The Basque emigrations analyzed through pictures

Why an Italian citizen studies the Basque emigrations?

The development of the migratory flows that characterized the19th and 20th century has been, nevertheless, one of the most complex phenomena of the Contemporary Age. For this reason - in spite of the fact that the scientific international community has produced a big and consolidated bibliography on the history of the contemporary migrations - it is necessary to continue studying motivation that pushed millions from Europeans to leave their countries of origin to seek and to realize a new life beyond the Ocean.

Until now, in fact, the historical analysis have concentrated, mainly, almost exclusively on the economic and political aspects of the situation. We can affirm that in the history of the contemporary migrations there are not analyses that have been fixed on aspects as the mentality, daily life, interpersonal relations between the emigrants out of their countries of origen. At the end, but not less important - from my point of view - an approach that studies the plurality of the most human aspects that characterized such phenomena.

In the last years many have been the researchers who have shared this idea, and pushed by the need to reinterpret the migratory contemporary experience they have started outlining new analytical perspectives, new interpretations that have not yet achieved confront the predominance of the political - economic interpretations.

Personally I have started studying the history of the contemporary migrations almost five years ago in my country - Italy - paying all my attention, especially, in the concrete case in the so called Italian Mezzogiorno.

In spite of that during this time I could have found out about many aspects of the migratory question, I have realized that the complexity of the topic is such that, to understand it in all its aspects, is preferable to move away from those investigations that present such phenomena using only the unique analytical perspective, as if an alone form of explanation existed.

For this reason I am sure of the fact that, to understand the shape of essence of the migratory experience, we don’t have to focalize our attention only in those aspects that sound to us, familiar, because the nearest to our cultures. In fact, exist a plurality of aspects that have not been studied yet because they linked to communities and different groups of culture to the researchers cultures who, normally, prefer the cases nearest to those of their own history or nationality of origin.

In addition, it is necessary to bear another factor in mind. In fact, if it is true that the contemporary emigration can be considered the phenomenon that during all the 19th century and part of the 20th has joined the destinies of millions of Europeans conforming as one of the most evident phenomena of mass of the Contemporary Age, on the other hand it is not possible to deny that every person should have lived through this experience across his individual point of view, which is unique because leaked through his personal experiences and his culture of origin. And it is this individual, personal point of view, which can be considered to be a door that we have to open to continue a new interpretative way for the history of the migratory phenomena.

Probably these are the motivations that have pushed me to dedicate to the concrete case of the migratory Basque flows.

This people is not - geographically speaking - too much far from Italy, but, from the cultural point of view it is, nevertheless, deeply differently of mine. I am, in fact, a son of the Mediterranean - Neapolitan - my culture is born far from the Cantabrian coasts. F. Braudel used to say: " what is the Mediterranean? Thousand united things. It is not a landscape, but innumerable landscapes... It is not a civilization, but a series of civilizations. " My culture is born, this way, of the antique and inevitable pollution among the villages that have appeared to the coasts of the Mediterranean one. The Basques, on the other hand, continue being defined as one of the most ancient villages of the world, that is the least contaminated culture. They have a language that for me is still very difficult to learn and that, besides, defines a huge part of the Basque being. If I am not wrong the word euskaldun, that normally comes translated in Spanish as Basque, means something like " the one that speaks euskara ". Then, those who are the Basques? Only those who speak euskara?

Maybe for this and other motives, before understanding the history of the Basque emigrations, I have to strength dealing those who are the Basques. I have heard more than once that " to be a Basque it is necessary to think as a Basque " and immediately after this idea in the last two years I have lived through a slow and intense process that it would define of " disposal culturally ". Such a process has not been "completely "pacific". Many, in fact, have been the moments in which the cultural misunderstandings and the force of the example to follow were not allowing me to improve in the understanding and comprehension of the Basque people. The development of the research that I am carrying out to finish my studies of doctorate has been evolving parallel to another search that did not have nothing to see with the books of history kept in the libraries. I have gone in search of a " mental land " virgin or, at least, not completely contaminated by my culture mother.

Two years of life in Basque Country are not too much, it is true, but they have carried inevitably to approach the Basque mentality and consequently the history of this people. Probably the experiences of life are helping me so as the books and the sources. My personal way of investigation, in fact, does not conform simply to the relation between the researcher and the sources, but it is something that is necessarily accompanied on the personal experiences.

This personal way of including the investigation has implied the choice of the images through pictures as principal source for my study. I have chosen this type of source for a series of motives: first, in my life I have had the possibility of practice the photographic activity very often; secondly this activity has pushed me to develop a critical sense towards this type of image that is so beautiful as complex of interpreting; and in the end there are other most scientific motivations that I will explain in the following paragraph.

