Two illustrious Spanish citizens, the Basque entrepreneur José Francisco Navarro Arzac (1823–1909) and the Catalan anarchist Pedro Esteve (1865–1925), represent, on the surface, historical extremes of the Spanish immigrant experience in the United States. Together, they engaged a remarkably diverse set of undertakings, beliefs, and public work that connected the Iberian Peninsula with North America. While neither of these individuals and their lives should be considered “typical,” they each had influential public personas and engaged in a variety of activities that contributed powerfully to the meaning and identity of Spanish immigrant in the United States.
Navarro and Esteve both left Spain as single men due to political instability in their homeland, and they settled in the United States; each married, raised families, and rose to prominence in public life. While their Iberian identities and general immigration experiences suggest commonality, at least on the surface, the contrasts between the two were extreme. In New York, where they both lived for many years, they moved in completely different circles: Navarro was a leading entrepreneur and financier, while Esteve was an anarchist and labor activist. Navarro founded shipping lines and formed business partnerships, Esteve organized maritime workers and edited anarchist periodicals; Navarro was a member of Manhattan’s economic elite and lived at some of the island’s most prestigious addresses, Esteve lived in immigrant working-class tenements located in Brooklyn, Paterson, NJ, and Ybor City, FL. Ideologically, Esteve was an anti-imperialist internationalist, a militant atheist, and an intellectual anarchist who died in near poverty conditions at the age of 60. Conversely, Navarro was a fervent Catholic, a very wealthy españolista monarchist, who celebrated 86 birthdays.
Despite these profound differences, there are striking parallels between these two men. Both retained enduring ties with Spain, both sought to influence the politics of their motherland as well as those of the United States, and both forged institutions in the “new world” that reflected their social and political identities formed years earlier in Spain. Indeed, they each believed in societal change and had powerful visions of a new world order. Esteve hoped for a world revolution, the anarchist “social revolution,” while Navarro’s biographers identified him as “Spain’s first multinational manager” who envisioned a single global Christian capitalist government.1 The historic value in comparing and contrasting these two lives is that they shed much light on the evolution of conflicting Iberian identities in both Spain and the “New World.” Through their lives, we gain insight into the dynamic transnational process in which “old world” institutions and forms of sociability were transported to, and implanted in, the Americas. Despite their atypical lives, we suggest that melded together these two represent a kind of prototype of the Spanish immigrant in the United States. Yet ultimately and for ironically similar reasons, they were both relegated to obscurity.
From Basque Country to the Americas
José Francisco Navarro Arzac was born on March 21, 1823, in San Sebastián (or Donostia in Basque), Spain. According to family lore, he was directly related to several famous Spaniards including the military general and engineer Pedro Navarro (1460–1528).2 His youth was not privileged, however, and the Carlist wars and political turbulence buffeted the Basque region as Navarro was growing up, creating an unstable and at times dangerous environment for him and his family. In 1835 at the age of 13, he entered the Spanish Royal Naval Academy in Cádiz. Three years later, after graduating as midshipman, he made plans to travel to Cuba, where his wealthy uncle, Don Basilio, lived. The young Navarro embarked for Cuba on April 21, 1838, arriving in Havana on May 31.3
In Havana, José’s uncle offered him clerical work, but José preferred the workshop, learning how machines worked.4 He became fascinated with railroads and engineering. Ambitious and inquisitive, he decided to travel to the United States, further his education, and explore new opportunities. In 1840, he arrived in Philadelphia, and he was certain that he would quickly learn English, but that proved unexpectedly challenging. To make matters worse, he contracted scarlet fever and ended up in a public hospital. While convalescing, Samuel Chase, a partner in the shipping firm of Kirkland, Chase & Co., unexpectedly visited him, assisted his recovery, and then helped him move to Baltimore where he enrolled in engineering and English classes at St. Mary’s Jesuit College; he later took some classes at the Troy Institute as well.5 Although never certain, José believed that his uncle in Havana had reached out to Samuel Chase, a likely contact through business, and implored him to help his foundering nephew.
José returned to Cuba in 1843 and discovered that his uncle had recently sold his properties and moved to Spain. This didn’t deter José’s ambitions; he had his own valuable connections and was then fluent in both English and French. He found work as an assistant to Don Antonio Cuesta, President of the Havana-Güines Railroad. José recalled later that his own “Yankee ideas” and youth had provided him considerable advantages in his entrepreneurial efforts in Cuba.6 While still with the railroad company, he “quietly arranged a co-partnership with Don Inocencio Casanova, a rich Spanish planter and very influential with his class.”7 On March 21, 1844, they formed the Casanova & Navarro warehouse and shipping company headquartered in Cárdenas.8 This was just the beginning of Navarro’s long and impressive history of entrepreneurial activities at the vanguard of industrial modernity.
