Maketo in Basque (or maqueto, in Spanish) is a pejorative term used to describe non-Basque migrants from other parts of Spain who have migrated into the Basque Country, especially those who cannot speak the Basque language.
The term's origins lie in the industrialization of Biscay in the late 19th century. Mine workers often came from outside the Basque Country and were referred to as "maketos" by the local population. The word's use and negative connotation were spread by writer Sabino Arana, who is often considered the father of Basque nationalism.
Biscay in the last third of the 19th century
In the last third of the 19th century, Biscay underwent a rapid industrialization process based on iron mining and steelmaking. One of its consequences was the arrival of thousands of emigrants from other provinces. The 1877 census already shows the weight of the emigrant population, which represented 19.5% of the total, but this percentage was much higher in the mining and urban area of Bilbao, while it remained low in the rural areas. This contrast can be seen in the percentage of localities such as Guernica, 5.8%, compared to 38% in Bilbao, 36% in Baracaldo, 41% in Santurtzi or 65% in San Salvador del Valle. Emigration explains the great demographic growth of Biscay in those years, where the population went from 195,864 inhabitants in 1877 to 311,361 in 1900, reaching a population density of 141 inhabitants per square kilometer, which was similar to that of other European industrial areas.
The vast majority of the labor force employed in the mines and factories was foreign, while Biscayans occupied the positions of foremen and other intermediate positions, in addition to the fact that the owners of the mines were also Biscayans. This was explained in a report prepared by the on the workers in the mines in 1904:The workers from Biscay are in a small minority, to the point that it can be stated, without fear of being mistaken, that more than 70 percent of the workers who work in the mines come mostly from the provinces of La Coruña, Lugo, Orense, Pontevedra, León, Soria, Oviedo, Palencia, Zamora, Salamanca and Burgos. The first six provinces provided the largest contingent. The Biscayan worker is rarely a laborer; he is generally found working as a foreman or listero, while the Galicians, Asturians, Leonese and Castilians, by exception, carry out work other than that of a laborer [...]In the same report, a distinction was made between workers with stable residence, foreign or not, and itinerant workers, almost always working for a period of less than three years, who lived in appalling conditions under the supervision of foremen. It was in this context that the first workers' organizations were born, hitherto non-existent in Biscay and in the Basque Country in general. They were the work of the socialists headed by a man who arrived from abroad, Facundo Perezagua, who, according to socialist Julián Zugazagoitia, was a “lean, wiry, indomitable individual, possibly a descendant of Toledo Jews (because of his physical appearance), who acts as a revolutionary ferment in the Christian paradise of the Biscayan mines”. In 1886, he constituted the first socialist grouping in Bilbao, whose members were also emigrants, and which was followed by those of Ortuella (1887), (1888), Sestao (1888), Las Carreras (1890), San Salvador del Valle (1891), , Begoña and Erandio (1896).
The irruption of the socialist movement in Biscayan society took place in May 1890 with the general mining strike, in which the workers resorted to violence to extend it, and which ended with their victory by achieving a reduction in the working day. Serious labor conflicts and strikes were a practically unknown phenomenon in Biscay and in the Basque Country, which until then had lived in a kind of “sweet arcadia”, in the words of the socialist Zugazagoitia. As Ricardo Miralles has pointed out, at the end of the strike, “several phenomena chained together became commonplace before the astonished and bewildered eyes of the public opinion and the official media: the social question, as the bourgeois press of the time called it; the hegemony of organized socialism, to which the mining bosses systematically denied its representativeness, and, above all, the practice of a type of workers' pressure to obtain success in their demands that abruptly broke the traditional social stability. From that moment on, the history of Biscay took a turn that placed it in the sphere of contemporary social conflict par excellence, the workers' conflict”.
