TY - JOUR
AU - Aquino,, Mariel
AB - Iker Saitua’s Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry is a narrow study that explores the history of Basque sheepherders in Nevada’s Great Basin region. The author seeks to do away with the “romantic ideal of the nomadic Basque shepherd” (p. 10), and he does so by placing Basques and their labor into the larger context of the American capitalist western landscape. There are numerous examples of the hardships herders encountered, such as the exploitation they suffered at the hands of their employers, and the antagonism they faced from the cattle industry. Chapter 3, where Saitua explores the consequences of that antagonism, is the book’s most successful. In it, he argues that development of Nevada’s system of public lands was largely the result of the cattle industry’s attempts to prevent Basque herders from grazing on public lands. The cattle industry framed their complaints in environmentalist terms rather than xenophobic ones: they accused Basque herders’ sheep of destroying the range with their unfettered grazing. In this chapter, Saitua joins the growing ranks of scholars whose work asks us to consider the political origins and human consequencesof environmentalist policies. Less successful are those chapters in which the author explores Basques’ racialization as the ultimate sheepherders. By the 1940s, Basques had become in the American public imagination workers that possessed “certain racial/cultural advantages necessary for sheepherding that nobody else had” (p. 5); the wool industry later invoked this rhetoric to justify the importation of Basque sheepherders, circumventing the national quotas put in place by the Immigration Act of 1924. While the author effectively traces the development of this image in the American media, his analysis would have benefited from a greater consideration of how and why this racialization occurred. Further comparison with the histories of other ethnic groups would also have been welcome. There is some discussion of how Mexican sheepherding labor was devalued in favor of Basques’; but it would have been helpful to the general reader to more deeply consider both groups’ divergent experiences of labor racialization. The book suffers somewhat from a lack of cohesion: it is not always clear how chapters fit together, and the transition from broad social to close-grained diplomatic history in the final third is a bit jarring. A conclusion would have helped to clarify the author’s main arguments. Despite this, there is much to take away from this study; in particular the need for more scholarly attention to an understudied western population. Saitua’s emphasis on the political also helps illuminate the degree to which foreign policy concerns affected immigration law. Lastly, the transnational connections Saitua explores—between Basque migrants and the homeland, as well as American politicians and Spain—help us better understand the development of the current world system. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry: Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880–1954. The Basque Series. By Iker Saitua
JO - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whz100
DA - 2020-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/basque-immigrants-and-nevada-s-sheep-industry-geopolitics-and-the-FlAWBAgPDp
SP - 75
VL - 51
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -