Argentina

Argentina did not come across the Basques by chance: it went looking for them, and it did so by law.

Law 817 on Immigration and Colonisation was enacted in 1876, under the presidency of Nicolás Avellaneda, after a debate that took up two parliamentary sessions. The country was going through the economic crisis of 1873-76 and was competing with its neighbours, Brazil above all, to attract immigrants. The law was meant to help it out of the one and to win the other, and it ended up as one of the pillars of Argentine modernisation.³

What it offered families willing to settle as farmers in the colonies was a great deal: the State advanced them the passage on the ship, gave them land free or sold it to them on long terms, carried them at no cost from the port to their destination and, during the first year, advanced them provisions, seed, tools, and draught and breeding animals.³

And yet that law had not been written with them in mind. Article 76 called for encouraging, above all, immigrants from northern Europe, and to that end it subsidised certain steamship lines. Nor was it applied as written: it was applied slowly, by halves, with little effect, because the State lacked the means and because emigration followed its own paths, far from the government offices. Only during the presidency of Juárez Celman (1886-1890), with agents posted in Europe and subsidised passages, did the State really manage to steer the flow, and the crisis of 1890-92 put an end to that drive.³

The newcomer who landed in Buenos Aires, in any case, did not arrive into a void. Since 1854 there had been the Asociación Filantrópica de Inmigración, created by the Buenos Aires legislature and paid for by the province: next to the port it had a shelter where new arrivals slept and ate free of charge for their first eight days in the country, and in Europe it handed out leaflets that presented Argentina as a land of immigration. Behind it stood some of the biggest landowners and rural businessmen of the day (Olivera, Gowland, Pereyra, Martínez de Hoz, Armstrong, Casares), who needed hands used to the new ways of working the land.³

But what probably weighed most came not from any ministry but from the families themselves. From the 1880s, when the ships made the voyage shorter and more regular, the system of “calling passages” spread: whoever had already settled paid the ticket for the brother, the cousin, the nephew waiting on the other side of the ocean. An estimate from 1893 put the passages bought this way that year at more than twenty thousand, a quarter of all arrivals, and the real proportion must have been higher, because a single calling passage could bring several members of the same family.⁴

People came to Argentina, to a large extent, because someone in the family was already here and had paid for the ticket. That chain explains the Basque concentration better than any official policy.

What work they did and how they prospered

The local registers let us see them up close. In 1869, in Chascomús, sheep country between 1845 and 1875, 960 Basques were counted: 18 landowners, 80 shepherds, 57 merchants and 33 cart drivers. In Tandil, 264 were recorded.²⁷

Their trades sketch three worlds. That of the countryside, where know-how was needed: shepherds, milkmen, dairy farmers, fence builders, well diggers, drovers. That of the towns and their outskirts, with bakers, shoemakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, merchants, butchers and kiln workers. And that of the roads, of transport, where the cart drivers stood out.²⁷ In Barracas, both north and south, they worked in the salting plants and in the port.

Most had crossed the ocean aged between fifteen and twenty-five, and many went far. Of eleven Basques whose trail has been followed in Chascomús between 1869 and 1895, eight ended up as property owners; in Tandil, the path runs from farmhand or shop assistant to smallholder, to cattle farmer and, in the end, to landowner. Trade was another “important route upwards… though more gradual and slower than the one experienced by the shepherds”.²⁷

They had come, according to the same material, from the French Lower Pyrenees (the French Basque Country and its surroundings), from Navarre, from Gipuzkoa and from Bizkaia.²⁷