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The Ysursas, a well known American family whose reference city is the US is Boise, Idaho will celebrate this weekend the Centennial of their arrival to America. It was in November 1915 when Benito Ysursa Urrutia left his home town in Iurreta, Bizkaia to establish in Boise, where he was able to raise a Basque American family, with progeny distributed today throught several states. One hundred years later, the Ysursas keep paying a contribution and adding from their Basque rooths to their daily American reality.

Boise, ID.   To mark this momentous occasion, the Ysursas are celebrating in Boise.  Five generations of the Ysursa family will share in the festivities with a special guest, the Mayor of Iurreta.  Wanting to maintain their cultural heritage and move forward and build on it by taking another step, beginning their second century in the United States by providing new opportunities for mutual understanding and growth for young people on both sides of the Atlantic. The first steps will be taken this weekend with a meeting between Mayor Totorikaguena from Iurreta and his counterpart in Boise, Dave Bieter.

Totorikaguena will also meet with the Oinkari dance group in Boise, as well as with representatives of the Basque club and other civil and cultural authorities in Idaho.  The idea on both sides, the Ysursas, and the highest representative of Iurreta, is to provide continuity and renew the legacy that Benito Ysursa started 100 years ago, following those traditional Basque words that Gernikako Arbola proclaims, “Eman da zabal zazu, munduan frutua,” providing and sharing with their surroundings.

Mayor Totorikaguena’s Program

Iñaki Totorikaguena will spend this week in Boise and will also visit cemeteries in Dry Creek and Morris Hill to pay tribute to Benito and those who died over the last hundred years from the Ysursa famil, as well as other members of the Idaho Basque community. He will attend an official reception at 4pm with Mayor Bieter at the town hall, and will also visit the Basque Museum and Cultural Center and the Jacobs-Uberuaga House, the final witness that integrates and combines the city’s Basque and American history.  His day will conclude with another reception beginning at 6pm.   

On Saturday, April 16, he will ride and tour Grandview, a beautiful area of great significance to the Ysursa-Basabe families, returning to Boise at 3pm, for a program that includes Basque Mass at 3:30 officiated by Fr. Antton Egiguren, Basque chaplain in Idaho, at the St. Paul Catholic Center, and then attending the Basque club’s monthly dinner at the Boise Basque Center, club members and friends.

The Legacy of Benito Ysursa

Benito Ysursa Urrutia was born in 1895 in the Iturburu farmhouse in Iurreta.  He immigrated to Boise in November 1915 and married Asuncion Camporredondo, who was from Trapagaran, Bizkaia.  They had two children, Ramon and Evangelina Ruby.  He became a very prominent person among the Basques in Boise and managed the Modern and Valencia hotels, in downtown Boise, contributing to the cultural dynamic of the city. The family treasures several recordings of him, during the time of the gramophone, with Benito playing jotas and popular Basque songs on his guitar, with Ramon and Ruby singing and dancing.  Ruby, married a Basque, John Basabe, and passed away in 2003, while her older brother passed just over a year ago, on January 20, 2015 at the age of 95.

There have been five Ysursa generations over the last 100 years.  Some, like Benito's son, Ramon, just missed this celebration, while new couples and generations like Mick and Jess Ysursa, Ramon’s grandchildren will soon becoming parents.  The new Ysursas recognize themselves as Americans and Basques, or Americans of Basque heritage, but while the first seems obvious, the second will only last if cultivated, celebrated and nourished from the depths of their roots and the values that the family exercises and transmits.  As the old Basque adage says so well “Izan zirelako gara, izan garelako izango dira” (Because they were we are, because we are, they will be).