Argentina

To come together, the Basques of Argentina first built homes of their own in Buenos Aires and Rosario, then a network of nationalist committees and newspapers and, in the end, a federation that brought most of them under a single name. The oldest of those homes is still open, and the federation is still standing.

That home was born in a café. On 13 March 1877, thirteen young Basques met at the Café Milán, at number 410 Calle Cangallo, and founded the Centro Laurak Bat de Buenos Aires. They did so in direct response to the abolition of the fueros the year before, and that centre is today the oldest Basque centre in the world still in activity. These were the thirteen: Francisco Aranguren, Francisco Beobide, José M. Berastegui, Juan M. Elgarresta, Vicente Ganuza, Anselmo Gomendio, Juan S. Jaca, Pablo Larburu, Canuto Lasaga, José A. Lasarte, Daniel Lizarralde, Hilario Mayora and Ramón Sorondo.⁵

Two decades later another kind of home began to take shape, the first intended for the Basques of both sides of the Pyrenees, and it was slow to be born. Martín Errecaborde, Nemesio de Olariaga and others had been promoting Euskal Echea since 1898. In April 1900 the first public document enshrining the project came out, and it was signed for the most part by board members or former board members of the three Basque centres that Buenos Aires then had. But the society was not founded until 24 April 1904, when the assembly that had opened on the 17th and continued on the 24th approved its Statutes and Regulations.⁶ It began as a charity for orphans and ended up as a school: at its premises in Llavallol the sons of the Basque landowners of the Buenos Aires interior were educated, and Basque was taught there until 1932. That same year of 1904, the Laurak Bat opened its own chair of Basque, which ran until 1906 under the direction of Pello Mari Otaño.²¹

Why did the centres multiply? Historians point to something less kindly than nostalgia: regionalism. The fuerismo, the defence of the old charters, that the last Carlist war had left behind, the defeat in Cuba and the rise of the nationalisms of the Peninsula stirred up repressed passions. When the Centro Vasco Francés, the Laurak Bat and the Centro Navarro appeared, and groups such as the people from Irun began to meet on their own, some responded by creating institutions to check that fragmentation, such as the Zazpirak Bat of Rosario or Euskal Echea itself.⁶ The centres did not only preserve an identity; they also argued over which one it was.

That argument also had its political side, in a Basque nationalist fabric that was dense and well dated. The magazine Irrintzi, by Nemesio Olariaga, came out on 1 December 1903. In Rosario the Comité Nacionalista Vasco (1911) and the Centro Zazpirak-Bat (1912) were created, and the newspapers Aitor (1915), Patria (1917) and Zazpirak-Bat (1922) were published there. In Buenos Aires the Junta Municipal Nacionalista Vasca appeared in 1913, and in 1919 the Comunión Nacionalista Vasca de la República Argentina, a delegation of the PNV, the Basque Nationalist Party. In 1923 the Acción Nacionalista Vasca de la Argentina was born, which in 1933 became an extraterritorial organisation of the PNV and in 1939 had to change its name to Acción Vasca de Argentina. Its newspaper, Nación Vasca, came out from 1924 to 1998.⁷

Bringing all of that together took years. The process got under way in the 1940s and was finally settled on 7 January 1955,¹⁷ when, in Mar del Plata, in the middle of the Semana Vasca (Basque Week), the Federación de Entidades Vasco Argentinas, the FEVA, was constituted. There were 22 founding entities, although the Auñamendi counts 23 according to the record of the extraordinary general assembly of 1968.²⁶ Among them were Acción Vasca de la Argentina, Laurak Bat, Zazpirak Bat, the Asociación Coral Lagun Onak and the Euzko Etxea of Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, La Plata, Rosario, Córdoba and Bahía Blanca.²⁶ Its aims were written down like this: “to strive by every means for the greatest harmony to reign among its members” and to aspire to “the total union of all Basque and Basque-Argentine forces”.²⁶ It is the largest structure of the Basque community outside Euskal Herria.⁸

Since its foundation, six centres regarded as “large or traditional” have had a guaranteed seat on its Board of Directors: Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires, Euzko Etxea of La Plata, Unión Vasca de Bahía Blanca, Euzko Etxea of Necochea, Zazpirak Bat of Rosario and Denak Bat of Mar del Plata.⁹

The federation was soon looking beyond Argentina. A year after it was born, at the Congreso Mundial Vasco de París, the World Basque Congress in Paris (23-29 September 1956), it was a founding member of the Confederación de Entidades Vascas en América (CEVA), together with the Federación de Entidades Vascas de Chile, the Centro Vasco de Caracas and the Centro Vasco Euskal Erria de Montevideo.⁸