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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Although there are [in Chubut] families who are still faithful to the language and traditions of Wales, I am afraid that the Welsh life there will but slowly waste away, and may not survive another generation ... A generation is raised there who has never been in Wales, some of them who have trouble reading Welsh despite continuing to speak the language occasionally, some who consider themselves Argentine subjects and give [Argentina] pride of place in their minds and hearts.
More than six decades have elapsed since R. Bryn Williams made the gloomy forecast cited above, and yet Welsh life is far from being forgotten in Patagonia. On the contrary, the epic of the Welsh pioneers who ventured to South America in the second half of the nineteenth century has earned an increasingly prominent place in Chubut. Indeed, the so-called gesta galesa (Welsh feat) has become a cornerstone of the province, whose identity is now described as 'the result of the fusion of the cultures of the Tehuelche and the Welsh'. Notwithstanding the dramatic decline in the number of first-language Welsh-speakers, the twenty-first century has witnessed a quasi-miraculous revival of Welsh culture in Patagonia, with binational contacts at an all-time high at the marking of the sesquicentenary of the Landing in 2015.
That the Welsh venture has earned a special place in the historiographies of both Argentina and Wales cannot be doubted. Though Welsh culture in Chubut today is very different from the 'Welsh life' whose end R. Bryn Williams lamented, there remains a tendency in Wales to see Y Wladfa – as the settlement is called in Welsh – as a sort of capsule of Welshness isolated in South America, construed in the Welsh imaginary as a purportedly uncontaminated cultural reservoir 7,000 miles across the Atlantic. The settlement is also highly regarded in Argentine history, though for completely different reasons. Despite their numerical insignificance in the context of a country hailed as a paradigmatic example of mass European immigration, the Welsh pioneers in Chubut are credited with having established the first permanent white settlement beyond the 40th parallel south, gaining eastern Patagonia for Argentina at a time when the state's territorial claims were only nominal and there were serious concerns that the region might fall into Chilean or even British hands. Moreover, the adoption of the Welsh feat as foundational narrative for Chubut has granted the community pride of place in the configuration of its official memory, a development that enables an analysis of the province as a particular settler colonial formation within the larger settler colonial setting of Argentina.
This volume breaks new ground by bringing these partial images together and looking at the Welsh community in Chubut in its context as an integral part of Argentina, with a focus on historicising and problematising both the stereotyping of Welsh culture and the adoption of the Welsh feat as Chubut's foundational narrative and its settler colonial implications. The approach adopted here is also innovative in that it explores the under-studied period spanning from the decline of old-school Welshness to its celebrated turn-of-the-century revitalisation in a new guise, an interval marked by the tensions and anxieties of the expected assimilation of the community into the Argentine nation, and the shift in their positioning from Welsh settlers to Argentine citizens.
Beyond the case study, this literary investigation of identity construction in twentieth-century Welsh Patagonia aims to further our understanding of the dynamics of identity formation and transformation in settler societies, and perhaps also in other ethnically diverse communities – nowadays fashionably called 'transnational groups'. Following the concerns of social history, I set out to obtain 'a view from the ground', as it were, of the critical period preceding the turn-of-the-century Welsh renaissance, so my work explores how four memoirs published by Welsh descendants from Chubut between 1984 and 1997 engage both with a sense of Welshness and with the master narrative that we call 'official memory'. Given that this involves an active discursive construction rather than a mere reflection of it, one further aim of this study is to consider how Welsh descendants frame Argentine identity at the same time as Argentina frames their Welsh Patagonian belonging.
Attempting to redress the little consideration given to materials by actual Patagonians in comparison with the abundant attention devoted to external pundits, the present volume brings together the divergent autobiographical personae created in Valmai Jones's Atgofion am y Wladfa, Fred Green's Pethau Patagonia, Juan Daniel Moreteau's Tres etapas de una vida and Carlos Luis Williams's Puerto Madryn y el triunfo de mis padres: El Amor. By means of an unprecedented comparative analysis of materials written in Welsh and Spanish, these texts are interrogated in order to contrast how these four 'ordinary' individuals construct in their self-narratives a porous sense of Welshness that is always in dialogue with notions of Argentinian, Patagonian and even British identities. Reading the four memoirs against the grain, this volume explores the tensions, dissonances and ambivalences emerging from the individual narratives, probing the romanticised stereotype of the Welsh-speaking, chapelgoing, choir-bound, tea-drinking Welsh descendant so prevalent in media representations in order to foreground a broader, richer panorama of what it means to be a Welsh descendant in Patagonia in a modern Argentinian context.
