Mexico

The history of Mexico has Basques in very different places: a bishop who set up the first printing press in the Americas, a nephew of one of the founders of Zacatecas who conquered Nueva Vizcaya and established Durango, a hacienda owner from Balmaseda at whose sugar mill a massacre took place in 1856, and a journalist who kept the magazine of the exile going on his own until 1973.

Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop

Juan de Zumárraga (Durango, Bizkaia, 1476-1548) was the first bishop and archbishop of Mexico, and his work was also one of books and schools. According to the Auñamendi, he set up the first printing press in the Americas and promoted the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco to educate the indigenous people.¹

Francisco de Ibarra, the founder of Durango

Francisco de Ibarra, born in Eibar, had family with a name in New Spain: he was the nephew of Diego de Ibarra, one of the founders of Zacatecas. In 1562 he was appointed adelantado and captain general of Nueva Vizcaya, which covered the present-day states of Durango and Chihuahua, and the following year he undertook its conquest. In 1563 he commissioned Captain Pacheco to found a town: Pacheco called it Guadiana, and Ibarra established it as Durango, with fourteen first settlers. The coat of arms looked to Bizkaia too: Nueva Vizcaya adopted that of the Lordship of Biscay. Ibarra died in Chiametla in 1575.²

Pío Bermejillo and the San Vicente massacre (1856)

In the mid-nineteenth century, in the hot lowlands of Morelos and Guerrero, whoever was in charge on the sugar haciendas was usually a Spaniard: most of the administrators and foremen were, and Basques and Navarrese in particular. According to Ruiz de Gordejuela, the arrogance of the Spaniards towards the indigenous workers turned the area into a scene of violence on both sides.³

Pío Bermejillo, from Balmaseda, entered that world in 1851, when he bought the haciendas of San Vicente, Dolores and Chiconcuac for 450,000 pesos. He invested in machinery and sought a more intensive use of the land, and the peons who lived on the estates lost their traditional access to it. On those properties there were attempts to impose methods as harsh as those of the plantations of the Antilles: the Biscayan José María Aguirre went as far as beating two young men and putting them in the stocks, locked up and without food, until a judge ordered their release.³

In December 1856 the violence reached San Vicente. According to the Spanish version, some thirty attackers entered the sugar mill looking for the Spaniards and killed several employees, among them Juan Bermejillo, the owner’s nephew, aged fifteen. Nicolás Bermejillo, the owner’s brother, offered 40,000 pesos for their lives, and the ringleader replied that he had not come to rob but to “kill gachupines”. It was, according to Ruiz de Gordejuela, the largest massacre of Spaniards in Mexico so far that century. But the defence of one of the accused later maintained that Bermejillo and his employee Víctor Allende had earlier organised a punitive expedition against the village of Hornos, with a massacre of its inhabitants.³

Antonio Ruiz de Azua, the journalist of Euzko Deya

Antonio Ruiz de Azua Zabalbeaskoa, Ogoñope, was the one who kept Euzko Deya going to the end. He had been its editor-in-chief and, from 1946, its co-director. When Jesús de Garritz left in 1957, he carried on alone as editor, and the magazine held out until March 1973, shortly before his death.⁴ The Auñamendi presents him as its founder.¹