Uruguay

Uruguay took in a Basque emigration that was enormous for its size: in 1999, its eight recognised centres gathered 11.8% of all the members of the Basque centres in the world. It was not made by the illustrious founders of Montevideo, but by what two local historians call “an anonymous multitude”, which arrived at two moments, before and after independence, and from both sides of the Pyrenees. That double origin shaped from the start the way they organised themselves. The community of today, eleven bodies in eight cities, was founded by descendants, not by emigrants.

The illustrious names, even so, are there at the very origin of the city. Montevideo was founded by a man from Bizkaia, Bruno Mauricio de Zabala; its first governor, José Joaquín de Viana, was from Araba; and in its early years the leading economic figure was another man from Bizkaia, the shipowner Francisco de Alzaíbar.¹

But the mark that remained is not the mark of those names. The historians Martha Marenales Rossi and Juan Carlos Luzuriaga sum it up like this: it was “an anonymous multitude” that decided to stay. It arrived in two great stages, and both changed Uruguayan society. The first, in the colonial period, lasted thirty years, from 1780 to 1810. The second, in the independent republic, lasted twice as long: sixty years, from 1830 to 1890.¹

The second was the decisive one. Uruguay became independent in 1830, and over the following six decades Basques kept arriving from both sides of the Pyrenees: at first mostly from the French Basque Country; later, in growing numbers, from Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Araba and Navarre. Coming from one side or the other made a difference, and already in the nineteenth century the Basques of Montevideo argued over whether they should all come together in a single society or each with their own people, an argument that runs through the history of how they organised themselves.⁵