Colombia

An idea with a hundred years of history

What is argued about in Colombia where the Basques are concerned is not when they came, but an idea: that the people of Antioquia, the paisas, descend in large part from them. It is often repeated, and it has those who defend it as a heritage and those who see it as a twentieth-century construction. The historian John Alejandro Ricaurte, founder of the Centro de Estudios Vascos de Antioquia, has studied how it took shape.⁵

His account begins in the colony. According to Ricaurte, the Basques came to Antioquia alongside other Spanish immigrants and stood out in the administration, trade, mining and the religious orders; after independence their presence became almost imperceptible. The thesis of the “Basque ancestry” of the people of Antioquia came much later: it was spread between the twenties and the forties of the twentieth century by authors such as Gabriel Arango Mejía, Emilio Robledo and Libardo Ospina, and later amplified abroad by scholars such as Everett Hagen and Ann Twinam. Over time, those opinions took root in Antioquian society.⁵

What those who hold it say

The other reading is set out in the Auñamendi entry on Colombia. It cites the Colombian thinker Luis López de Mesa, for whom the people of Antioquia received a large Basque contribution, and supports it with the frequency of Basque surnames in the population and with customs and traits that it attributes to that heritage.¹³ Its method is the surname: it classifies more than 2,500 surnames of Basque origin among Colombian families.³

Both things at once

There are facts that nobody disputes: there were Basques with posts and foundations in colonial Antioquia, such as the man from Eibar who made the founding of Medellín official. And there is an interpretation, that of an Antioquian people with Basque roots, which for some is a heritage and for others an identity built in the twentieth century. What none of the sources read provides is a reliable figure for the number of descendants.