History of the Basque diaspora

For centuries Basques have been leaving their land to settle anywhere on the planet, and they take with them the identity and culture of their origin, which they pass on to their children and grandchildren, generation after generation. That whole body of people, those who left and those descended from them, is what is called the Basque diaspora.

The word comes from Greek and means, in the sense given by the Auñamendi encyclopedia, “propagation or sowing”.²⁸ Sowing says more than dispersal, because what is scattered, in some places, takes root.

That diaspora has two outlines. The sharper one is the outline of the institutions: the recognised Basque centres, non-profit bodies founded outside the Basque Country to keep up cultural, social and economic ties with the land of origin. The other is broader and more diffuse, and it is made up of all the people of Basque descent who, without belonging to any centre, keep the memory of that origin alive in their family or in their culture.

It is popularly called the eighth province. The name extends the old motto zazpiak bat, “the seven are one”, which united the seven provinces, and by adding an eighth it acknowledges that the Basque Country, in a certain sense, also exists beyond its borders.

How many Basques live abroad: the official figure and other estimates

Counting them is not simple, and the figures in circulation do not agree with one another. The reference figure is the Basque Government’s. Its official magazine, Euskal Etxeak, put the number of people belonging to Basque centres around the world in the year 2000 at almost 18,000, when there were 124 centres in 18 countries, and the number of Basques living abroad with the right to vote at around 30,000.¹ The membership figure has to be read with its date, because today the Basque Government recognises 177 centres in 24 countries.

The same magazine speaks of nearly five million people “of Basque descent and with Basque surnames” in the world, without saying how it counted them.¹ And for some countries even larger figures circulate, such as the “four million Argentines with Basque blood”, which come from popular sources with no census behind them.

That they do not add up is not down to carelessness. Belonging to a diaspora is not measured in a census: it depends on how many generations back one is willing to look and on whether each person recognises themselves in that origin. On top of that there is a problem of records. Ports barely noted those who emigrated again from one neighbouring country to another, so the same emigrant could be counted twice, or not at all.²

What is not in doubt is the scale: 177 recognised Basque centres in 24 countries, four centuries of continuous presence and organised communities on all five continents.

Three waves of migration, very different from one another

That presence did not take shape all at once or for a single reason. The Basques left in three great waves, and each had its own causes, its own people and its own destinations:

The three chapters that follow tell each one separately. But Basque emigration did not end in 1939, and there are two currents that the three waves leave out. Between the end of the Second World War and the mid-seventies, workers left for Paris, Australia, Germany and Switzerland. And since the nineties, professionals and students have been leaving and have set up Basque centres in countries where there was never a Basque community.