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The history of Basque transnationalism challenges the sociospatial assumptions of community, for these active ethnics have linked themselves simultaneously to networks of relationships and meaning from both host and home country since the time of marine trade and Spanish colonialism, through the Basque government-in-exile period, to contemporary Basque centers. “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson 1991, 6). These dispersed Basque diaspora communities are similarly imagined as ethnic diaspora communities (utilizing Cohen’s categorization), promoting cultural preservation and sustained ethnic identity over centuries in some cases; as groups maintaining homeland trade, labor, immigration, and cultural ties; as exhibiting solidarity with co-ethnics; and as a community with a shared collective history and myths of its idealized homeland.1 I have traced the history of Basque migration and shown that Basque ethnic group awareness existed in their European and later New World trading networks and in the imperial diaspora inside the Spanish colonial framework. Economic conditions, the aftermath of wars, primogeniture inheritance systems , and chain migration from Basque villages to the New World facilitated a Basque labor diaspora. From the 1930s through the 1970s, a political diaspora of exiles escaping oppression, prison, and death sentences under the Franco dictatorship provided the last wave of Basque emigration. It is this most recent cohort of Basques who have affected the diaspora communities and their contemporary ethnic identity manifestations. As a means of concluding the results of this project, I aim to summarize the comparisons of Basque diaspora communities in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Peru, the United States, and Uruguay; to compare the Basque diaspora to other ethnic diasporas; and to propose its place in present and future Basque studies. “Belonging Here and There”: Expressions from the Basque Diaspora I have demonstrated support for the argument that despite geographical and generational differences, the core elements of Basque ethnic identity are deWned 192 Chapter Seven Amaia: An Interconnected Disconnectedness 07chap7.qxd 8/27/03 5:02 PM Page 192 in a constant manner, focusing on ancestry, music, dance, sport, cuisine, and religion, and decreasingly on language, in each of the six case studies.The various ethnic institutions and Basque centers developed in much the same way— as ethnic societies for mutual Wnancial aid and as host-country adaptation facilitators with a focus on preserving a Basque cultural identity, and not as political organizations promoting a political or partisan ideology. The centers have also followed a transition pattern similar to institutions that are now facilitating host-country Basques’ “return” to ethnicity in general and often to the home country speciWcally. The research responses demonstrated that though the majority of people queried had no intention of a permanent physical return, many maintain a psychological and emotional commitment to the Basque Country—one of the elements of diasporic identity. A diasporic identity, however, is not merely an extension of the homeland. Boundaries of multiple loyalties shift and can differ from one diaspora location to another. The subjective nature of Basque diaspora identity—the sense of belonging that it entails and the connection to positive social status as argued by Tajfel—is important because it provides a sense of unity that transplants the sense of belonging from a speciWc physical homeland to a transnational consciousness. The subjective identity may also entail a responsibility to survive as a conscious collective (Bakalian 1992, 2–3), a concept that only a few interviewees expressed explicitly in interviews but that was supported by questionnaire results. Separate research has concluded that women are more likely than men to implement ethnic food consumption, holiday celebrations, and childhood socialization patterns (Stoller 1996, 146), but responses to my interview and questionnaire questions did not Wnd this a statistical reality with the Basque population. Though there were differences between males and females in their reported knowledge of homeland politics and in their migration experiences, gender was not a signiWcant factor in deWning “Basqueness,” and the majority of both genders disagreed that mothers had been more inXuential than fathers in preserving Basque ethnicity maintenance. This adds another dimension to the Basque feminist anthropologists’ contentions that a Basque matriarchy does not exist in reality. Though the myth of a Basque matriarchy continues among Basque populations in Euskal Herria and abroad, questionnaire responses fortiWed Teresa Del Valle’s conclusion (Del Valle et al. 1985) that mothers are not necessarily more inXuential than fathers in perpetuating Basque traditions and identity. I have illustrated that these diaspora deWnitions of...

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