After this brief introduction, the present volume will provide an overview of the history of Y Wladfa in order to outline the main phases shaping the historical dynamics at work in this study before looking at the memoir as a genre and explaining the selection of the works analysed here. Chapter 2 will survey a range of relevant academic works written about the settlement before moving on to the main theoretical considerations that the subsequent analysis will employ, using settler postcolonialism as an interpretive perspective on the trajectories of Welshness in Patagonia. As may be expected, the following four chapters will focus on the individual memoirs in depth, considering the subject positioning of each author in response to a range of factors and historical dynamics and engaging with the complexity of senses of belonging at play before conclusions are drawn in the final chapter. Rather than encouraging closure, however, my intention in this volume is that it should open up new ground for the use of future scholars wishing to pursue related paths.
A snapshot of the history of Y Wladfa
As stated in the Introduction, the history of the Welsh in Patagonia has lent itself to extensive romanticisation and mythification on both sides of the Atlantic. Even though Welsh emigrants to the United States were more than fifty times more numerous than the approximately 2,000 said to have arrived in Patagonia, the enterprise has effectively captured the Welsh imagination by virtue of its nationalist aspirations, whose 'significance and heroism' have been highlighted as an example by modern Welsh linguistic nationalism. Reacting to Anglicising tendencies in Victorian Wales, the Independent minister Michael D. Jones believed that the Welsh language was so inextricably linked to the national identity that losing it was virtually equivalent to being left without Welsh customs, values and religion, which was what prompted him to act when confronted with the reality of the Welsh settlements in the United States in the 1850s. Given the rapid assimilation of Welsh communities in the United States, he concluded that the only way to preserve Welshness was to streamline migration to a single settlement where the Welsh would be the dominant 'formative' element rather than the 'assimilative' one, which led to the favouring of Patagonia over locations such as Vancouver, Palestine or Brazil because of its isolation from a potentially dominant non-Welsh majority culture. Nevertheless, the Patagonian venture still fits the general pattern of emigration from Wales due to economic reasons in the wake of the disruption of traditional patterns caused by the Industrial Revolution.
Not only were Welsh settlers in Patagonia a minority compared to those in North America, they were also statistically negligible by Argentinian standards. When the makers of what is now the Argentine Republic set about creating the country in the first half of the nineteenth century, they conceived of it as a melting pot modelled on the apparently successful example of the United States, a notion which enjoyed a consensus amongst both policy-makers and the public at large. Just like the American paragon described much later in Israel Zangwill's famous play, the 1837 generation expected Argentina to be 'the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!' In order to solve 'the problem of [geographical] extension' – identified by the Argentine statesman Domingo F. Sarmiento as the main issue facing the vast and purportedly empty country – the political theorist Juan B. Alberdi suggested, in a text that served as the basis for Argentina's first constitution, that 'In America [i.e., the American continent], to govern is to populate.' Nevertheless, Alberdi had a very clear idea of the targets and exclusions of his suggested settlement policies:
It is advisable to increase our population and, moreover, to change its make-up in the cause of progress. With three million indigenous peoples, Christians and Catholics, you would certainly not achieve the republic. You would not achieve it either with four million peninsular Spaniards, because the pure Spaniard is incapable of achieving it over there or here ... if we are to tailor the population to the proclaimed system instead of the system to the population, it is necessary to encourage the establishment of Anglo-Saxon immigrants on our soil. These people are identified with the steam engine, commerce and freedom, and it will be impossible [for us] to root these things amongst us without the active cooperation of this race of progress and civilisation.
Despite their own creole (i.e. mixed Spanish–indigenous) origins, Argentinian intellectuals like Alberdi despised the potential not only of America's indigenous populations (posing the so-called 'Indian problem') but also of full-blooded Spaniards to materialise the prospective Republic, longing instead for the contribution of the Anglo-Saxons, whose accomplishments spread progress in Europe and the United States.
Argentine national identity was then imagined during a large part of the nineteenth century as a response to the barbarous Other represented by indigenous populations and the not-good-enough creole element, within the frame of the civilisation/barbarism dichotomy informing Argentinian intellectual thinking. The implementation of policies actively encouraging white European immigration (preferably from the northern countries) was aimed at improving the racial basis of the population with a view to achieving the much-yearned-for progress. It was Alberdi's hope that 'From Babel, from the chaos [resulting from the intermixture of races and languages] will one day emerge brilliant and clear the South American nationality. The soil makes men its children, it sweeps them in, assimilating and appropriating them.'
