Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, 1881

The Basque associational life of Brazil can be told in a few names: a society in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, a centre in São Paulo that for years was the only recognised one, and a handful of houses born in the twenty-first century.

The first documented Basque society in the country is Euskaldunak Orok Bat (“All Basques, one”), which the Basque Government places in Rio de Janeiro in 1881, among the first Basque associations in America.²

Eusko Alkartasuna of São Paulo

The one that has lasted to this day was born in São Paulo in the fifties. Eusko Alkartasuna is the oldest Basque centre in Brazil that is still active, and until 2009 it was the only one in the country recognised by the Basque Government.¹²⁸

Its premises were paid for by many. On 9 December 1959 the deed for Gernika Kutun was signed. It cost 400,000 cruzeiros, raised from the contributions of more than fifty Basques, 50,000 cruzeiros from Bilbao industry and a loan of 100,000 from José María Sanz Navarro.⁵ Fifty years later, in 2009, the centre marked that deed with a tribute to its 56 founding members, six of whom were still alive.⁵

The Basque Government officially recognised it on 18 June 1996.⁵ In 2005 it hosted the world’s first Basque language course taught in Portuguese, and in 2006 another was set up at the Universidade de São Paulo.²

The centres of the twenty-first century

With the new century came other houses. The Casa Vasco-Brasileira de Itapevi, in the state of São Paulo, Eusko-Brasildar Etxea, was recognised in December 2009.⁸¹¹ The Eusko Brasildar Etxea of Brasilia followed in February 2011, and with it Brazil came to have three official Basque centres.⁸

In the south, where many families of Basque origin live, the centre came a little later. Around 2012, forty founding members created the Euskal Etxea de Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, chaired by Ana Luiza Etchaluz, and by early 2013 more than two hundred people had already shown interest.⁶ It organised meetings on Basque culture around the state, the third of them in Pelotas in 2013.⁷