Arizmendiarrieta, J. M. Archival writings held by the Mondragón Corporation.
The archival corpus of the young Catholic priest whose 1943 arrival in the town of Mondragón in the Basque Country seeded what would become, seventy years later, a federation of over 120 cooperatives employing more than 100,000 worker-owners. Arizmendiarrieta founded the technical school in 1943 that produced the graduates who started the first cooperative in 1956, and founded the Caja Laboral Popular in 1959 to provide the cooperatives with the financing that Franco-era banks refused to extend. The writings document the theological, pedagogical, and organizational reasoning behind decisions that shaped the group’s early institutional architecture.