The role of the Welsh settlers was clear in this arrangement. Insofar as the nomadic habits of Patagonia's indigenous peoples allowed the national authorities conveniently to describe the region as a desert, the settlement of white northern European populations (the Welsh were virtually synonymous with the Anglo-Saxon from an Argentinian perspective) in the then frontier territory of Patagonia had a twofold objective. On the one hand, it was expected to plant the seed of civilisation in that remote corner of the country, contributing to the government strategy to counter indigenous primitiveness with progress. At the same time, it was meant to realise the Argentine claim, until then merely nominal, to the region, under threat both from Chile's expansionist designs and from European imperialism.
Nevertheless, the inception of the settlement was much less straightforward in practice. After the initial negotiations between the Liverpool Society established in 1861 and Argentine officials, Lewis Jones and Sir T. Love Jones-Parry of Madryn travelled to Argentina to continue discussions with Rawson and survey the Patagonian region in February 1863, a scouting visit that would prove highly contentious in at least two ways. Firstly, Jones was accused of doctoring his report on the suitability of the Chubut Valley for settlement in order to attract more migrants to the desolate area, already misdescribed in the Handbook of the Welsh Colony as the best-irrigated land in America. A second point of controversy is the terms agreed with the Argentine government for occupation of the area; Interior Minister Guillermo Rawson suggested that settlers would be granted not only religious freedom but, most importantly, a high level of administrative autonomy as a Welsh province within the larger Argentine Republic, but the Argentine Congress rejected his proposal in August 1863 on the grounds that it would be dangerous to allow Protestant and 'English' immigrants to settle so close to the already British-occupied Falkland Islands. After the failure of the exclusive concessions, the leaders of the venture ended up accepting the general terms offered by Argentina to any European settler: 100 acres for every family (with a minimum of three members) settling anywhere in Argentine territory. Nevertheless, the change in circumstances was apparently not clearly conveyed to prospective settlers, and preparations continued in Wales as if the law granting them special privileges had been approved.
Though they were supposed to be representing Argentina, the Welsh actually arrived in Patagonia before the state authorities. When the Mimosa finally reached New Bay (today Puerto Madryn) on 28 July 1865, the pioneers were dismayed to find themselves totally unprepared for such a dry and hostile environment in the middle of winter. Hardly had they recovered from this first shock when the central government rushed to assert its presence by sending Lieutenant Colonel Julián Murga (military commander of the Carmen de Patagones settlement in Río Negro) on an official visit on 15 September 1865 to remind the newcomers that they were under the authority of the Argentine government and subject to its laws, punctuating the ceremony with the hoisting of the Argentine flag – described as a 'fatal blow' to the idea of a Welsh colony in Patagonia.
At any rate, the settlers would enjoy a high degree of de facto autonomy during the first decade, a crucial feature of which was their much-romanticised encounter with the indigenous Tehuelche who inhabited Chubut at the time of their arrival. The Welsh were initially very anxious about native Patagonians, whom they recognised as the rightful owners of the southern territories, and had backed up their devised strategy of 'defeat[ing] the Indian through kindness' with the formation of a small defensive army. However, there were few instances of conflict and the link proved very fruitful for both groups. It was thanks to Patagonia's original populations – whom they considered 'a little more civilized than the Argentine soldiers' – that the Welsh managed to survive in the rugged steppe, as they established a mutually beneficial bond of economic complementarity which stemmed in part from the treaty, originally signed by the Tehuelche and the Argentine government, to the effect that the Welsh settlement would be supported and defended, and indigenous groups compensated for ceding lands for its establishment. For their part, the Tehuelche reportedly deemed the Welsh less of a menace than the Argentine government and were 'contented to see [the Welsh settlers] colonize on the Chupat', as trading with them would be easier than with the 280-mile-distant Carmen de Patagones, a strategic attitude which challenges traditional representations of indigenous peoples as devoid of agency. (Indeed, given how the presence of Y Wladfa facilitated trade for the Tehuelche, we might even speculate that the strategy of defeating the Other through kindness had in fact been the latter's and not the settlers'!)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Memoir and Identity in Welsh Patagonia"
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Copyright © 2017 Geraldine Lublin.
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