The Basque diaspora online

The first Basques who met on the internet did not do so through any institution, but on the initiative of individuals who opened a space and waited for the others to arrive. At first the tool was a mailing list. Marta Llourdes Llanos created Basque-L in December 1993 to talk about Basque topics.³ Blas Uberuaga, who was among its members, remembers it as a group of Basques scattered all over the world, whose discussion was “pretty deep and pretty intense”.⁴

Uberuaga himself took the next step. He was studying physics at the University of Washington when he realised that there was “next-to-nothing in English about Basques on the internet”, and in the autumn of 1994 he opened Buber’s Basque Page. It was one of the first two websites on a Basque subject; the other, from the same season, was that of the University of the Basque Country.³⁴

The organised diaspora took a little longer. In February 1996 the Zazpiak Bat club of Vancouver, in Canada, published the first website of a Basque organisation outside the Basque Country.³ In July, several members of Basque-L created the newsgroup soc.culture.basque, and in October EuskaraZ was born, the first mailing list that ran entirely in Basque.³

By then the Basque Government was already encouraging the Basque centres to go online, and it went as far as donating computers to most of them.³