Peru

A chapel in San Francisco

The Hermandad de Aránzazu was a confraternity: a religious and mutual aid association that the Basques of Lima built around a chapel, a Virgin and a crypt where they could be buried together. It was kept going above all by its merchants, lost its property in the nineteenth century and has returned to public life in the twenty-first.

It began with meetings. From the first years of the seventeenth century, a group of Biscayans met in the convent of San Agustín in Lima with the idea of forming a brotherhood. The decisive step came on 13 February 1612, when a group of “gentlemen hidalgos of the Basque nation” gave six fellow countrymen power of attorney before a notary to buy the chapel of the Encarnación in the church of San Francisco, with its crypt in which to bury the brothers and their descendants. To pay for it they undertook to raise 10,000 pesos.¹

There was no precedent. According to the historian José de la Puente Brunke, Lima was the first place in America where the Basque community formed a confraternity, under the dedication of Our Lady of Aránzazu.¹ The Basque Government counts it among the most important early forms of association in the diaspora.⁶

Giving it shape took years: the first election of stewards was in 1619, and the final constitutions were not completed until 1635.¹

Who could be brothers and what it was for

To join, one did not need to have been born in Bizkaia or Gipuzkoa. Brothers could be residents of Lima who were natives of those two provinces and their descendants, and also those from Araba, Navarre and the “four towns” of the Cantabrian coast: Laredo, Castro Urdiales, Santander and San Vicente de la Barquera.¹

What the brotherhood set out to do fitted into a formula, “to exercise itself in works of piety and mercy”, and in practice that meant visiting the sick poor, above all strangers to the city, taking an interest in the prisoners of Basque-Navarrese origin who were in the jails, and finding out who was arriving in Lima from those lands so as to help them.¹ Its constitutions also declared it exempt from all civil or ecclesiastical jurisdiction.¹

Those same constitutions carried the prejudices of their time: they excluded from burial descendants “stained” by a Jew or Moor penanced by the Inquisition, or married to a mulatto, Indian or Black woman.¹ And the brotherhood’s documents record that it had slaves in the service of its chapel.¹

The Basque merchants of eighteenth-century Lima

It was in the eighteenth century that the brothers of Aránzazu carried most weight in the Peruvian economy.¹ The historian Alberto Flores Galindo drew up a list of the fifty leading figures of Lima’s upper class at the end of that century: twenty-six were peninsulares, born in Spain, and fifteen of them were Basques or Navarrese, not counting other sons of Basques already born in Peru.¹

Not all of them rose equally high. The Navarrese Martín de Osambela, born in Huici in 1754, made a great fortune and even so did not reach the highest circles, probably because he did not marry into a great Creole family. The Querejazu, on the other hand, were one of the most powerful families in the city: Antonio de Querejazu y Uriarte, a native of Mondragón (Arrasate), was steward of the brotherhood and prior of the Tribunal del Consulado de Lima, and his son became the senior judge of the Audiencia.¹

From the closing of the vault to the present day

The nineteenth century took from the brotherhood, one after the other, its crypt and its property. In 1808, when the General Cemetery of Lima opened, the vaults in the churches were closed: the stewards removed the bronze plaque that had been there since 1693, and the brotherhood received niches in the cemetery in exchange.¹ In 1865, a decree of President Mariano Ignacio Prado transferred the property of the brotherhoods and confraternities of Lima to the Sociedad de Beneficencia Pública.¹

It returned to public life with its four-hundredth anniversary, in 2012, and the following year it organised events in eight cities in Peru.⁹¹⁷ In 2019 it promoted the Limako Arantzazu Euzko Etxea, which the Basque Government today recognises as a Basque centre.¹⁰¹⁵