However, the growing nationalist insurgency in Cuba threatened the stable business climate that Navarro craved. He witnessed the arrival of the Cuban rebel Narciso López and his filibustering in Cárdenas. Navarro determined that he was observing the “forerunner or beginning of the sure end of Spanish Dominion in the Island of Cuba.”9 Gradually, he sold his interests in Casanova & Navarro and prepared to relocate to the United States. Clearly, Navarro’s business priorities were more important than his love of patria: he’d already abandoned a Motherland beset with dynastic conflicts, and now the first rumblings of nationalist mobilization in Cuba would send permanently to the United States.
Spanish Entrepreneur in the United States
José Navarro arrived in New York during May 1854, and he moved into an apartment located in Greenwich Village.10 Two years later, he married 25-year-old Ellen Amelia Dykers, daughter of John Hudson Dykers, a wealthy banker from the West Indies. The couple lived at 25 Washington Square for the next 40 years. They started a family and had three sons: John Dykers Navarro (1859–1877), Antonio Fernando (1860–1932), and Alfonso Gonzalo (1863–1926).11 John passed away at age 18, while Antonio and Alfonso both became successful attorneys.
Navarro displayed his business acumen immediately upon arrival in New York. Recognizing that he was “well and favorably known,” having been involved in the New York–Cuba sugar trade, he was about to begin competing with his former clients. Nevertheless, he was careful not to antagonize the merchants with whom he had earlier done business. Through a combination of consultations and meticulous business dealings, he gained their trust. He also added a partner to his rapidly growing business that became known as Mora Brothers, Navarro & Co.
Navarro’s discretion and negotiating skills allowed him to successfully navigate and prosper in the burgeoning capitalist system, and he was soon elected to the New York Chamber of Commerce. As his trading business expanded, he contracted for his own steamships. He later claimed that the firm C. H. Delamater & Co. had built for Mora Brothers & Navarro the very first iron sea-going steamship, the Matanzas, based in the United States. Soon, his company had a fleet of eight ships engaged in the South American trade including a very profitable Brazil route.
Navarro’s success attracted the attention of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who asked him to manage his own steamship lines; Navarro declined. Instead, with a US government subsidy – $250,000 per year over ten years for a semi-monthly line – he did go into partnership with Cornelius K. Garrison and organized the United States & Brazil Mail Steamship Company. He recalled later that the firm’s first steamer, “The North America” embarked from Pier 42 at Canal Street with “the Spanish flag flying from the mainmast, the Brazilian flag from the foremast, and the American flag from the mizzenmast ….”12 The Brazil trade provided Navarro relief from the ongoing political problems in Cuba, but Navarro learned that his partners, the Mora brothers, were actively plotting against Spain in support of Cuban separatists. “This a Navarro could not stand,” he later wrote, and he decided to liquidate his interest in the firm.13 Indeed, the Spanish government not long after charged the Mora brothers with conspiracy; in the meantime, they had spent their own fortunes supporting the separatists, activities in which Navarro had not engaged. Navarro was a businessman, but he remained a patriot of his homeland.
Navarro’s shipping ventures made him invaluable to the US government. During the Civil War, he placed ships at the disposal of the Union, and he received “a peace dividend” in the form of generous state subsidies to open more lucrative new shipping lines.14 In this way, he was drawn firmly into ruling economic, political, and military circles (e.g. General Ulysses Grant, Commander-in-Chief during the Civil War and the 13th President, was on the board of one of Navarro’s companies).15 It was likely that this work also contributed to his ability to evade any obligation to fight in the American Civil War, thanks in particular to his close friendship with James Roosevelt, father of the future Franklin D. Roosevelt and cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, who ensured that a substitute was found for Navarro.16
Navarro’s opportunities to make large sums of money and participate in new entrepreneurial ventures grew out of the early success of his shipping firm. He would be invited to participate in lucrative commercial ventures. In 1859, only five years after arriving in New York, Henry Baldwin Hyde asked Navarro to participate in the creation of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States for which Navarro served as director for the rest of his life. He also helped create a Spanish version, the Madrid-based insurance firm called La Equitativa formed in 1882.
Navarro’s executive level involvement with the Equitable led to more connections and entrepreneurial ventures. Through his work with the Equitable, Navarro became a close financial associate of Thomas Edison leading to his appointment as a trustee of Edison Electric Light Company in 1880.17 Navarro also participated in the formation of the Edison Spanish Colonial Light Company in 1882 that would produce and distribute ele...
