‘Like home for us’: Inside the Basque book inspired by Boise’s link to the culture
When a group of teenage girls flew thousands of miles from Bilbao in northern Spain to Boise for last summer’s Jaialdi festival, they found something they didn’t expect: the feeling of home.
The writers watching them felt it, too.
That trip — made by a women’s youth soccer team from Athletic Club Bilbao’s academy — became the inspiration for “Boise,” a Basque-language children’s book published by the Athletic Club Foundation. The work of fiction explores language, belonging and what it means to carry a culture thousands of miles from home.
The book contains three separate stories, each exploring a different thread of Basque identity.
“Boise is like home for us,” said author Xabi Paya, one of the three writers commissioned by the Athletic Club Foundation to document the trip. “The way that you have found out in Boise to be Basque-American is a novel thing. When we go there, there’s a place for us, too. There’s no other place in the world like Boise.”
Paya’s story follows a young girl who arrives in Boise nursing an injury and finds herself balancing the cultural pressure to excel academically and athletically while taking time to heal. When her team meets the Indie Chicas, Boise’s all-girls soccer club, she discovers what Paya describes as another way to “live football,” one built on team building and resilience rather than pure technique and excellence. But when the girl is injured again while rafting on the Boise River, the story takes an unexpected turn: The reader is asked to decide how it ends. Does she keep fighting for her dream, or walk away? The title, “Zu Zara Nagusia” — “You are the Boss” — puts that choice in the reader’s hands.
Co-author Nerea Ibarzabal’s story follows a young girl named Yarde who asks “What does it actually mean to be Basque?” after losing her grandmother. Is it speaking the language? Performing traditional dances? Eating the food? The answer she finds results in her finding a new way of seeing her own identity in a city where people have maintained language and culture across generations and thousands of miles.
Joana Onintza Ruiz Olabuenaga, director of community relations at Athletic Club, said the rich sense of cultural identity in Boise goes well beyond any single landmark or event. “Here, it’s a city thing,” she said. “It goes beyond a place or a spot. It makes you feel proud of your identity and those who have been able to maintain it so strongly, so far away.”
“Boise” is a part of the Athletic Club Foundation’s annual program of distributing free books to schools throughout the Basque Country. The foundation visits around 70 schools each year, inviting students to actively engage with the themes of the stories.
While “Boise” is not currently available in Idaho, a free digital download will be available in the coming weeks on the Athletic Club Foundation’s website.