The Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism


Photo by Bill Belknap Nevada author Robert Laxalt in 1965.

In his memoir Sweet Promised Land, published in 1957, the late Nevada author Robert Laxalt foresaw changes for the Basque way of life.

The book tells the story of Dominique Laxalt, a Basque sheepherder who’d traveled to Nevada from the Basque homeland in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France to make his fortune. He stayed and made the West his home. But adjustments to the New World were costly. The elder Laxalt, in traveling back to the old country later in life, felt awkward. He worried that his children’s children would not remember their Basque heritage.

Robert Laxalt, a UNR graduate and later a journalism professor at the Reynolds School, invoked Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur’s idea of a melting pot into which the singular Basque identity would eventually dissolve.

“And in a little while,” Laxalt wrote, “even our sons would forget, and the old country people would be only a dimming memory, and names would mean nothing, and the melting would be done.”

When Laxalt published Sweet Promised Land in 1957, many Basque-American families identified with the story. Those who wrote to the author were invited to the first Western Basque Festival in Sparks in 1959. The festival, with folk dancing, weight carrying and wood chopping, was sponsored by the Nugget, a local casino managed by a Basque named John Ascuaga. It inspired similar events in Basque communities throughout Nevada, Idaho and California

Nowadays, descendants of the Basques immigrants who flocked to Nevada and other western states from the mid-1800s through the 1960s to herd sheep, dig for gold and run hotels are undoubtedly more American than they are Basque. But Nevada ’s Basques, full-blooded and otherwise, stubbornly refuse to let the culture dissolve entirely into the American broth.

“These people don’t melt,” declares Margi Silonis, 61, a Reno nurse whose mother re-married into a Basque family when Silonis was a child. “Their pride’s the biggest part of them. They don’t melt.”

Laxalt was inducted into the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame in 1988.

Read Laxalt's profile.