Mexico

The Centro Vasco de México has more than a century of history: it was born in 1907 as a cooperative, split in two in 1934, has had four premises, the last of them in Polanco, and has gone from 741 members in 1928 to some two hundred at the beginning of this century. But before the Centro came pelota.

Before the Centro: the first fronton

The first Basque pelota fronton in Mexico, the Eder Jai, opened on 12 December 1895 on the calle de los Inválidos, and President Porfirio Díaz attended the opening. After it came the companies of professional pelota players.⁴

The birth (1907)

The Centro was born from another association. The Asociación Vasca de San Ignacio de Loyola was dissolved on 11 November 1906, and its president, Andrés Eizaguirre, and twelve other members of the association established before a notary the Centro Vasco. Sociedad Cooperativa de Responsabilidad Limitada, whose deed was registered in June 1907. They wanted premises for lectures, concerts and language classes, and among its aims they wrote that of “stimulating love for the Basque Country and for the Basque language and history”. Eizaguirre was its first president.⁴⁶

After that, the Centro kept moving house. It began at number 9 of the callejón segundo de Santa Clara, today calle Motolinía (1907-1909); it moved to the building of the Teatro Colón (1909-1926) and then to number 6 calle Madero (1926-1972), and since 1972 it has been at number 239 calle Aristóteles, in the Polanco neighbourhood.⁶⁴

The split of 1934

The break came through politics. Between September 1934 and February 1935, a lawsuit set the board against a group of dissident members: a “Basque-Spanish” ideology against a “Basque-nationalist” one. Some of the members left and founded the Círculo Vasco Español.⁴⁶ Not everything was ideology. Garritz and Sanchiz give three explanations from Lorin Gaarder: the predominance of the nationalists in the Centro, the entry of French Basques, whom some did not accept, and reasons of class and economics.⁴ In 1935 the Centro ceased to be a cooperative and became a civil association.⁶

The Spanish Civil War left each house on one side. The Centro Vasco supported the Republic and became the home of the exiles, while in the Círculo, with more people from Araba and Navarre, there was sympathy for the rebels.⁴

How many members

The Centro’s membership figures go down over the century. In October 1928 it had 741 members whose dues were paid up. At the end of 1958 there were 320 active members and 67 junior members. In 1999 there were 246, and after a purge of those in arrears 203 remained in 2001.⁴