euskalkultura.eus

The Kern County Basque Club, in Bakersfield, CA has organized a concert by the New Orleans band, The Iguanas.  The event’s goal is to raise money and create a scholarship for a university student to intern as part of the Memoria Bizia oral history program that preserves the testimonies of older members of the local Basque community. 

Bakersfield, CA.   The concert will take place on August 8th at a local brewery, the Temblor Brewing Company, and will be performed by invited artists The Iguanas, a band from New Orleans that plays “eclectic music with the sounds of the accordion, blues, jazz and Mexican music,” club sources told EuskalKultura.com.

Tickets are $25, $5 of which will go directly towards the project.

The Bakersfield club has made preserving the stories of the local Basque community a priority, and hopes to interview the largest number of people possible, as soon as possible.  The interviews with the Basque community elders, regardless of club membership will be videoed

The Kern County Basque club wants to raise money for a scholarship so that a student at California State University, in Bakersfield (CSUB), can work on the program providing it with the push that it needs.

The Memoria Bizia Program is the fruit of the collaboration between NABO, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Deusto University as well as the Etxepare Basque Institute and the Basque Government’s Directorate of the Basque Community Abroad.  The program is based in Reno with historian, and researcher Pedro Oiarzabal as its manager.  Even if the idea later extended to Argentina and other places in the Diaspora, its goal in the US and Canada was to establish, in several towns and places in North America that have a Basque presence, a local group that could preserve the oral histories by interviewing and recording elders in the Basque immigrant community, as well as first and second generation Basques who were born in these communities.

-Memoria Bizia: www.nabasque.org/oral_history.html
-Kern County Basque Club: http://kcbasqueclub.com