Mexico

Mexico received a continuous Basque emigration for four centuries, and it was almost always one of merchants. In the colonial period Basques came at the call of relatives already settled there, until they made up more than 18% of the Spaniards in New Spain; in the mid-nineteenth century, 95.5% of the Basques in the capital whose details have been studied were merchants, and nearly half were between 15 and 29 years old. Independence and the anti-Spanish laws slowed that arrival and the Porfiriato revived it: the Centro Vasco, founded in 1907, dates from those years. Later, the exile of 1939 brought a different wave. Today one recognised entity remains, in the capital.

The first came with the conquest. There were Basques in the conquest and in the making of New Spain, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they stood out in the mining of Zacatecas and Nueva Vizcaya.¹ Two of them left their name in the Church and on the frontier: Fray Juan de Zumárraga, a native of Durango (Bizkaia), was the first bishop of Mexico, and Francisco de Ibarra, from Eibar, conquered Nueva Vizcaya (see Basques in Mexican history).¹²

Behind them came those who arrived because others called them over. The Basque or Navarrese emigrant went to New Spain because a relative or a fellow countryman already settled there, almost always in trade, sent for him, and so their numbers grew: according to the historian Jesús Ruiz de Gordejuela, by the end of the colonial period they were more than 18% of the Spaniards living in New Spain.³

Independence partly broke that chain. The insurgency (1810-1821) and the crisis in trade greatly reduced the arrival of Basques, though they did not cut it off entirely, and the anti-Spanish laws that came afterwards, with expulsions of Spaniards, slowed it even further.³

In the mid-nineteenth century they were still arriving, but it is not known how many, because many young men embarked at Bordeaux to evade the control of the Spanish authorities. Other sources give some idea. In a list from the Spanish consulate in Mexico, of 739 Spaniards identified, 237 had been born in the Basque Country or in Navarre. And among the Basques living in the capital whose details Ruiz de Gordejuela analyses, 95.5% were merchants and nearly half were between 15 and 29 years old.³

The Porfiriato opened another stage. Under Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), and above all from 1890, the foreign population in Mexico grew, although, according to Amaya Garritz and Javier Sanchiz, it cannot be called mass immigration. The Centro Vasco was born in those years (1907).⁴

And then came the exile. From 1937 refugees from the Spanish Civil War arrived in Mexico, and on 13 June 1939 the largest group disembarked from the Sinaia (see the exile).⁴