On the beginnings of Basque-American press: An analysis on the newspaper Californiako Eskual Herria (1893)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the Basque-American newspaper Californiako Eskual Herria, based on the used, as the main source, of the collection of remaining issues of the newspaper as published within the Urazandi collection1 . During this essay, firstly as a contextualization, I give information about the Basque people who left the Basque Country to move to the Unites States, why moved, how they lived once in the States, on what they worked. On the other hand there is also information about the Basque language; its different varieties, when, where and how the language was used in the diasporic historical context. Later, I explain the content of the source and some conclusions I reached after analyzing all the issues of the newspaper from July to December of the year 1893; the very first year of the newspaper. For the analysis, I divided the newspaper in different sections: there is information2 about the director of the newspaper, how the newspaper is organized explaining, and what appears in each page, which sometimes changed during the different issues but not always and a path can be found too. Besides, there are two other important parts, one is the news given in the newspaper by analyzing where are the news from and how often they appear. The other part will be the different advertisements of the newspaper; in what language they were written, what language the advertisers speak, what they try to sell in the advertisement. The same way as I did with the news, this time I will also explain how often the advertisements appear. Moreover, for a better understanding of this last part, I made two graphics for a more visual idea of the topic. Last but not least, I made some conclusions about the newspaper and what I have analyzed on it, and also there is some conclusion about the project itself too.