The photographic image, offering interesting perspectives of a social analysis, has stopped being used simply as illustration and, nevertheless, it starts standing out as one of more useful sources - we should say favored - for the development of new interpretations of the history.

In the concrete case in the history of the contemporary emigrations it is not possible to ignore an evident data and of relevant interest: during the 19th century the diffusion of the photography was an European phenomenon that developed in contemporary with the massive migrations towards America.

The history of this powerful way of communication, and simultaneously of reproduction of the reality, starts in 1829 when the Frenchman Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce, had a long tradition of studies of optics, achieved a way of fixing images using the action that the light exercises on sensitive substances before it. Since then the photographic image, parallel to its fast technical evolution, has begun to develop a multiplicity of functions becoming, not only the technology of the art piece, but also the manners of expression and the human communication.

The photography was becoming as a way of communication of masses from the beginning of its history, in the same moment in which the whole Europe was living through the development of another massive phenomenon, the migrations. We could affirm that it was historically impossible that both phenomena were not coinciding.

This temporary "coincidence" puts as the main issue to take-off for the development of a Photographic History of the contemporary migrations.

For almost two centuries, therefore, the pictures took part of the daily and familiar life, this is because of it that nowadays, independently of its aesthetic qualities, there come considered ocular testimonies, particular points of view that place us, in a way, opposite to the history.

In spite of this, the use of the testimony of the photographic images presents numerous problems and, if on the one hand they provide us information about concrete aspects of the social realities, on the other one they do not reflect a reality because sometimes they distort it. The photographic communication, in fact, as all kind of images, is characterized by a double level: denoting (what is represented) and connotative (the symbolic, metaphorical meaning, etc.) so the image assumes beyond what is materially represented.

In that way, on the one hand the whole world can understand what is represented in an image thanks to the process of primary significance but in the other one, to understand completely a photography, it is necessary the fact that there are studied all those cultural implications that characterize the secondary process of significance that, inside a certain historical - social context, they are absolutely conventional created by cultural specific traditions.

Then, The images can assume different meanings according to the context in which they are, until they weren’t understood for anything if the cultural traditions of the "readers" (1) are not accustomed what is represented in them.

This affirmation imposes a reflection on us: pictures that have been realized in epochs and contexts different from our ones cannot be interpreted historically resting on our visual culture, and our interpretive categories linked to this one. If we want to understand the original meaning of the pictures produced during the migratory contemporary experience, we have to dispose the one that is our visual culture to approach to the point of view of the epoch.

In fact, if the primary codes constitute a point in common between two different epochs, the secondary codes of both moments (the present and the 19th century) are completely different. Ours is, in fact, a society collapsed by all kinds of images, whereas XIX society was a society who experimented, very fast, the potentials in a new way the reproduction of the reality. Because of that it was, nevertheless, a society characterized by a sensibility different of ours. Many of the images that today do not tell us nothing, simply because we are accustomed to a much bigger scale of images, had on those times a major impact.

Another motivation that pushes the new generations of historians towards an analytical interpretation of the documentary photographic is that, though exist a big quantity of photographic material related to the migratory experience, there are few works of photographic history that contain the contemporary emigrations as an object and, less those that affect in Euskal Herria's frame. The risk that great part of these documents could disappear is evident and real.

Nowadays, thanks to a careful use of the new computer technologies with the development of precise works of restoration of the delicate materials, is it offered to us the possibility to don’t lose definitively these sources in favor to the reconstruction of the historical memory that are the files and the family albums. The pictures, that have been built a reference to the daily life or exceptional events, which concerned the lives of the protagonists of those times, can contribute with a lot of information to deep in our knowledge of the migratory contemporary experience.

We don't have to waste this possibility that is offered to us

Personal pictures: private images of the emigration.

The pictures that are situated in the family files had to use to answer to a specific purpose, in general to complete the messages of the epistolary communication. These images, in fact, were constituting an essential help in the abundant correspondence. A testimony of this attitude is provided by Juaco Lopez Álvarez:

The communication of the emigrants with their families was fulfilling through letters and pictures, thereby, one and the others were informed about the innovations that were concerning their lives and the physical changes of the persons and villages. The emigrants sent thousands of instantaneous with their portraits, conference of the trade and the stay of their property or where they were working, the holidays and parties were they met, their houses and cars, and the tombs in which there were staying forever the remains of brothers or relatives.... Close to these pictures also they sent images of the landscapes and cities in which the life was developing in América.

In the distance produced by the emigration it was essential to transmit to the families the documents in which there was remaining clearly the condition of good health and well-being, simultaneously, it was necessary to demonstrate that some things of the past were missing and had not taken place in this way to confirm a substantial continuity with the communities of origin. Because of this, we can affirm that the kind of communication preferred by the emigrants was the portrait. In fact, since the end of the 19th century, the practice of a portrait before the emigration turned into one slightly habitually, almost routine.

