The experience of a significant percentage of immigrants did not end with them saving for several years and returning home as if nothing had happened. They were not working machines; they were people, with affections, fears, illusions. A love affair, several children, a painful outward journey or a profitable job that is hard to leave are concrete possibilities to immobilise anyone. A rudimentary assessment of what was in store for them in the new country they had left years before, could decide more than one to leave their bones in the fertile lands of the Río de la Plata.
The phenomenon, as a whole, is known as social integration or assimilation. Although the statement is presented as very simple, there could - at least potentially - have been different experiences of integration. From extremely closed behaviour (in the choice of partners, own institutions and language), to attitudes close to a true ‘melting pot’, through a whole variety of intermediate possibilities. Assimilation, in short, is the process in which people from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds come to interact in the life of a community free of previous obstacles. The first stage of this process does not involve a change of identity, but a change in the material and cultural axis of life for many immigrants. The vast majority had to arrive in the Río de la Plata immersed in social strategies centred on their place of origin, with the expectation of returning. Some did return; in the Basque case, around 40% returned to their place of origin. But others gradually changed their social and material concerns and interests, shifting their lives to a new social environment. This did not necessarily imply losing their identity of origin, or disassociating themselves from the local ethnic community (or communities), but it did mean progressively thinking about their own future in the sphere of the adopted society.
In all this, the cultural baggage carried by the immigrants themselves had to play a major role, as did the socio-economic and political situations in their places of origin; the continuity - and conformity - of the immigration flow; the times and forms of arrival; the places and forms of settlement - rural, urban, dispersed or compact - and so on. Native attitudes -at times discriminatory and phobic- must not have been of minor importance. Whether or not today, coldly, we may hazard global conclusions based on figures on return, the acquisition of property in Argentina or the number of children, the decisions to return - just as in the departure - must have been made in limited, intimate, individual or family spheres. What is possibly not so doubtful is that the experiences of integration must have been intimately linked to the world of work; it is difficult for a researcher who tries to analyse social integration as an isolated phenomenon to reach firm conclusions. Think, for example, of the geographical dispersion and the wide range of occupations that characterised the Basque group. That reason alone, when compared to groups that were ‘tightly’ localised or massively engaged in pastoral or agricultural tasks such as the Irish and Danes respectively, must have played an important differential role.
The Basques came from a region whose political identity was divided two nations, France and Spain. Once on American soil, they were generally seen to participate in institutions and demonstrations organised by their older relatives. The fact that this was a minority national group, concealed by others, but mainly that it arrived earlier - occupying the space before them - presents us with a panorama that is as complex as it is attractive, and so far little dealt with.
Except for a handful of Basques who initially moved to Entre Ríos to work with sheep and those who later moved to the vineyards of Mendoza, the vast majority settled in what is known as the humid pampa, which mainly covers the province of Buenos Aires, part of Santa Fe and a portion of La Pampa. The first thing that comes to mind, imagining what the experience of Basque social integration might have been like in that area, is that there were important Basque communities there. If this is true, we can assume two things: that they achieved this on the basis of cohesion mechanisms that distinguished them from the rest; and that, a priori, they experienced a slow integration, for some reason and with a delayed mechanism. Paradoxically, we soon become aware of the general non-existence -before 1940- of Basque-speaking institutions to support this feeling. The characteristics of the scenarios that prevailed in the interior of that vast region lead us to think, then, that its first inhabitants - natives and immigrants - must have been obliged to solve the most elementary problems and absences that the Buenos Aires State, occupied with frequent wars, neglected. This may have acted, in the early stage (until 1880), as an accelerator of social integration. If the Basque integration experience was - even with a strong collectivity - not very traumatic and ‘fast’, it would confirm the idea that the delay in a definitive social assimilation of a national group depended to a large extent on the existence of institutions within it.
Another suspicion points to the possibility that the image of a collectivity may have been shaped by purely cultural elements and even by the actions of a few of its members. If this is valid, we will be able to prove that although the formation of institutions by an ethnic group could - in certain cases - be decisive in delaying definitive integration, it was not so decisive in the formation of a collective image. Lastly, and no less interesting, we believe that there was an influence - a priori notable - of an exceptional experience of social integration of the pioneers in the period after 1880. If the colonial Hispanic tradition -and within it the Basque tradition- of moving to America had a positive influence on the early insertion-integration, it did the same with the Basques who arrived in the massive stage.
Argentina. Basque immigrants 1840-1920
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