Chile

Chile is the country where the Basques came in at the top. Their decisive moment was not that of a mass emigration, but the eighteenth century, when the Bourbon reforms opened the way for officials and merchants who joined the Creole elite, to the point of giving their name to the so-called “Castilian-Basque aristocracy”. The popular emigration came much later, in the twentieth century, and it brought with it the first institutions and, in 1939, the refugees of the Winnipeg. Today the community comes down to three recognised entities, with the delegation of the Basque Government in Santiago at its institutional head.

The Basque presence runs through the whole history of Chile, but it did not weigh the same in every period.¹ The first came with weapons: there were Basques among the conquistadors who accompanied Pedro de Valdivia and Diego de Almagro, and among the first families to settle in the country.¹⁴

The eighteenth century was the decisive one. The Bourbon reforms favoured the passage to America of officials and merchants, and many of them came from the Basque Country: Navarrese and Gipuzkoans above all, and a smaller contingent from Bizkaia and Araba.¹ Once inside the Creole elite, they gave rise to what has been called the “Castilian-Basque aristocracy” (see the Castilian-Basque aristocracy).³⁴

Those who arrived in the twentieth century were of another condition: people of humbler origins, ready to start from scratch. With them the first institutions were born, the Centro Basco de Santiago in 1912 and the Basque mutual society of Valparaíso in 1915.²⁵ In 1939 the refugees of the Civil War disembarked from the Winnipeg, and after them, in 1950, small expeditions of Basque exiles came from France.⁶¹⁰

Their number can be measured. The historian Rubila Araya, who described twentieth-century Basque immigration in the Valparaíso region as “a moderate and declining process”, gives the figure: between 1909 and 1982, the Spanish consulate in Valparaíso registered 1,914 people from the Basque provinces and 391 from Navarre, out of a total of 11,535 registered from all over Spain. Only the Old Castilians, with 1,987, outnumbered the Basques.⁵