Intimate portraits conceived strictly as "recollection" from the value that gave to the photography a carrier of a spiritual feeling of permanency opposite to the reality of the physical absence. In the same way in the moment of the return, also was the habit of doing a last portrait in America (4).

To understand the value of these photographic portraits, it's going to be for us easier to understand Walter Benjamin's words that, in spite of he was not speaking about the emigrations, described them in this way:

Is in the photography where the explanatory value begins to make move back in the whole line the value of the worship. This one yields but makes opposition to it. A last trench occupies the human face. It is not because of that the central place of the photography of the first epoch is occupied by the portrait. The value of the worship of the image has found its last refuge in the worship to the recollection of the dear distant or late relatives. The aura signs to us for last time from the early pictures the fleeting expression of a human face. This is that constitutes its nostalgic and incomparable beauty (5).

Another possible motivation that was imposing the first photographic portrait on the emigrant is born of the administrative obligatory nature, the official documentation that the emigrant had to complete to cover all the legal steps, as well to achieve their item, good to be admitted by normality into the country of destiny. In every way, it is necessary to specify that, the administrative use of the photography like complement of the personal documentation is relatively late, in fact, it was in the habit of using more frequently in the criminal cards or police. Only at the beginning of the 20th century the information or personal signs, the physical characteristics of the individual were coming completed with the photographic portrait. The practically massive utilization of pictures like official document of identification was one of the factors that it allowed on the one hand, the professionals' proliferation in the ports wherefrom the ships were going out, and in the other one, from the second half of the century, the same development of this type of small local business can be considered to be another factor of the definitive popularization and diffusion of the photography.

In fact, if we simply could imagine the quantity of pictures and portraits that were crossing the Ocean, the private ones and those that they were born as bureaucratic need, up to a point, we might up to affirm that the emigration in mass to America has been one of the factors that mainly determined the popularization and the diffusion of the photography worldwide.

To the persons' flows recovered others, characterized by the same intensity, formed by images. Across the sending of the photographic images, in fact, what was trying to realize age, on the one hand, to create a reunification - we say - virtually of the family unit; for other one, this type of visual communication was functional to the creation of apologetic messages of the migratory experience in which were underlined almost exclusively the good results obtained by the same protagonists, as if it was indispensable to demonstrate the optimistic the made election.

What the emigrants were claiming was, then, to transmit the image which " the fortune they smiles and at that have acquired the modern taste for the comfort and the quality of life " (6).

It is not a chance that besides the portrait developed another kind of communication, both in America and in the communities of origin, was very much successful: the pictures of the business and properties. These were the images that, in a way add to certify, compulsory, the economic level achieved by the emigrants.

Another relevant group of pictures relative to the contemporary emigrations refers to the religious and traditional festivities organized by the communities of emigrants bought property in the new continent. In fact, throughout the whole 19th century the religious festivities in America knew a strong impulse in agreement with the importance that there were acquiring the religious and festive acts in the e migrants communities.

These acts were serving as pretext to summon meetings, to debate matters relating to the interests of the collectivity and, especially, as a way of affirmation of the regional identity. At the first moment these acts had the double religious and playful character, with mass, procession and pilgrimage, and in that dances and other traditional elements were not absent. Thanks to the pictures and the illustrations, it is possible to document as these summons they were a way of keeping alive the traditions of the community of origin. Great number of attendees were dressed in traditional suits according to the designs at the time in force. The photographers, in fact, did not lose the opportunity to gain new clients inserting advertising destined for all those that wanted to be portrayed by the regional suit, establishing special prices and delicate lights.

The pictures of the emigration were not characterized only by individual or business images, another element that stands out in this ocean of images is, nevertheless, the family. Many, in fact, are the portraits of the family groups. Once again it is necessary to say that to create categories of photographic aspects is a practice that might turn out to be historically dangerous. In fact, in spite of that the family portraits are very similar, the histories that took the family groups to America are very different. Many of the families were those who having left their own country formed a family in the country of reception, others who left with their own families, had to wait a lot of time in order that they were reached by the brothers, cousins, wives, parents etc. and not they all managed to reunify the original group of the family.

1) The word "readers" refers to Roland Bathes's phrase in the one that was affirming: " I Read texts, images, cities, faces, gestures, scenes, etc. " Mentioned by Peter BURKE in I Dress and do not not dressed, Barcelona, 2002, pág. 145.

2) López Älvarez J.; in the Justification of the book " Asturians in America (1840-1940) " of Crabiffosse Cuesta F., Gijon, 2002, Pág 4.

3) Normally they were the families that before the lack of news, were forcing the emigrants to give reasons of their worriying silence, asking for a convincing response