History of the Basque diaspora

The second wave is the one that filled the ships and the one that left behind the map of Basque centres that exists today. It was no longer qualified people leaving in the service of an empire, but people who had no other way out: peasants at first, then craftsmen and people from towns and cities. The most intense period starts around 1830 and tails off between 1920 and 1925.

Why they left: inheritance, wars and crises

Inheritance: the farmstead passed whole to a single child

The main explanation is upheld by the Basque Government itself. The farmstead was not divided: it passed whole to a single heir, and the other brothers and sisters were left with three ways out, the Church, the army or America. Many chose the third. It is the explanation that a good number of authors give, and the one written into the preamble of the law in force:

“Basques have been scattered throughout the whole world for centuries. Many are the reasons that have brought about this phenomenon, among them the spirit of adventure or the particular foral inheritance system, which, with its entailment regime, drove younger sons to seek other means of living; on other occasions the reasons have been more social and political, arising at times from situations of need and economic hardship, and at others as a consequence of wars and exile.”

Law 8/1994, of 27 May, on relations with Basque communities and centres abroad, preamble (translated from the Spanish)⁵

Other historians do not say it is false, but they do say it was not the only reason, and their objection has two parts. The first is one of precision. There was no single Basque inheritance system, but rather a variety of different legal codes that coincided in having a single heir, a figure that is often confused with entailment, the mayorazgo (a legal institution of the Ancien Régime, abolished along with it). The second is one of fact: there was heavy emigration from areas where that unequal division was not in force, such as the towns of Bizkaia under common law, the plains of Araba or the French Basque Country.²

Lineage inheritance and the single heir were, therefore, a real driver of Basque emigration, as the law says and as much of the literature maintains. But they were not the only one, because people also left from places where the land was divided.

Other causes: the Carlist wars, military service, agrarian crises and the loss of the fueros

Other reasons were added to inheritance. The ones most often cited by scholars are the Carlist conflict, the rejection of military service and the exodus from the farmstead, and there were also specific triggers, with a date on them, such as the maize crisis of 1856-57 and phylloxera from 1880 onwards.¹

Military service weighed more heavily than is usually told. After the Carlist war, the Basque provinces were placed on the same footing as the rest of the State in the obligation to do military service. But those who had defended the Government’s cause were exempted from it, and so all the quotas of the conscription levies fell on the Carlists. Twenty years later the exemption was still in force. For a family on the losing side, a son having to join the army was not a matter of chance, but a consequence of having been on that side.⁶

The abolition of the fueros closed the cycle. The law of 21 July 1876, promoted by Cánovas del Castillo, is the political event most directly connected with the founding of the first Basque centres: the Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires was born the following year, and as an explicit response.⁷

Who emigrated: first peasants, then craftsmen

Nor was it always the same kind of person who left, or for the same reasons. In the Argentine census of 1869, Basques who could not read or write predominate, which fits with an initial departure that was mostly rural. By around 1895 the numbers are reversed, and those arriving are mostly craftsmen and people from towns and cities escaping the problems of industrialisation.⁸

The French Basque Country: emigration from the French side

The great emigration is usually told from Hegoalde, the southern side, but the north emptied just as much or more. According to Argitxu Camus Etchecopar, some 80,000 people left the French Basque Country for America between 1832 and 1891, with the peak between 1850 and 1880. The figure is calculated from passports and, as the author herself warns, is not entirely reliable. In the twentieth century that current changed course: America practically stopped attracting the Basques of the north, and its place was taken by the Paris region (see the Basques in France).³²

Where they went: first to Argentina and Uruguay, then to Chile, Cuba and the United States

The destinations changed with the times, and the order in which they followed one another explains today’s map of Basque centres.

The sailors, merchants and officials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had gone to Newfoundland and Labrador, to Mexico, to Peru, to the Caribbean and to the Philippines (chapter 2), and throughout the early modern period they kept going to Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and the Caribbean. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Latin American independence movements cut off the flow, which resumed strongly from 1825. From then until 1936 the first destination was the River Plate, Argentina and Uruguay; then came Chile, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and at the end of the century the North American west coast. After 1936-39, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico and the Dominican Republic would be added.⁴

Two episodes have a life of their own. The California gold rush (1849) gave rise to Basque sheepherding in the American West. And much later, between 1957 and 1970, the Western Range Association processed more than 5,000 applications for sheepherder contracts, most of them from Navarre and Bizkaia.

Those sheepherders had not mastered the trade through some ancestral skill brought from home. Much of what they knew about large flocks they had learned earlier, on the South American pampas, where many of them had first emigrated.