ABSTRACT
Basques have migrated from their Spanish-French Pyrenees homeland for more than a millennium. They participated in the Roman colonization of Iberia, whaling expeditions in the Atlantic, commercial networks throughout southern Spain and northern Europe, and in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Philippines. Basques suffered political and economic exile during and after the French Revolution, the First and Second Carlist Wars of the 1800s in Spain, and throughout the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and subsequent four decades of the Francisco Franco dictatorship. Regardless of the circumstances and destinations, over the centuries millions of Basques living in foreign host societies have maintained ties to their ancestral homeland, language, customs, traditions, and ethnic identity. These links range from emotional and psychological to educational and commercial and today they orient nearly 200 Basque diaspora organizations in twenty-one states around the globe.
