Basques formed a minority ethnic group whose diaspora had a significant impact on the history of colonial Latin America. Basques from the four Spanish or peninsular Basque territories—the Lordship of Vizcaya, the provinces of Álava and Guipúzcoa, and the Kingdom of Navarra—migrated to the New World in significant numbers; the French Basques were also prominent in the Atlantic, particularly in the Newfoundland fisheries.
The population density of the Basque Atlantic valleys, which was the highest of any region in Spain, was an important factor that encouraged emigration. And, in response to demographic pressure, in the second half of the 15th century most villages and towns adopted an impartible inheritance system that compelled non-inheriting offspring to seek their fortunes outside the country. Castile was the immediate choice for the Basque émigré, but after 1492 America gradually became an attractive destination. Outside their home country, their unique language and sense of collective nobility (hidalguía universal) were to become two outstanding features of Basque cultural identity.
The Basques’ share of total Spanish migration to the New World increased significantly in the second half of the 17th century. By the 18th century they were one of the largest and most influential peninsular regional groups in America. The typical Basque émigré was a young, single man aged between fifteen and thirty. In the New World they left their mark in economic activities that their countrymen had developed in their homeland for centuries: trade, navigation, shipbuilding, and mining. Furthermore, Basques’ collective nobility and limpieza de sangre (blood purity) facilitated their access to important official positions.
Article
Lily Pearl Balloffet
Global transoceanic migration booms of the 19th century brought with them more than a quarter of a million migrants from the Arabic-speaking eastern Mediterranean destined for Latin American cities, towns, and rural outposts across the region. Over the course of the early 20th century, a near-constant mobility of circulating people, things, and ideas characterized the formation of immigrant identities and communities with roots primarily in the Levantine area of the Middle East. Over time, historians of this migration have come to interpret as central the transnational and transregional nature of the ties that many individuals, families, and institutions in Latin America carefully maintained with their counterparts across the Atlantic. As the 20th century progressed, Middle Eastern migrants and their subsequent generations of descendants consolidated institutions, financial networks, and a plethora of other life projects in their respective Latin American home places. Meanwhile, they continued to seek meaningful participation in the realities of a Middle East-North Africa region undergoing deep shifts in its geopolitical, social, and cultural landscapes from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the end of World War I, through the tumultuous century that followed.
Article
Rosemary A. Joyce and Russell N. Sheptak
The Online Finding Aid for the Archivo General de Centro América will provide increased ways for researchers to identify documents of interest in a widely distributed microfilm copy of this primary resource for the history of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Chiapas (Mexico). The original archive, located in Guatemala, houses approximately 147,000 registered document collections from the colonial period, ranging in date from the 16th century to independence from Spain in 1821. The microfilm copy, composed of almost 4,000 reels of microfilm, is organized according to basic keywords designating the original province in colonial Guatemala, a year, and a subject-matter keyword. Also associated in the basic records of the finding aid (which are already available online) are the reference number assigned each document in the original archive, and the specific reel(s) on which it is found. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, enhanced records are being created for documents dating between 1700 and 1821 identified as associated with Guatemala, the administrative heart of the colony, for which there are no published indices. Enhanced records add names of people and places not recorded in the original record, opening up the microfilm collection, and through it, the original archive, to broader social history including studies of the roles of women, indigenous people, and African-descendant people.
Article
Pablo F. Gómez
In the early modern Spanish Caribbean, ritual practitioners of African descent were essential providers of health care for Caribbean people of all origins. Arriving from West and West Central Africa, Europe, and other Caribbean and New World locales, black healers were some of the most important shapers of practices related to the human body in the region. They openly performed bodily rituals of African, European, and Native American inspiration. Theirs is not a history uniquely defined by resistance or attempts at cultural survival, but rather by the creation of political and social capital through healing practices. Such a project was only possible through their exploration of and engagement with early modern Caribbean human and natural landscapes.
