Uruguay

The Basques who chose Uruguay did not do so entirely on their own: the country went out to look for them, and it offered them something concrete, land to work. What they found was more modest than the advertisements promised, and those who arrived first also ran into a war.

A Uruguayan consul in Vitoria-Gasteiz

Uruguay did not wait for them to come. In 1873 its consul general in the Basque Country, who had his seat in Vitoria-Gasteiz, sent his minister of foreign affairs a report in which he showed an interest in the Basques as immigrants, and said why: they were hard workers, they were Catholics and they spoke Spanish. In 1880 the same consulate was publishing advertisements in the Vitoria-Gasteiz newspapers that presented the country as a paradise for anyone who wanted to emigrate.²

The Basque peasant who read those advertisements had a concrete reason to heed them: on the River Plate he could hope to work the land, and not to end up employed in a factory.²

What they worked at

Most of them, however, did not grow rich. In Montevideo and in other cities, many earned their living as cabinetmakers, bricklayers and blacksmiths; in the interior, some carried on with the country trades they already knew and others changed occupation completely. Some went back to Euskal Herria with savings enough to buy land or build a fronton; others could only return because their fellow Basques helped them. For most, say Marenales and Luzuriaga, the hope of American wealth “remained only in dreams”, although their children lived better thanks to the sacrifice of their parents.¹

Of those who did achieve public prominence, the same authors studied fifty cases. Of these, 25% were businessmen; 24%, ranchers; another 24%, merchants and bankers; 16%, members of the liberal professions; 6%, artists and intellectuals, and another 6%, priests and military men.¹

All of that was happening in a country that was changing. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Uruguay was modernising its farming with meat-packing plants, factories and steamships, and the Basques went into the leather, wine, wool, sugar and rice industries.¹

A war in which they fought on both sides

Those who had arrived in the first decades of the republic found a country at war. During the Guerra Grande (1843-1851), the forces of Manuel Oribe kept Montevideo under siege for eight years, and the Basque immigrants fought on both sides, organised in battalions of their own, whose story is told in Basques in Uruguayan history.³