I got up this morning a bit early to try and get a little more research done before heading into the office. The topic, again, was de Anza-related. I figure if I continue to hit topics around the substantial moments of his life for the next 5 years, the essentials of the story I need to tell about him will finally materialize some time. It’s a hope.

I had been thinking the last few days about de Anza’s background, and how it had to play into the shaping of this man’s life. In a more generic sense, I wondered how his Basque heritage influenced his thinking and his actions.

From a cursory study about Basque culture, I gleaned a few insights about his people.

One article I read highlighted the fact that Basques have, over their history, been comfortable skirting Roman or European cultural norms to follow the customs that define them. Never mind their unique language. These people have always had a penchant for doing their own thing, despite how they’ve been directed otherwise. And this is not necessarily bad thing. Their independence of culture brings with it an independence of thinking among its members.

What is clear is that from this independent nature, there is a great spirit of adventure and entrepreneuralship oft found in Basque people, and both adventuring and entrepreneurialism are risk-taking activities which are embraced by people for whom fear is minimized and contained, or well dealt with.

Another interesting nugget I read was that Basque culture has always valued women, and that besides being able to inherit and control property, women could also officiate in churches.

And their mentality about land control, even reaching back to the Middle Ages, circumvented conventional thought. Land was acquired and held onto for the good of the family, and to the one who inherited land, there came with it an implicit understanding that, while they were title holder of the property, it still belonged to every family member- and as such, particularly in relation to large agricultural properties, the inheritor felt a responsibility to use it for the benefit of the family. This nugget alone tells me that commitment to family has been a key obligation for these people.

And the Basque have largely clung to Catholicism since they accepted it in the 10th century, from whom came Francis Xavier, the heralded Catholic missionary, and Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the society of Jesus (or the Catholic order of the Jesuit priest), and who led Xavier into Christianity. In an odd turn in history, it is de Anza who was given charge in the New World to expel Jesuits from his regions in 1767.

Basques are historically regarded as independent, free-thinking, tough, adventurous, egalitarian, religious, and family-oriented.

These tribal traits give us a little bit of insight into what kind of cultural customs leaned into his life.

De Anza was Basque by background, but he was born in the New World. He grew up a child in the demanding deserts of northern New Spain, and as such, he was also a child of life lived on the frontier, amidst bleak and bare places and peoples. He had to figure out how to foster and protect lives rooted in the new world as this steward still serving the old one, and representing his people in the process.

We at least get a sense here of some of the qualities de Anza was instilled with that guided him as a man.

As a Basque native of the New World.