In
the preface to his book Gaeil i dTír na nGauchos,
Mícheál de Barra, a retired school principal from Kilfenora
in County Clare, tells us that when he returned to Ireland
in 1975, having lived for some years in Argentina, he
found that there was little interest in the historic links
between the two countries. This is all changed now, he
says, due to two events. The first consisted of two series
of television programmes made by Raidió Teilifís Éireann
(the Irish national broadcaster) on the topic, the first
dating from 1987 and the second from 2004; and the second
was the founding of the Society for Irish Latin American
Studies. He thinks that there is now a certain momentum
behind the Irish-Argentine enterprise and predicts that
another major scholarly work on the topic will appear
– in either English or Spanish – in the next 10 years.
In the meantime, he offers this book as an interim solution
for readers of Irish.
I
found de Barra's book of great interest, and indeed quite
absorbing at times. For a start, almost all of the information
in it was entirely new to me, and in many instances, not
at all what I expected. In addition, de Barra has done
a lot of research – including archive work and face-to-face
interviews with some of the people he writes about – and
he has a strong attachment to Argentina and its Irish
population, past and present. Although he calls it a little
book, it has over 400 pages. Its 24 chapters deal with
a variety of themes (both Irish and Argentinean), periods,
and different aspects of the Irish-Argentinean encounter,
taking us from Magellan's Irish altar boys of 1516 down
to the present time. The chapters are in broadly chronological
order, although some of them require flashbacks to earlier
times. Thus Chapter 18, on the involvement of the Irish
in education in Argentina, takes us all the way back to
the beginning, and on to the end. The book has some of
the characteristics of a collection of essays, therefore,
but can still be read straight through as a history of
the Irish in Argentina. It also has a good collection
of pictures, mostly photographs.
Its
most striking feature is the steady stream of biographies
it contains, some very brief, less than a page, others
much larger, and a few taking up a whole chapter – a very
large chapter (40 pages) in the case of the Fr Anthony
Fahy, O.P (1805–1872). Because the chapters vary greatly
in length, approximately half of the book is contained
in six of them, the contents of which I indicate here
by the persons they deal most with: Chapters 7 (Admiral
William Brown), 10 (John Brabazon and other diarists),
11 (Anthony Fahy), 12 (Thomas Armstrong, the Mulhalls,
Dean Dillon, William Bulfin, Eduardo Casey), 16 (The Arts:
the Bulfins, the Nevins, Barney Finn) and Chapter 24 –
another 40-page chapter – which might be considered as
a geographic overview of the entire story. It lists the
principal locations in Argentina (over 40 of them) that
had a significant Irish settlement, and gives their histories
and the principal Irish surnames associated with them
– and, as always, the odd biography. The other chapters
cover topics such as the gaucho on the cover of the book,
and in its title, the Pampas, the colonial period and
the war of independence from Spain, British incursions,
Juan Manuel de Rosas and the story of Camila O'Gorman,
the big influx of Irish in the nineteenth century, the
appalling fate of the Irish brought over on the City
of Dresden, the history of hurling and the Gaelic
League in Argentina, the Perón years, the dirty war and
‘the disappeared’ (1976-83), and the Malvinas/Falklands
war. On the latter two topics, de Barra has a remarkable
amount of anecdotal information.
The
book was written for readers of Irish who know little
or nothing about Argentina or its Irish population, and
I can personally vouch for its suitability for its intended
readership. It is a fine introduction to this extraordinary
story from the Spanish part of the southern hemisphere
for the complete newcomer. It is beautifully written,
in professional, journalistic Irish, some of the events
are almost unbelievable and a lot of them quite moving
and frequently disturbing, and the book leaves a trail
of issues for further reading in its wake. Personally,
I would have preferred references in the body of the text,
and an index, and perhaps a glossary of constantly recurring
terms such as criollo, barrio, reducción, and
similar words that which will throw the reader who is
skimming or dipping in. On the other hand, I have to admit
that on-the-spot references for everything would have
conflicted with the author's wish ‘to tell the story of
the Irish in Argentina in a simple way’(Preface). He does
however provide a bibliography and some footnotes.
In
trying to cope with the mass of new material, my own strategy
was to contrast the Irish experience in Argentina, as
best I could imagine it from de Barra's account, with
the experience of the Irish in Québec (Harvey, 1997),
where I lived for a time, and the experience of the Irish
in North America generally, well-known to me from family
connections and from reading. I got a rude awakening.
Irish emigration to Argentina was not at all like the
mass emigration of Catholics from the south in famine
times and later, but was far more similar to earlier and
mostly Protestant emigration from the North of Ireland
to the US. The Irish who went to Argentina – mostly in
the nineteenth century – were generally from urban environments,
many of them were professionals or tradesmen, they were
leaving voluntarily and with definite ambitions, some
of them must have had a significant amount of money, and
their surnames suggest that many of them were of English
stock. In addition, they came from very specific parts
of Ireland, an incredible two-thirds from Longford and
Westmeath (Barnwell, 1988). The reason for this seems
to be that those who were successful in Argentina often
brought over relatives and people from their own areas
to work for them.
