History of the Basque diaspora

What the diaspora stands for cannot be read in the dates of departure, but in how those who left and their grandchildren lived: whom they married, what they danced at festivals, whom they admitted as members. To tell it, one has to step out of history and into anthropology, because the question is no longer what happened, but what it means to be Basque on the other side of the Atlantic and three generations later.

An identity built in dialogue with the host country

The diaspora is defined as a dispersed ethnic population and, in the words of Pedro J. Oiarzabal, one that is “deterritorialised and forms a collective identity always in reference to the dominant culture of its countries of residence”.²¹

That “in reference” means that the identity of the diaspora is not a frozen copy of the one back home, but is built in dialogue with the country that takes it in, and that is why there are as many Basque diaspora identities as there are countries. The same author adds that these communities, “far from being monolithic or homogeneous, integrate into each host region”.²¹

Language, clothing and food: the traits by which a group sets itself apart

The anthropologist Lisa M. Corcostegui, in a study devoted precisely to Basque dance and symbolic ethnicity, explains that ethnic identity consists in the emblematic use of aspects of culture to set oneself apart from other groups, and that the most recognisable emblems are tangible: language, clothing and food.²²

They are the same things that fill the programme of any Basque centre: Basque classes, dantza with its costume, cooking, pelota, mus. What from the outside may look like folklore is, in anthropological terms, the apparatus with which a group marks its boundary, and the centre is the place where those emblems are kept in use, not on display.

What counts, following Fredrik Barth and Gloria Totoricagüena, is not the trait itself, but the boundary the group draws with it: ethnicity is an ascription, the identification of oneself in a new and differentiating context.²³

Marrying among Basques: the emigrants to Idaho (1889-1934)

That boundary did not stay in speeches: it also went through the civil register. Of 119 Basques who emigrated to Idaho between 1889 and 1934, 114 married Basque women, and only five married outside. Marrying by proxy meant that someone crossed an ocean to be joined to a person they had never seen, and that is how many of those emigrants married.²⁸

Who could be a member: how the definition of Basque changed from 1877

Where each centre drew that boundary can be read in their own names and statutes:

Sources: statutes and names in ²⁴; the last row, in chapter 6.¹⁴

In little more than a century, the criterion of belonging went from being born in four provinces and being Spanish to feeling Basque. And each of those steps was taken abroad: in 1904, in Buenos Aires, the grandson born in Argentina to parents from the French Basque Country was already recognised as Basque. Zazpiak bat was practised in the diaspora earlier and with fewer obstacles than at home.

People argued even over words, because words decided who was inside. In the centres, “vascongado” ended up working as the label for the non-nationalist Basque, the one who, according to his opponents, “did not accept his homeland in its fullness”.²⁴

Traditions that adapt: the Basque festivals of the United States

In 2010, during his fieldwork at the summer festival of the Zazpiak Bat Basque Club of Reno (Nevada), the anthropologist Pablo Orduna Portús attended a children’s contest of bota drinkers. The children drank juice, and the winner was whoever did it with the most style and spilled the least. Orduna read it as “a new reinterpretation of tradition, a praxis of culture, a self-affirmation in difference”.²¹

The tradition had not been degraded, but adapted to those who had to receive it. At another Basque festival, in Elko, the bertsolari Jesús “Jess” Goñi sang it so that those who came after could enjoy the same:

Eta Amerikan oraindik ere / gure ohiturak bizirik / dantzan eginez, harrijasotzen

“And still in America our traditions are alive, dancing and lifting stones”.²¹

The study itself describes that blend as a convergence that is hybrid by definition, in which “the present contains the past”.²¹

Why the diaspora sometimes seems more Basque than Euskal Herria

Between the diaspora and Euskal Herria there is a strangeness that runs in both directions. The one from outside finds Euskal Herria different from what he was told, and the one from inside sees in a Basque centre in Argentina a Basqueness that sounds old to him. It is not that some are more Basque than others, but that they parted at a point in time: the diaspora keeps the image of the moment of departure, while the home country went on changing.

William A. Douglass and Jon Bilbao described what that meant for those who went back. Many emigrants, on returning, found that the images of their family and their village, which they had kept frozen and unchanged in memory, had changed, and that made any resettlement difficult.²⁵

Several identities at once: the sheepherders of the Roncal valley

The same ethnographic study followed the sheepherders of the Roncal valley who ended up in the mountains of Nevada, and draws two things from them. The first is that the interviewees put their Roncal origin ahead of any Spanish, European, Basque or American identity.²¹ Identity often works at the scale of the valley or the village, not the nation, and someone can feel they are from Uztárroz before feeling Basque and be, at the same time, in the Basque club of Reno.

The second is that those belongings do not exclude one another, but add up. Their identity, the study says, “has mutated and become something very complex”, a mosaic of Roncalese, American, Basque-Navarrese and Hispanic traits, “where no confrontation whatsoever is found”.²¹

A saying in the Basque of the Roncal valley about distance

The people of Roncal have a saying for that way of being far and near at once:

Dina abaño dina urrin.

What, being near, we feel far away; and what, being far away, we feel near.²¹