Puerto Rico

The Basques of La Guaira reached Puerto Rico out of another emigration: they had left for Venezuela, settled in its port and been driven out from there. The historian Birgit Sonesson reconstructed their journey in Vascos en la diáspora. La emigración de La Guaira a Puerto Rico, 1799-1833 (CSIC, 2008). She tells how Basques who had emigrated or been expelled reached Venezuela at the end of the eighteenth century, drawn by employment with the Compañía Guipuzcoana, and how, once settled in the port of La Guaira, they kept up endogamous relations for at least three generations: they married among themselves.⁴

They were expelled for their part in the conspiracy of Gual and España of 1797 and, for good, in 1821. The scattered families came together again in Puerto Rico, and that cohesion allowed them to set up trading firms which in time encouraged investment in agriculture. But that same closeness, writes Sonesson, hid structural weaknesses, and their businesses collapsed around 1870.⁴