The Basques of Bakersfield

Beginning in the eighteen eighties and accelerating through the early twentieth century, Basque sheepherders from the provinces of the western Pyrenees, from Navarra and the Basque Country of Spain and from the French side of the mountains, began arriving in Kern County in significant numbers. They came for the same reason Basques had been arriving in California and Nevada since the eighteen fifties: sheep grazing on open range, an occupation that required the kind of solitary, self-sufficient labor the Basques had practiced for centuries in the mountain pastures of Europe, and that translated directly to the Sierra Nevada foothills and the valley edges around Bakersfield.

The economics worked. A herder could negotiate a contract, take a band of sheep into the hills, and return after months of isolation with enough money to either send home to family in Euskal Herria or save toward owning animals of his own. The work was brutal and lonely, and the Basque boarding houses that sprang up in Bakersfield served as the social and commercial anchors of the community: places where herders could spend their weeks between grazing seasons, eat food that tasted like home, and speak a language that nobody else in Kern County understood.

Two of those boarding houses became famous. Noriega's Hotel on Sumner Street opened in eighteen ninety-three and closed in twenty twenty. The Wool Growers restaurant on Union Avenue dates from nineteen fifty-four and is still going. Both served the traditional Basque family-style meals that were the economic basis of the boarding house model: long tables, fixed-price meals, wine served in pitchers, and courses arriving in sequence without a menu being consulted. The format was functional. Herders who came to town did not want to study a menu. They wanted to sit down and be fed.

The Bakersfield Basque community is one of the largest in the United States, though exact population figures are difficult to establish because Basque identity is not a separate Census category. What the boarding house record and the community organization records establish is that the concentration here was and remains substantial enough to support institutions that operated for generations. The sheep herding economy that brought the first generation here is largely gone. The Wool Growers is not.