History of the Basque diaspora

The Basque centres are what emigration left standing. They were founded by newly arrived emigrants to help one another and, much later, by descendants who never emigrated. Why they were born, and why they are still open, has a different answer in each period.

The first centres: helping one another and not losing Basque identity

The very first was the Laurak-bat of Montevideo, in 1876. The one in Buenos Aires was born the following year, and it is the oldest of those that have remained active without interruption.²⁸

Basques had gathered outside Euskal Herria before, but for a different purpose: these were religious and charitable brotherhoods, not civil societies of emigrants. In 1612 the Basques of Lima bought a chapel and founded the Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu, the first Basque brotherhood in America according to the historian José de la Puente Brunke. In 1715, just over a hundred men from Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Araba founded the Congregación de San Ignacio in Madrid, which is still active today. Neither of the two set out to do what the Laurak-bat centres set out to do: bring together a community of emigrants, help the newcomer and uphold a Basque identity alongside the larger immigrant communities. That begins in 1876 (see the Hermandad de Aránzazu and the Congregación de San Ignacio).³⁷³⁸ The purpose of the new centres, stated without embellishment, was this: “to unite the Basques of the area, to provide help to new immigrants, and to establish contacts with the Basque Country”.²⁸

Behind that formula there were two needs, one practical and one political, and neither of them was nostalgia. The practical one was mutual help: mutual aid societies for the fellow Basque who fell on hard times. The political one was set down by Martín Errecaborde, co-founder and first president of Euskal Echea, when he explained what else the centre was for: so that the Basque community would not scatter into “Spanish, French or Argentine” societies.¹¹

Centres with no community behind them: the diaspora of the twenty-first century

The latest crop of centres fits into no wave, because there is no community of emigrants behind them. In November 2004, the Advisory Council for Relations with Basque Communities noted that Euskal Herria was no longer a country of emigrants, but that young people were still leaving to study or to work, often for a spell, and that they were not going to the old destinations (America, the Philippines, Australia), but to European countries such as Italy, Germany, Ireland or Denmark, and to new destinations such as China. The same Council warned that the traditional model of the euskal etxea did not meet what those groups needed.³⁵

The centres born of that departure bear little resemblance to the earlier ones. The one in Rome, created in 2002, is not a community clubhouse but a project of cultural outreach aimed at Italians as well. The one in Shanghai was born in 2005 from the professionals who had gone there with Basque companies. And in the one in Tokyo, a good part of the members of the first association were Japanese.

A place of political debate about who was Basque

The centres were also the stage for a dispute. Between 1877 and 1899 they felt the climax of the last Carlist war, the abolition of the fueros, the split between conciliatory and uncompromising defenders of the fueros, the cultural revival that began around 1880, the Navarrese Gamazada, the first steps of Sabino Arana’s “bizkaitarrismo”, Nocedal’s Integrism and the crisis of ’98, and all of that echoed among the men who drove the first euskal etxeak.¹² Inside the centres, Carlists and nationalists clashed openly over their ideas.¹³

Out of those arguments came a decision that marked the rest, and that turned zazpiak bat into a practice and not just a motto: to take all Basques as their aim, without regard to whether they came from the Spanish or the French side.¹¹

Since 1980: centres founded by the descendants of emigrants

From 1980 onwards, who founded the centres changed. In cities of the interior, Basque centres began to appear that were opened not by emigrants but by their descendants. Their leaders and members were second and third generation, knew little of Basque culture, and had as their main identity trait “a fundamental dose of Basque feeling”.¹⁴

These were not isolated cases. From 1985 alone, thirty-nine new organisations were registered in Argentina, ten in the United States and six in Uruguay, a whole founding wave carried out by people who had not emigrated.²⁸

With them the diaspora stopped depending on people continuing to arrive, and it renewed itself from within. Those centres no longer take in the person stepping off the boat, nor are they mutual aid societies, nor do they support a government in exile: they are institutions of identity kept going by people who never emigrated.

The whole process went hand in hand with a drive to federate, and from very early on the centres grouped together into wider organisations. At the Congreso Mundial Vasco de París (World Basque Congress in Paris) in 1956, the Confederación de Entidades Vascas en América (CEVA) was founded, with the Argentine FEVA, the Federation of Chile, the Centro Vasco de Caracas and the Euskal Erria of Montevideo, and in 1973 the North American Basque Organizations (NABO) was born in the United States.¹