Article
The lives of Latin American Japanese were disrupted during World War II, when their civil and human rights were suspended. National security and continental defense were the main reasons given by the American countries consenting to their uprooting. More than 2,000 ethnic Japanese from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua were transferred as “illegal aliens” to internment camps in the United States. Initially, US and Latin American agencies arrested and deported male ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. During the second stage, women and children joined their relatives in the United States. Most forced migration originated in Peru. Brazil and Mexico established similar displacement programs, ordering the population of Japanese descent to leave the coastal zones, and in the case of Mexico the border areas. In both countries, ethnic Japanese were under strict monitoring and lost property, employment, and family and friend relationships, losses that affected their health and the opportunity to support themselves in many cases.
Latin American Japanese in the United States remained in camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the army for the duration of the war and were among the last internees leaving the detention facilities, in 1946. At the conclusion of World War II, the Latin American countries that had agreed to the expulsion of ethnic Japanese limited greatly their return. Some 800 internees were deported to Japan from the United States by the closure of the camps. Those who remained in North America were allowed to leave the camps to work in a fresh produce farm in Seabrook, New Jersey, without residency or citizenship rights. In 1952, immigration restrictions for former Latin American internees were lifted. Latin American governments have not apologized for the uprooting of the ethnic Japanese, while the US government has recognized it as a mistake. In 1988, the United States offered a symbolic compensation to all surviving victims of the internment camps in the amount of $20,000. In contrast, in 1991, Latin American Japanese survivors were granted only $5,000.
Article
Nicole von Germeten
Free and enslaved Africans played an important role in developing a unique form of participatory Christianity in New Spain’s mining towns, especially Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, and Parral. Afro-Mexicans founded, organized, and led religious organizations, called cofradías, shaping them to their own needs and understandings of the sacred and its connections to social ties, gatherings, and celebrations. The practical goals of cofradías included helping sick members and paying for burials and funerals. Historians observe a kind of Latin American African-influenced Baroque piety in cofradías, with embodied practices concentrating on annual flagellant processions held during Holy Week, and an evolving internal gender dynamic, which suggests assimilative goals, even as cofradías strengthened Afro-Mexican communities.
Article
Oscar Álvarez-Gila
The historical presence of Basque immigrants and their descendants in several Latin American countries from the age of colonialism to the present has led to the creation of a web of Basque diasporic communities whose members combine their political identity as citizens of their countries of residence and, in most cases, also of birth, with a cultural, ethnic identity as Basque Argentinians, Basque Uruguayans, Basque Mexicans and Basque Cubans, among others. For centuries the organization of these communities crystalized in the formation of a network of voluntary associations in which the preservation of Basque identity was usually linked to more practical aims such as mutual aid, leisure, and education.
Recent advances in the treatment of information, especially the benefits of digitization and the increasing use of the Internet as a tool for communication in all the spheres of human activity, have led to the appearance of initiatives to make this information available both to know and to research the past and present of these Basque diasporic communities, in the Americas and worldwide. These initiatives have been favored by the political evolution in the Basque homeland, with the retrieval of home rule and the creation of its own institutions of regional government, especially in the Spanish side of the Basque Country. Because of this, different websites are now available that provide researchers and general public with a gateway into deeper knowledge of how the Basque diaspora has evolved and what it is today.
First of all are the primary sources for reconstructing the history of the Basque diaspora in Latin America. The efforts have been focused on trying both to preserve the documentary heritage of collective endeavors of previous generations of Basques in the region, and to make this heritage as open as possible. This has led to the creation of several digital archives that hold and make available the papers of Basque clubs and associations (in the colonial age, as well as in the period after Latin American independence), the periodicals created by and for the communities of Basque immigrants, the views of others about these communities, and some personal archives to any interested person. Among these initiatives is the attempt to recover the memory of one of the latest forced migratory movements to hit the Basque Country: political exile after the Spanish Civil War.
The second type of resource is derived from the later attempts of some Basque diasporic communities to construct their own historical memory, using oral history as their principal tool. Most of the archives of oral sources created through these initiatives are available either on the Internet or in other publicly accessible ways.
Third, there are also websites whose aim is to provide the reader with first-hand, easily comprehensible articles on topics related to the Basque diaspora. Some of them deserve special comment because of the variety and richness of their contents.
