History of the Basque diaspora

The exile closes the classic story of the diaspora, but not the emigration. Between the end of the Second World War and the mid-seventies another current left Euskal Herria, different from the three before it. It was economic, it headed mainly for Europe and Australia, and it had no institutions behind it: no government organised it and no centres founded decades earlier took it in. It moved through work contracts and family chains.

Paris. In the twentieth century, America practically stopped attracting the Basques of the French side, and its place was taken by the Paris region. After the world war, the young left for the cities and the countryside emptied: between 1954 and 1962 farming in Lower Navarre and Zuberoa lost a third of its workers. At the start of the fifties the first large generation of young Basques arrived in Paris. They worked in modest jobs, in the parishes, in domestic service, as municipal employees or on the metro, and in 1956 the Maison Basque opened for them. In the sixties and seventies Basques from the north and Navarrese kept arriving for economic reasons, and Basques from the south for political ones (see the Maison Basque de Paris).³²

Australia. It is the most distant destination and the one that appears least in histories of the diaspora. Basques began arriving around 1910 to cut sugar cane in northern Queensland, and the great influx came between 1958 and 1960, with organised recruitment in northern Spain. Whoever arrived under contract had exchanged the assisted passage for two or three years of work wherever the Australian Government decided. His first home was usually a migrant hostel; the largest of all, Bonegilla, was open from 1947 to 1971. Many ended up on the country’s great public works, and by the mid-sixties the Basque community in Australia numbered around 2,000 people (see the cane cutters).³³³⁴

Germany and Switzerland. In the same years Basques left to work in central Europe. As late as 2005 the euskal etxea of Switzerland still described many of its members as the children of Basques “who emigrated in search of work in the 70s”.³⁵

The current came to an end for two reasons that recur in every destination. One was technical change: the sugar harvest was mechanised in Australia, and in the United States fewer sheepherders were needed. The other, the one that weighed most, was the economic recovery of Euskal Herria, which made leaving no longer worthwhile. In 1976, of 742 sheepherders under contract in the United States, only 106 were Basque.³⁴³⁶