Use and origin of the word
To designate the workers who came from outside, the foremen of the mines used derogatory and racist names such as “our Chinese”, “belarri-motxas” (“short ears”, referring to non-Basques) or "azur baltzak" (“blacks or liberals in the bones”, an expression that comes from Carlism). The most used, however, was “maketos”, which was also used by employers and other social and political groups, as denounced by the socialists, among whom the young Miguel de Unamuno stood out. Unamuno wrote several articles on the subject in the socialist newspaper La Lucha de Clases, and later, in the liberal newspaper El Heraldo de Madrid. In one of those articles, Unamuno said:The name maketo, of Castilian origin, comes from the mining region, where it was used at first by the natives of that region, in the sense of new-comers or intruders, and with them, the workers of the country, the poor braceros who came from all over Spain to earn their wages with their work, enriching the owners of the mines, Biscayan, for the most part. From there, it has spread to all of Biscay. [...] They blame the so-called invasion of evils that the economic process itself carries with it. It is the usual refrain, based on profound ignorance of the social dynamism [...]Ainhoa Arozamena picks up the idea that the appellative "maketo" comes from the mining area of Biscay, and quotes Sabino Arana to corroborate it. Arana wrote that its use was initially restricted to the area “from Galdácano to Portugalete and from Munguía to Valmaseda”. Thus, according to Arozamena, “maketo” would derive from the Biscayan word or voice "makutua", which means "wrapper", since the miners from the Basque Country called those who came from outside "makutuak", “meaning with that ‘those of the wrapper’, or those of the house on their backs”.Arozamena, Ainhoa "Maketo", Auñamendi Eusko Entziklopeia. (Accessed January 6th, 2025) This same interpretation is made by Juan José Solozábal, who says that the word, "with a derogatory intention, was applied to the immigrant workers who came from other provinces to work in the mines with their poor little bundle, or maco, on their backs”.
However, it has also been pointed out that the word “maketo” could derive from the “northwestern regional voice of unknown origin, probably pre-Roman” magüeto, as it appears in the Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana, or from "meteco" (meaning "foreigner") of ancient Athens.
The "antimaquetism" of Sabino Arana
The father of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, identified the “being” of the “Basque nation” — understood in an essentialist way, and therefore, independent of the will of its inhabitants — with the Catholic religion and the . The language, Basque, appeared in second place. Hence, he wrote in the opuscule Errores catalanistas (1894): “if we were given the choice between a Biscay populated by maketos who only spoke Basque and a Biscay populated by Biscayans who only spoke Castilian, we would choose the latter without hesitation, because it is preferable the Biscayan substance with exotic accidents that can be eliminated and replaced by natural ones, to an exotic substance with Biscayan properties that could never change it”.
According to Arana, the Biscayans — like the rest of the Basques, all of them defined racially, not linguistically or culturally — had been “degenerating” in a long process that culminated in the 19th century with the subordination of the Fueros to the Spanish ConstitutionIn 1894, Arana wrote: “In the year 39, Vizcaya fell definitively under the power of Spain. Our homeland Biscay, from the independent nation it was, with its own power and rights, became on that date a Spanish province, a part of the most degraded and abject nation in Europe.” and with the ‘invasion’ of the Spanish immigrants, who had brought with them modern anti-religious ideas, such as "impiety, all kinds of immorality, blasphemy, crime, free thought, unbelief, socialism, anarchism...", as well as having caused the decline of the Basque language. In an article significantly titled “Our Moors”, he stated: “The maketo: behold the enemy!”. Subsequently, on June 30, 1876, Cánovas de Castillo promulgated the Spanish constitution of 1876, which further undermined the institutions and laws of the peninsular Basques.
Thus, as Miguel de Unamuno had already observed in his time, “antimaquetism” became the axis around which Sabine nationalism revolved, expressing with it the rejection of the consequences of industrialization, among which was the “maketa invasion”, as it was called by the middle and popular classes attached to traditional culture.
Arana identified the maketo with the Spanish,He writes: “In a word, every Spaniard is a maqueto, whether Catholic or atheist; and Maquetania, all of Spain with its adjacent islands.” extending the depravities and vices attributed to the immigrant maketo to the Spanish as a whole. In this way, Arana turned the maketo into the counter-figure of the Biscayan and the Basque, whose presence was responsible for the “degeneration” that Basque society was experiencing. “The Euskerino society, twinned and confused with the Spanish people, which spoils the minds and hearts of its children and kills their souls, is, therefore, far from its purpose, it's losing its children, it's sinning against God”, writes Arana.