Company in Cambridge: A Pamplonan’s Coffee-Flavored Life

Josefina Yanguas is 89 years old. Her voice is velvety and still infused with an august Basque accent after all these years. Her hearing is not as good as it used to be, but she still musters enough wit for biting ripostes. Josefina has served rich coffee and even richer company over the 48 years that she owned Café Pamplona, playing host to writers, students, locals and luminaries. (She sold it to a young Canadian couple last week.) The café, “my little coffeehouse in Cambridge,” as she fondly calls it, will not be the same without her behind its counter.

America, however, just might be. “This is a lonely country. When you go to Pamplona—if you are alone for more than an hour, someone will start a conversation with you. If you go on the bus there, you will know the person’s life history before the ride’s over.” So she decided to fashion a coffeehouse in the style of those in Pamplona. It took her three years searching for a suitable location and working a $36 per week job to pay for it. It was more than just about coffee. “I thought this was the only way I could have contact with people,” she told us in a conversation this week at her residence above the Bow Street café.

Quickly, her little coffeehouse became one of the worst-kept secrets in Cambridge. A couple from Chicago urged Josefina to open another Café Pamplona in Chicago, but she told them, “If I wanted to live in the airport, I would do that. I want to run more of a friendly place.” And then there was the time when one of her regulars, a professor at Harvard Business School, asked how many cups of coffee she made from a pound of coffee beans; he wanted to help her increase the shop’s efficiency. Josefina’s response was, with characteristic bohemian spiritidness, “Ha! If I have $1 after expenses, I say to myself: ‘I am making money.’”

Over the years, the Café evolved into a freewheeling locus for intellectuals and travelers. Sometimes, however, the city was out of step with it. Then, as now, Cambridge had a law declaring it illegal to serve alcohol on sidewalk tables. “You could not serve liquor on the sidewalk? What difference does it make if you get drunk inside or outside?...In Pamplona we have more bars than churches. And we are not short of churches.”

Outside, Josefina would sometimes find out her patrons’ true identities from the dust-jackets of books. The quiet and relaxed, yet welcoming, atmosphere of Pamplona attracted writers of all ilks. “They would come in at 11 in the morning and leave at 10 at night, just reading and writing,” Josefina archly told us, “That’s why I never had music—you can’t think!”

But the Cambridge of Josefina’s prime is not the Cambridge of today. Ominously, banks now seem to dominate the central trine of Harvard square, taking advantage, as Josephina emphasized, of skyrocketing rents that only they can pay. And Harvard, the landlord in many cases, has done nothing to stop the commercialization of what used to be a closer, more integrated community.

Her philosophy of a coffeehouse, in this way, stands directly opposite to the quiet gentrification of Harvard Square. A coffeehouse should be a leisurely place for conversation and company. In one of the few times her voice took on an irritated edge, she said, “You go to a coffeehouse to talk, to work, to make a revolution, not to be on the computer! You can do that at your house. This is why [young people] are very isolated today, despite all this connectedness. Even Harvard students have stopped talking to people; they are too attached to the Internet, or their phones, or their headphones. They don’t know how to relax. When they come into my café like this, I tell them, ‘I am not a television set, I can talk too!’”



Pamplona remains an oasis for conversation in Cambridge, though thankfully it is not the only one these days. Josephina is thankful, too, for many reasons. “I was very lucky. I and my café have had superb friends. I thank all of them.”



Brian J. Rosenberg ’08, a Crimson associate editorial chair, is a biology concentrator in Lowell House. Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, a Crimson associate editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.