Brazil

Brazil was not one of the great destinations of Basque emigration, and a good part of its community is explained by what was happening next door: many Basque families in the south of the country descend from emigrants who had gone first to the River Plate and later crossed the border. To that indirect arrival are added an old and scattered presence, which begins with the sixteenth-century Jesuit whose college gave rise to São Paulo, and the Basques who settled in the industrial São Paulo of the early twentieth century. The exile of the Spanish Civil War left hardly any institutional trace, and today the register recognises two bodies.

That old presence begins with a man of the Church. The Jesuit José de Anchieta, son of a Gipuzkoan from Urrestilla (Azpeitia), arrived in Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century and founded the college of Piratininga, from which São Paulo grew (see Basques in Brazilian history).⁴

The associations came three centuries later. According to the Basque Government, in the 1860s and 1870s Basque associations began to be founded in the countries where Basque immigration was largest, and Brazil was among them: in 1881 the society Euskaldunak Orok Bat existed in Rio de Janeiro.²

The south has another story, and it was reached by crossing the border. Rio Grande do Sul, the state bordering Uruguay and Argentina, is, according to its Basque centre, perhaps the one with the greatest concentration of Basques in Brazil. Many descend from Basques who emigrated to the River Plate between 1840 and 1875 and from there moved on to the south of Brazil.⁶ In Pelotas and throughout the region many families of Basque origin live, because Uruguay is so close.⁷

São Paulo drew others. Between 1890 and 1916 millions of European immigrants arrived there, and some Basques went on to the west of the state. With industrialisation, around 1915, Basques such as Balbino Guisasola opened factories and shops.¹

The Spanish Civil War, on the other hand, left hardly any institutional trace in Brazil. In 1942 the Basque Government in exile planned Delegations in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, but no documentation has been found that the one in Brazil ever operated.³