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Born in Sao Paulo, Pilar Alava is a 37 year old Brazilian Basque, who was elected this year president of the Eusko Alkartasuna Basque club. Gernika Kuttun is the name of their headquarters and they are celebrating its 55th anniversary this month.  “You are all invited,” she says.

Joseba Etxarri/ La Plata, Argentina. We confess that we spoke face to face to Pilar Alava, however not in Sao Paulo or in Brazil, but in La Plata, Argentina, where FEVA’s annual meeting was held last weekend, during the Semana Nacional Vasca. She has been elected this year president of the Eusko Alkartasuna Basque club in Sao Paulo and she attended here as her club’s delegate. There were also Basques from Uruguay and Chile, as well as athletes and pelotaris from these same countries as well as from Mexico, Venezuela, and Euskadi. Daughter of a Basque from Urduña, we spoke to her in Spanish, language that she speaks bringing an interesting Brazilian accent to it.

-Tell us about your relationship with Euskadi. When did you join the Basque club?

-Let’s see (she pauses and calculates). I am 37 and I have been part of the club for some 20 years. That is when I took my first trip to Euskadi and when I came back, my father returned to the Basque club and our family has been a member ever since.

-Your second trip was in 2003, to participate in the Gaztemundu Program.

-That was eleven years ago but it’s like it was yesterday. I didn’t know much about Euskadi and I was very excited. We also participated in the World Congress of Basque Collectivities that took place in Vitoria-Gasteiz to end Gaztemundu. I learned a lot and made a lot of friends; I learned about the dynamics in other clubs and Basque communities….And what is for sure is that I was able to reconnect today, in La Plata, with some of those I shared the program with, with Arantxa and Xabier from Necochea, Soledad from Jose C. Paz, Daniel from Uruguay, Jesus from Buenos Aires, Maria Laura from Chascomus…its wonderful to see that we keep working Basque, everyone from his/her own town and country…

-This is your first time at the Semana Vasca Argentina…

-Yes, and I’m quickly feeling at home.

-What is Sao Paulo like?

-It’s crazy. It is a metropolis of twenty million people with everything that that implies. There aren’t many Basques and being such a huge city with so many things to do, it is difficult to bring people to our club. Even so, this year we are recharging our batteries and carrying out new communications campaign, we are on the internet, we provide information to folks with Basque last names that live in Sao Paulo, and we are getting very good results.

-You are the oldest Brasilean Basque club.

-We will celebrate 55 years on November 30. We are hoping to pay tribute to the three founding members who are still living, Elias Echegoyen, Amable Otondo and Francisco Lizarzaburu, all three are 91 years old. We will hold a party with songs, food and speeches. And we will plant a new Tree of Gernika. Our clubhouse, outside of Sao Paulo, is surrounded in greenery, and is called Gernika Kuttun. We already have a Gernika sapling there but after all this, we would like to symbolically plant another one since here everything continues to go from father to son.

-What’s Brazil’s economy like?

-We just had presidential elections but I would say that many Brazilians think that 2015 is going to be a difficult year. Let me say that we love our homelands, Brazil, Euskadi and we will keep working.

-Are Basques still coming to Sao Paulo?

-There are many Basque companies here and we want to connect them to the Basque club, but in general I can’t talk about young Basques emigrating here, unless there are exceptions. I work for a Spanish company, Movistar, that absorbed the company I used to work for and they did bring 300 Spaniards to work in Sao Paulo a year or two ago, creating entire departments with people from there. But as far as I know, there are no Basques.

-You are in a revival phase at the Basque club…

-We have a solid base and our own Basque club that we bought with a remarkable personal effort on the part of the founding members. We are now finishing up a remodel and will celebrate our 55th anniversary there. There are some Basques who come to Brazil. This week Lehendakari Ibarretxe will visit us and talk about sustainable human development and the Basque case at a university forum. Writer Fito Rodriguez is also coming. Let me take advantage of this occasion to invite anyone around to come to the Basque club on November 30 to share our birthday with us, or come whenever you please. Gure etxea zure etxea da, our home is your home.