Argentina

The Basque presence in Argentine history is seen better in people than in summaries: the sons of Basques who sat on the first governing juntas, the officers with Basque surnames who accompanied San Martín, a shoemaker from the Lower Pyrenees whose son founded a town and the seventy-nine figures of Basque origin buried in the Recoleta.

Sons of Basques in Argentine independence (1810-1816)

Of the nine members of the Primera Junta, the one of May 1810, two were sons of Basques: Miguel de Azcuénaga Basavilbaso and Juan Larrea. The Junta Grande, which came after it, included Francisco Antonio de Gurruchaga, Juan Ignacio Gorriti and Pedro Francisco Uriarte.²²

The last two were priests, and one of them went as far as signing the declaration of independence. Pedro Francisco de Uriarte (1758-1839), ordained in 1783, parish priest of Santiago del Estero and deputy for his province, signed the Act of Independence on 9 July 1816 and was a member of the committee that drafted the Provisional Regulation of 1817.²⁴

That priest with a Basque surname was no exception in the hall where the vote was taken: of the twenty-nine deputies who signed the Act, eleven were clergymen.²⁴

Officers with Basque surnames alongside San Martín

Before the wars of independence, during the British invasions of 1806-1807, it was a Basque merchant, Martín de Álzaga, who led the reconquest of Buenos Aires.²²

Later, in San Martín’s military circle, we find José María Aguirre, Gregorio Aráoz de Lamadrid, Mariano José de Gainza, Matías de Irigoyen, Toribio Luzuriaga, Mariano Necochea, José Valentín Olavarría and Matías de Zapiola, and in the north, Martín Miguel de Güemes Goyechea.²²

Two of those surnames ended up on the map. Necochea and Olavarría are today two cities in the province of Buenos Aires, and both have a Basque centre: the Centro Basko Argentino “Euzko Etxea” of Necochea and Gure Etxe Maitea of Olavarría.²⁵

Gardey, the town founded by the son of a shoemaker from the French Basque Country

This is a story from the French Basque Country, the side of Euskal Herria that appears least in the accounts of emigration. Jean Pierre Gardey was a shoemaker in the Lower Pyrenees and emigrated in 1863 with his family. By the middle of that decade, the Gardeys already had an inn and a general store in Tandil. His son Juan gradually opened the business up on other fronts: merchant, produce buyer with ox carts, cattle farmer. In 1895 he bought the Las Horquetas estancia, of 5,400 hectares, and in 1896, thirty-three years after the family emigrated, he founded the town of Gardey, which still bears that name today and lies in the district of Tandil.²⁷

Figures of Basque origin buried in the Recoleta cemetery

The Recoleta Cemetery opened on 17 November 1822 and was the city’s first public cemetery.²³ For its bicentenary, the Fundación Vasco Argentina Juan de Garay published a guide written by Jorge Beramendi, Los vascos en la Recoleta. Guía de sus bóvedas: ninety-six pages for touring the Basque vaults alone.

The list, read straight through, is the history of the country. Eva Duarte is there. So are the presidents Hipólito Yrigoyen, Nicolás Avellaneda, Manuel Quintana, Victorino de la Plaza, José Figueroa Alcorta and Juan Martín de Pueyrredón. So are Miguel de Azcuénaga, the one from the Primera Junta, and Tomás de Anchorena, and Martín de Álzaga, the one from the British invasions. So are Luis Federico Leloir, Nobel laureate in Chemistry, and Luis Agote, a world pioneer of blood transfusion. So are Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield, author of the Civil Code, and Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, all three descendants of Garay. And so is literature: Juana Manuela Gorriti, Oliverio Girondo, Eduardo Mallea, Enrique Larreta, Hugo Wast.

In all, the guide brings together 79 Basque figures or figures of Basque origin, plus six direct descendants of Juan de Garay.²³