Finally, the lack of specific online, digitalized libraries on the Basque diaspora is somehow compensated for by the emergence of new types of cultural constructs relating to the diaspora in audiovisual form that are also a good source for approaching the topic.
Article
Osmundo Pinho
The state of Bahia and its capital, Salvador, are the original loci of European colonization in the territory that later became Brazil. Together with other cities in the Northeast and along the Brazilian coast, they witnessed the imposition of mercantile capitalism and slave labor as forms of production of a new state and society. In the 21st century, Bahia is a state marked by racial inequality, the poverty of a large part of the population, and state violence, paradoxically associated with the strong presence of traditions of African origin and a rich and dense popular cultural life, as in other parts of the African diaspora. This combination implies certain contradictions experienced in different fields, in the present social structure and in the cultural and political history of the region. This can be seen in the trajectory of carnival, the most important popular festival in the city, and in its successive moments of identity reinvention as well as in the constitution of the city’s landscape, marked by black and African presence in symbolic and material ways. It can also be seen in the historical formation of candomblé, the cult of Yoruban gods in Bahia, developed amid persecutions and disputes. All these dimensions are structured in the expressive cultural forms of a black culture, which has been made and remade by generations of Afro-descendants in this environment marked by inequality, but also by creativity, joy, and aesthetic power.
Article
Mieko Nishida
Japanese immigration to Brazil started in 1908 as a replacement for European immigrants to work for the state of São Paulo’s expanding coffee industry. It peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in the face of growing anti-Japanese sentiment in Brazil. The Japanese migrated to Brazil in mandatory family units and formed their own agricultural settlements once they competed their colono labor contracts and became independent farmers. Under Getúlio Vargas’s nationalistic policies, a 1934 immigration law severely limited the entry of the Japanese. Strict legal restrictions were also imposed on them during Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937–1945). Japanese immigration was eventually terminated in 1942. Then the number of Japanese immigrants reached 188,986. At the end of the war, the Japanese were sharply divided among themselves over the defeat of Japan, and Sindō Renmei’s attacks on other Japanese factions terrified the nation of Brazil. Having given up their hope of returning to their homeland, the Japanese and their descendants began to migrate on a large scale to the cities, especially São Paulo City. Japanese immigration resumed in 1953 and peaked in 1959–1960. A total of 53,657 postwar immigrants, including many single adult men, arrived in Brazil before 1993. By 1980, the majority of Japanese Brazilians had joined the urban middle class, and many were already mixed racially. In the mid-1980s, Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan began on a large scale, due to Brazil’s troubled national economy. More than 310,000 Brazilian citizens were residing in Japan in June 2008, when the centenary of Japanese immigration was widely celebrated in Brazil. But the story does not end there: the global recession soon forced unemployed Brazilians and their Japanese-born children to return to Brazil.
Article
Alicia L. Monroe
Lay Catholic brotherhoods constituted important religious, social, and civic associations among African-origin and African-descended people in Portugal, West Central Africa, and Portuguese America in the early modern period (1450–1850). Lay Catholic brotherhoods (irmandades), also known as confraternities (confrarias) and sodalities, functioned as spaces of devotion oriented around one or more patron saints. In the Portuguese Atlantic world, free and enslaved people of African origin and descent utilized the associations to prioritize collective devotion, mutual aid, and burial rites for members. Mutual aid could include small payments during illness, assistance with manumission process completion, and internment of deceased members under the auspices of the sodality.
Lay Catholic brotherhoods functioned as critical sites of transculturation and belonging for people of African origin and descent in the 1490s in Portugal, by the early 1500s in areas of West Central Africa with an entrenched Portuguese presence, and in Brazil beginning in the colonial period (1500–1822). Confraternities became a common facet of lived experience and religiosity for African and African-descended Catholic devotees across the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic world. Associations were governed by organizational charters generated by founding or elected directorate members that required approval from Catholic Church leaders, the Crown, and provincial-level state authorities. Confraternities had juridical personality and recognition from ecclesial and state officials as semi-autonomous entities or corporate bodies. Members could exercise and experience limited levels of autonomy, even in slave-holding colonial environments. Within brotherhoods in Portugal and in its overseas imperial territories, ethnic and racial stratification was predominant, but not absolute. Confraternities acted as institutional sites where West, West Central, and Southeastern African ethnic group identities held importance and deep social meaning across several centuries. Confraternity participants engaged baroque Catholicism, which emphasized collective action including celebration of the saints and related rites relying on music, movement, and festivities. Brotherhoods functioned as critical sites of proselytization, but also came to serve as spaces for local member imperatives that incorporated African cultural expression, esthetics, and worldviews.
