Memoir and Identity in Welsh Patagonia

Geraldine Lublin

Description

This literary investigation of identity construction in twentieth-century Welsh Patagonia breaks new ground by looking at the Welsh community in Chubut not as a quaint anomaly, but in its context as an integral part of Argentina. Its focus is on historicising and problematising the adoption of the so-called ‘Welsh feat’ as foundational narrative for Chubut and its settler colonial implications in the larger settler colonial formation that is Argentina, where indigenous re-emergence seems to be leading the way towards real pluralism. Exploring the understudied period immediately preceding the celebrated turn-of-the-century revitalisation, Memoir and Identity in Welsh Patagonia presents four memoirs written in Welsh and Spanish by Welsh Patagonian descendants, read against the grain to foreground the tensions, dissonances and ambivalences emerging from the individual narratives. The study then probes the romanticised stereotype of the Welsh descendant so prevalent in media representations, in order to describe a broader, richer panorama of what it means to be a Welsh descendant in Patagonia in a modern Argentine context.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Writing Welsh Patagonia
3. Valmai Jones – Anxiety about Welshness
4. Fred Green – The Welsh Patagonian Gaucho
5. Juan Daniel Moreteau – Welshness disowned
6. Carlos Luis Williams – Ineradicable Welshness
7. Conclusion
Works cited
Endnotes

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Irish
• English
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783169696
• Langue: English

Extrait

Memoir and Identity in Welsh Patagonia
1. Chubut Map
Memoir and Identity in Welsh Patagonia
VOICES FROM A SETTLER COMMUNITY IN ARGENTINA
Geraldine Lublin
© Geraldine Lublin, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78316-967-2
eISBN 978-1-78316-969-6
The right of Geraldine Lublin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: Procession of the Chubut Eisteddfod Gorsedd ceremony, Gaiman, 23 October 2014. Photograph by permission, norberto Lloyd Jones.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
A snapshot of the history of Y Wladfa
Memoir and memory
2. Writing Welsh Patagonia
Y Wladfa in its Argentine context
Marking Welshness in Chubut
3. Valmai Jones (1910–1994) – Anxiety about Welshness
Valmai Jones (1910–1994)
Atgofion am Y Wladfa
Between Wales and Argentina
In (and away from) the melting pot
Patagonian Welshness and diasporic belonging
Oscillating within Welshness
Closing points
4. Fred Green – The Welsh Patagonian Gaucho
Fred Green (1913–2002)
Pethau Patagonia
A sense of Welshness
A sense of Patagonian Welshness
Patagonian ‘welsh’
The ‘lasting friendship’
Closing points
5. Juan Daniel Moreteau – Welshness Disowned
Juan Daniel Moreteau (1915–2006)
Tres etapas de una vida
Disowning Welshness
Opposing Welshness
Claiming Argentineness
Closing points
6. Carlos Luis Williams – Ineradicable Welshness
Carlos Luis Williams (1953–)
Puerto Madryn y el triunfo de mis Padres: El Amor
‘Organic’ Welshness
Religion, music and other markers of Welshness
Wales as ancestral homeland and the Patagonian melting pot
Patagonia’s indigenous peoples
Closing points
7. Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Chubut Map
2. Cover of Valmai Jones’s Atgofion am y Wladfa . Reprinted by permission of Valmai Jones’s family.
3. Picture of Valmai Jones ‘at the age of 17, in 1927’, image included in Atgofion am y Wladfa , p. 130. Reprinted by permission of Valmai Jones’s family.
4. Cover of Fred Green’s Pethau Patagonia . Reprinted by permission of Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.
5. Picture of Fred Green included in Pethau Patagonia , p. 4. Reprinted by permission of Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.
6. Cover of Juan Daniel Moreteau’s Tres etapas de una vida . Reprinted by permission of J. D. Moreteau’s family.
7. Picture of Juan Daniel Moreteau included in Tres etapas de una vida , back cover. Reprinted by permission of J. D. Moreteau’s family.
8. Cover of Carlos Luis Williams’s Puerto Madryn y el triunfo de mis Padres: El Amor . Reprinted by permission of C. L. Williams.
9. Picture of Carlos Luis Williams included in Puerto Madryn y el triunfo de mis Padres: El Amor , back cover. Reprinted by permission of C. L. Williams.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume has been a long time in the making and, as the old cliché goes, I have incurred many debts along the way; it would be virtually impossible to list here all those who, in one way or another, contributed to bring this work to fruition. It all started back in the day, when I was granted an Overseas Research Student Award to pursue doctoral studies at Cardiff University’s School of Welsh, and for all the support I received during that period I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Colin Williams, Professor Angharad Price, Dr Dylan Foster-Evans, Dr Siwan Rosser and Professor Sioned Davies. I am also grateful to Professor Jerry Hunter and Professor E. Wyn James both for examining my dissertation and for their useful suggestions about how to turn it into a monograph. Dr Lloyd Davies of Swansea University deserves special thanks for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this work, and for his constant encouragement and support during all these years. Both the anonymous reviewer for the University of Wales Press and Professor M. Wynn Thomas have also provided invaluable feedback on a preliminary draft, and my debt is great also to them for alerting me to the many things I was taking for granted in my discussions; however many oversights may remain in this final version, this is a much, much better piece thanks to them. Diolch yn fawr! I should also like to thank the staff of the University of Wales Press for their patient support and guidance in bringing this manuscript to completion.
I am especially indebted to the four authors whose memoirs I analyse in this volume for having taken the time to sit down and put pen to paper for the benefit of later generations. Sincere thanks are also due to their families, as well as to Gwasg Carreg Gwalch for granting me crucial permission to use quotations and images. It has sometimes been difficult to analyse these writings critically without feeling that I was using the benefit of hindsight to be judgemental about the individual authors. However, I would like to reassure Carlos Luis Williams (the only living memoirist amongst those analysed here) and the families of the other authors that the memoirs have not been taken ‘personally’, as it were, but rather used as illustrations of different positionings that make up the puzzle I am trying to put together. I sincerely hope that all parties involved will understand my perspective and I apologise in advance if my analysis upsets any sensitivities.
Last but not least, ¡muchas gracias! to my friends and family for their understanding and support all these years, and especially to Walter, Ioan and Carys for their patience and love.
Though they have since been much revised, excerpts of this book have also been published as: ‘Fred Green a’r “cyfeillgarwch parhaol” rhwng y Cymry a brodorion Patagonia’, Taliesin , 133 (Gwanwyn 2008) 81–92; ‘Y Wladfa: gwladychu heb drefedigaethu?’, Gwerddon , 4 (Gorffennaf 2009), 8–23, available at http://www.gwerddon.org/cy/rhifynnau/rhifynnaugwerddon/teitl-3529-cy.aspx#/6/">rhifynnau/rhifynnaugwerddon/teitl-3529-cy.aspx#/6/ ; ‘Ellos y nosotros: De roedores honestos y diamantes sin pulir’, Los Galeses en la Patagonia IV (Puerto Madryn: CEHYS, 2010), pp. 97–111; ‘Memoria(s) de la comunidad galesa en la Patagonia, entre la conciencia diaspórica y la argentinidad’, HUELLAS. REVISTA DEL ILLPAT (UNPSJB, Chubut, Argentina, 2012), 141–54; ‘La identidad en la encrucijada: la comunidad galesa del Chubut y las conmemoraciones del Centenario y Bicentenario de la Revolución de Mayo’, IDENTIDADES – Revista del Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Políticos de la Patagonia (UNPSJB) (December 2013). All this material is used here by permission of the publishers.
ONE
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. 1
M ore 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’. 2 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 3 – 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