Starting in the 19the century, the families that make up the current base of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Aránzazu of Lima were the leaders of an intense expansion and settling process in the United States of America as a result of their commercial and production activities. This expansion has three main focus areas: the East Coast, centered in New York; the West Coast, centered in San Francisco
and Los Angeles, and the South, centered in Atlanta. New York became the center of the commercial and financial activities of these families, who moved there, creating commercial headquarters and integrating themselves into the commercial and financial activity of that place. On the West Coast, their bases of operations were the large ports, because that’s where their commercial activities with the Far East on the clipper lines were based as their activities grew in that part of the Americas. The implantation of the families of the Brotherhood in the South was based on a prior relationship of these families with the great cotton growing families in the Southern States. At the end of the American Civil War, and the ruin of the losing side, they acquired large swathes of cotton lands and created a strategic production and commercial base in Atlanta. The fact that these Basque-descendant families from Peru settled in the United States did not mean any loss of their connection to Peru, nor did it mean the loss of their connection to their founding principles. We cannot forget that the families that made up the Brotherhood starting in the second half of the 19thcentury did so as an act of vindication of that historical grouping of Basques. It was a decision that sought to defend the founding principles of the Brotherhood while resisting both the Peruvian Government’s decision to dissolve it and the acceptance of this dissolution on the part of another group which decided to found a guild. Keeping the idea and structures of the Brotherhood alive served to reinforce one of the special, and indeed rather unique, elements of the Brotherhood: its independence to work apart from all civil and religious organizations: starting in 1865, the Brotherhood only had to answer to itself and its members. From that moment on, aided by the commitment of its members, it has maintained a high level of both “internal” activity, preserving and caring for the heritage received, and external, by creating museums in houses, recovering the archives of the sister guilds and brotherhoods that had been created in the Americas (such as in Chile or Potosí); conservation and archive work; supporting and encouraging academic works; collaborating in paying homage to the work of the Basques in Peru, such as that of the Passionists in the Peruvian Amazon jungle; sharing the history of the Brotherhood and the Basques in that country; and continuing the leading mission of this group: to meet the needs of the Basques in Lima.