Article
Bryan A. Banks
Huguenots refer to the group of French Calvinists in France, those expelled from France into the wider European, Atlantic, and global diaspora, and those descendant from either of the first two groups. Driven by faith, religious factionalism, and dynastic rivalries, Huguenots enflamed the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Henri IV ended the war by extending a degree of toleration to the Huguenots in 1598 with the Edict of Toleration. Despite the king’s royal edict, the first wave of Huguenots (1530s–1660s) continued to leave France well into the 17th century. The second wave (1670s–1710s) occurred in the second half of the 17th century, when Louis XIV’s persecutory policies began to limit Huguenot communal activities, meeting spaces, available professions, and then with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the ability to be Calvinist legally at all. Following 1685, those who remained in France entered into what is often called the Désert period, when French Calvinists continued to practice their faith in clandestine settings, away from the French dragonnades. Those who rode the two waves out of France, settled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Great Britain, Ireland, and many of the German states. Some used other European states to ride successive waves of diaspora movement out further into Europe and the Atlantic World, relocating to North America, the Caribbean, Suriname, Brazil, South Africa, and then later on into the Indian and Pacific oceanic worlds. Huguenots took advantage of Atlantic spaces in order to prove their value to the French state, but when France no longer proved safe for Huguenots, the Atlantic offered them a refuge, wherein a complex diaspora community emerged in the early modern period.
Article
Matthias Röhrig Assunção
Capoeira is a martial art that developed from combat games enslaved Africans brought to Brazil. It is systematically documented since the beginning of the 19th century in Rio de Janeiro and later in other port cities. During the 19th century capoeira was increasingly practiced by the poor free people, black and of mixed ancestry, and also by white immigrants. Capoeira gangs controlled their territories against intruders and allied with political parties until the Republican purge of 1890. Capoeira survived best in Bahia, where it remained more associated with other forms of Afro-Brazilian culture and acquired many of its features still extant in present-day capoeira. From the 1930s onward, capoeira masters such as Bimba and Pastinha modernized capoeira, leading to the emergence of the Regional and Angola styles. Bahian capoeiristas migrated to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in search of better opportunities during the 1950–1970s. There they and their students developed what later became known as “Contemporary capoeira” (Capoeira Contemporânea) which is the most practiced style today. Capoeira was and is practiced in various ways: as a friendly game or as a fight, as a combat sport, or as an Afro-Brazilian cultural activity. Since the 1980s, capoeira has undergone a process of globalization and is now practiced in many countries around the world. Capoeira is the only martial art of the African Diaspora that is known and practiced worldwide. Writing on Capoeira has rapidly grown in a number of disciplines, leading to the constitution of its own interdisciplinary field of study.
Article
Nicole von Germeten
The European ideas associated with witchcraft came to the Americas as a multipronged weapon of imperialism, a conception of non-Christian beliefs not as separate worldviews but as manifestations of evil and the reigning power of the devil over Indigenous peoples and, slightly later, African slaves and free people of African origins or heritage. To create this imperialist concept, colonizers drew from a late medieval demonological literature that defined witchcraft as ways of influencing one’s fate through a pact with the devil and the ritual of witches’ sabbaths. Through the court structure of the Holy Offices of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, Iberian imperialists set up judicial processes that they designed to elicit confessions from their colonial subjects regarding their involvement in what was labeled witchcraft and witches’ sabbaths, but which was most likely either non-European beliefs and practices, or even popular European ideas of healing. Archival documents from the Holy Office fueled Europeans’ vision of themselves as on the side of cosmic good as well as providing some details regarding popular practices such as divination and love magic. Whatever ethnographic details emerge from this documentation, the use of the terminology of witchcraft always signals an imperialistic lens.
