Abstract
La Vitícola, the Irish colony of
Napostá 1889-1891, the largest foreign colony in the history
of Bahía Blanca
Juan Pablo Alvarez Pearce (Buenos Aires) & Santiago Delfín
Boland (Bahía Blanca)
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The
presence of Irish in Argentina is recorded since the
foundation of Buenos Aires, 1535. Nevertheless the origin of
the community was a group of Irish warriors who remained in
Buenos Aires after the defeat of the British Task Force
which attempted twice to conquer the city. On demand of this
group the Archbishop of Dublin provided an Irish chaplain.
During the Famine, Fr. Fahy OP, one of them, encouraged the
immigration to Argentina. The immigration current had a peak
in the period since 1845 till 1860 and then declined. The
Argentine Government, in the 1886, offered a lot of benefits
to would be emigrants. In February 1889 arrived to Buenos
Aires the 'City of Dresden', a steamer with 1.772 Irish
people on board. Seven hundred and nineteen of those Irish
immigrants departed to a Colony near Napostá, a rural spot
not far from Bahía Blanca, 700 Km south from Buenos Aires.
For serving the Colony, a railway station was built. Its
name was La Vitícola.
The
Irish Colony lasted only two years and ended in a tragedy.
More than one hundred people, mostly children, died during
the first two months because of the brackish water that
caused diarrhea,
and the lack of medicines. Not a single promise was
respected. Neither tools nor animals, neither the seeds nor
houses for living, were provided. They lived in tens, under
trees or in ditches
even
advanced the wintertime. The bad weather did the rest to
the failure of the colony. In
March 1891, 520 colonists returned to Buenos Aires.
The
beginning of the XXI Century found no traces of the Irish
Colony in Bahía Blanca. Not a single proof of it could be
found, as it had been a dream, a nonsense project and not a
real nightmare. Only the railway station La Vitícola, a
milestone for the tragedy, in the timeline and in the
geography. Not far from it, nobody knows where, the remains
of a hundred and more Irish children lay as testimony of
what the largest Foreign Colony in the history of Bahía
Blanca has given to the city. They, The
Martyr Children of La Viticola, are claiming the
recognition of their martyrdom by the inhabitants of the
city, by the Argentine people, by the Irish people …even a
stone Celtic Cross to shade theirs graves…
The
starting point of the research was an article written by
Michael J. Geraghty: "Argentina: Land of Broken
Promises", published in the Buenos Aires Herald, on
17th March 1999. The first step was the heuristic one. We
collected all documents we could, and recorded the locations
where to find them. We have even to prove the existence of
the Irish Colony. The second step was the hermeneutic one:
we had to make the data speak. We rebuilt the history of the
Irish Colony from the beginning to the end. Now we have to
face the third step, the archaeological one, to find out the
evidence of the colony in the spot, to point out exactly the
spot of the cemetery.
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