Boucher publishes translation of Basque diary ‘Trip to Idaho 1938’

Teresa Boucher, professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, recently published her Spanish-to-English translation of Manu de la Sota's "Trip to Idaho 1938," the diary of a representative of the Basque government in exile after the bombing of Gernika.

Traveling by Greyhound bus from New York City to Boise, Sota recounts his perceptions of American culture in the 1930s - including the Jim Crow laws affecting that cross-country bus ride - and describes the Basque communities he meets in Idaho and its environs. His diary provides a lively, almost ethnographic recounting of the local Basque community with its boarding houses, boxing champion, bilingual cowboy poets, competing fundraising associations, weekly newspaper column, radio program, feuds, scandals, dances, sports, tensions between Basque Catholics and the Irish Catholic bishop, and the annual cycle of sheepherding tasks.

Sota also compiles a census of Basque Americans, recounts biographies of first-generation immigrants from the Basque Country, and details the menu items of every feast to which he was invited. His layman's sociological observations and ironic asides give the diary a novelistic quality. The Boise Basque Museum and Cultural Center provided the illustrations.

The book includes an appendix of the official reports he submitted to the Basque government in exile, as well as an appendix of names that serves a valuable genealogical reference for contemporary Basques of Idaho. In each community he visited, Sota presented a documentary film about the bombing of Gernika and the plight of Basque children in exile in France and beyond, seeking to connect Basque Americans to their European counterparts. The book provides a link to access to this documentary online.

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