euskalkultura.eus

This past Sunday, September 7^th, the Marin Sonoma Basque Association celebrated its annual picnic. It was “nice and calm, as always,” Valerie Arrechea, president of NABO, the federation of North American Basque Organizations, told Euskalkultura.com. Around one hundred people attended this year when the club celebrates its 25^th anniversary.

Penngrove, USA. The Marin Sonoma Basque Association was founded in 1989, 25 years ago, by people living in these two counties North of San Francisco. It is a small Basque community, with no more than 200 members, and less than an hour away from the city of the Golden Gate. They keep traditions like their annual mus tournament, celebrated every March, and the picnic, always held on the weekend after Labor Day, Arrechea, a regular attendee, explains.

“The picnic is basically a lunch, there is no music and no dances, but it is a nice way to catch up with friends and see how their summers went,” she says. People brought food and drinks and cooked mostly everything there: barbequed chicken, beans, piperrade, salad, gâteau basque, and cheese. “It was very nice too that father Cachenaut came at the end of the lunch,” said Arrechea. Jean-Pierre Cachenaut is a Basque priest that was the chaplain for the Basques in the Western States for almost a decade in the 1980s. He is currently living in the Basque Country but has come for a few days to America to visit his old friends.

“There is not a good and a wrong way to celebrate being Basque,” the NABO president points out. “These small clubs are as important as the big ones, because they celebrate their communities doing what’s important to them. It is very important they keep their traditions because this is how they enrich the bigger Basque diaspora in the United States.”