The Basque diaspora online

This chapter asks what the internet has done to the way of being Basque far from Euskal Herria, and answers with what those who have studied it have observed. The history of the diaspora explains that this identity is not inherited intact: it is built in dialogue with the host country and sustained through shared practices. For more than a century, those practices had a physical place, a building, the Basque centre. The internet has changed who can take part in them.

A community that no longer depends on living near a centre

To belong to a Basque centre you have to live near one, and many people are left outside that circle. In 2016 the Basque Government spoke of some 84,300 Basques spread around the world and of some 34,000 people who belonged to Basque centres.¹³

For those people, the internet opened up the community. Blas Uberuaga explained it when talking about the first lists and websites: they make it possible to meet strangers and talk with them without being limited to one’s own neighbourhood, and they help in searching for the family’s past, because on them one finds distant cousins or people from an ancestor’s village. From there, he wrote, a stronger connection with the Basque Country is born.³ On his own website, the section that received the most visits for years was the one on Basque surnames.⁴

The same thing happened later on Facebook. In the groups of the Basque centres, a third of the users were not members of any centre.⁵

Keeping one’s roots far from home

Meanwhile, Basque emigration itself has changed shape. Oiarzabal points out that the chain migration that began more than a century ago has been broken: newly arrived emigrants no longer come in large numbers, and the bond with Euskal Herria is kept up through short stays, exchange programmes, cultural tours and mus tournaments.⁷

Those who live abroad only for a while also build their identity online. The researcher Koldo Díaz Bizkarguenaga followed for nine months a private Facebook group of young Basques on Erasmus grants, who used it to “keep their Basque roots” while they lived abroad. He completed the work with his own experience in Ottawa, Oxford and Buenos Aires.²⁴

A borderless “digital country”

From that work comes the idea of a “digital country”, a territory where “the Basque citizenry, divided between two states, meets on the internet”.²⁴ Online, neither the border between Spain and France nor the distance to Argentina or Idaho carries any weight.

Díaz Bizkarguenaga also describes a “multipolar nation”. The same person takes part at once in political, cultural and linguistic groups without feeling any contradiction, and young people talk more about sports clubs or places than about ideologies.²⁴ It is the same idea that the history of the diaspora sets out, that of a Basque identity which does not exclude and in which belongings add up. With Raphael Tsavkko García, Díaz Bizkarguenaga also reached another conclusion: the blog works as a tool with which Basque identity is built, and Facebook as a space in which it is lived.²⁰

What the internet does not replace

The web does not take the place of the Basque centre; it extends it. In the Facebook groups, users reproduce the relationships they already have off the screen, and 78% believe that Facebook has made their relationship with their centre easier.⁵ Oiarzabal puts it in a formula: online and offline realities are “part of the same equation”.²

What does change from one generation to the next is the way people get their news. A survey of more than 400 Basque Americans shows that, from the second generation onwards, people stop following the media of the old country and move on to taking part in cultural activities such as dance groups, and that most of their information reaches them through social media.²¹

In the early years, Uberuaga left a warning in writing: Basque topics also need to be dealt with in Basque, and not only in English, French or Spanish, because without tools in the language the internet is not enough to keep it alive.³ Twenty years later, in 2020, there were online Basque classes in Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, Germany, Chile, France and Canada.⁸⁹