basque provinces under its rule, granting their inhabitants certain autonomous privileges. (Those who lived in the other three provinces lost their semi-independence during the French Revolution in 1790.) The fueros granted Spanish Basques universal nobility based on their unique language and their status as the original settlers of central Europe. They also exempted Basques from paying taxes and performing military service, while granting them the right to administer their own farmlands, to pass their own inheritance laws, and to handle provincial civil and criminal matters.

The fueros reinforced conflicting stereotypes about the Basques. On one hand, universal nobility endorsed the myth about the exceptional nature of this continental minority group. On the other hand, only a small percentage of Basques, who had been educated by Catholic priests and nuns, knew Spanish or Latin.