Maketo

[5] 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.

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).

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.

[7] 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”.

[8] 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.

[9] 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 Constitution[Note 1] 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.

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.

Among the Spaniards, adultery is frequent, in the elevated classes as well as in the humble ones, and the affection for the home in the latter is null, because they do not have it.Arana's descriptions of the maketos/Spaniards become increasingly negative, as in the article Un pueblo caracterizado, published in El Correo Vasco of Bilbao in June 1899:[3]It is the people of blasphemy and the razor...

Let everything our eyes see, our ears hear, our mouths speak, our hands write and our hearts feel be Basque.Hence Sabino Arana's radical opposition to mixed marriages.

The basarritarres, the true sons of our race, the only ones from whom our Homeland can hope for salvation, were they to unite and associate with the dregs of the maketo people, if corrupt in their cities, more degraded in their fields?The socialists responded and, among them, Tomás Meabe [es], a former nationalist, stood out.

In one of the articles he published in La Lucha de Clases, he wrote:[3]It is true that they [men from other lands] also contribute to the public burdens, that they have enriched their exploiters, that they have worked like beasts and eaten worse than them, that they have gambled their lives at all hours, that they have in their homes an eternal drama of misery...