Argentina

Argentina was the first destination of Basque emigration, and today it is the country with more Basque centres than any other in the world: seventy-eight, spread from one end of its territory to the other. That community did not form all at once, but in layers that settled one on top of another: the scattered Basques who traded or held office in the colony, the great wave that Argentine immigration policy channelled between 1876 and 1930, and those who came after the Spanish Civil War. Today it is held together by a federation with centres all over the country, thousands of members and a young generation that has already taken over.

The first of those layers is almost as old as the city of Buenos Aires itself, which Juan de Garay, of Basque origin, refounded in 1580. Throughout the colonial period there were Basques in trade and in the administration, but they were isolated names in a society that was not their own: nobody brought them together, they had no common home, and so it remained until well into the nineteenth century.

From that point on, Argentine historians distinguish three moments: colonial immigration, which runs up to the National Organisation; what they call “institutional immigration”, from 1876 to 1930, the one the Argentine State itself went out to seek; and the one brought by the Spanish Civil War.¹

It was in the second that most of them came, and many of them did not experience the border as a border. For the Basque who worked on the River Plate, the two banks were almost one country: until well into the twentieth century, the boundary between Argentina and Uruguay, and to some extent that of Rio Grande do Sul as well, neither barred his way nor weighed on his mind. In the last third of the nineteenth century it was still common to cross the Uruguay River from one bank to the other, and back again, depending on where there was work and where the pay was better. Those comings and goings left almost no trace in the Argentine port records, which barely noted anyone arriving from a neighbouring country, and still less from Uruguay.² That is why the figures by country are porous: the same emigrant could be counted in two places, or in none.