Reading
on, I encountered more surprises. The Irish in Argentina,
in the early nineteenth century at any rate, appeared
to set up English-speaking communities wherever they could
and, as far as I could gather, resisted assimilation into
Spanish-speaking Argentina. This is in sharp contrast
to the Irish who arrived in Québec in large numbers about
the same time. While this was also a mix of two languages
and one religion, the Irish in Québec, unlike their counterparts
in the southern hemisphere, became indistinguishable from
the French-speaking population – except for the surnames
– in a very short time, two or at most three generations
at most. Although it is easy to list off the differences
between the two groups of emigrants and the radically
different situations they arrived into, that would explain
the different outcomes, in the end I found it difficult
to know whether the life the Irish created for themselves
in their new homeland was determined principally by demographic
factors, such as geographic isolation, or attitudinal
factors, arising from the tight cultural and linguistic
identity of the emigrants, much tighter than the term
‘Irish’ in some general sense would convey.
For
example, de Barra has an excellent chapter on Irish educators
in Argentina, and several sections detailing the efforts
of the Irish in Argentina in the nineteenth century to
bring over priests and nuns from Ireland to run their
churches and schools. He is quite at home with this material,
reflecting no doubt his own experience as an educationalist.
But while the account is excellent, he leaves us on our
own when it comes to the big question: What exactly was
going on? Were these efforts prompted solely by pastoral
concerns for a scattered flock? Or were there strong linguistic,
cultural, and ideological objectives also, namely to buttress
an English-speaking colonial elite against the outside
world? Why were the Mercy nuns sent packing? De Barra
wryly comments on their plight, docked in Liverpool on
what must have been a dreadful journey from Argentina
to Australia, with no chance of a quick trip home. The
suggestion is that the Argentinean Irish thought they
could have done better, but it is only a suggestion. De
Barra tells us also of the appearance in Buenos Aires
of the remarkable Passionist priest, Fr Fidelis Kent-Stone,
former US soldier and diplomat, in Buenos Aires at this
time. He appears to have outflanked Fr. Fahy and his supporters
rather easily, thus laying the foundations – including
blocks of stone – for the Irish Catholic presence in Argentina
that survives to the present:
He
got the better of the leaders of the Irish community
by placing his faith in the poorest classes, in particular
the Irish servant girls working in the big houses in
Buenos Aires. It was the subscriptions from these servant
girls that funded the building of the Church of the
Holy Cross in Buenos Aires and the Passionist Monastery
attached to it. (p. 252, my translation)
Religion
is not a simple matter, and it would be strange if religious
initiatives such as these did not also have linguistic
and cultural agendas. Even so, one thing I missed in de
Barra's book was some information on which language was
being spoken, English or Spanish, by whom, and in which
contexts at different points in the book. More generally:
what forms of English-Spanish bilingualism developed in
the Irish communities, and how did these change in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries? My guess is that the
Irish in Argentina have finally become like the Québec
Irish, but only in very recent times, and with great reluctance.
These
are things that have to be inferred from de Barra's account.
I wondered what more could be done, bearing in mind that
many a good book forces us to read a few more to complete
the picture. For example, de Barra provides an excellent
series of maps of Argentina at the beginning of the book,
which I found essential all the way through the book.
Is there something that could be done, even in a piecemeal
fashion throughout the book, to show us the cultural and
linguistic landscape that the Irish were operating in?
This would give us some idea of the amount of Spanish
that Fr. Fahy spoke in his day's work, about the linguistic
‘space’ that the Irish arrived into, and how it changed
over time. How much Spanish did Fr Fahy speak in the course
of a day, compared, say, with Fr Field in earlier times,
or Fr Pat Rice in our own time? And if they all had both
Spanish and English, on what occasions would they typically
switch from one language to the other? Books on minorities
tend to draw the reader into a false world. I must confess
to watching some street tangos from Buenos Aires on Youtube
at one point when I was reading de Barra's book – as if
I needed to remind myself that we were still all talking
about the same place.
Although
I am thinking mostly of Spanish-speaking Argentina when
I referred to the problem of the ‘blurred backdrop’ in
studies of minorities, the question of the native people
also arises. With the exception of the reference to La
Guira, in connection with the work of Fr Field (1547–1625)
in northern Argentina and Paraguay, the blurring is complete
in the case of the indigenous peoples: they appear in
the consciousness of the settlers only as indios
or salvajes, and attitudes seem to have hardened
during the nineteenth century. This is how things were
in North America also, although there were a few notable
Irish who identified with the indigenous people (Mooney,
1896/1965). I wondered what a chapter on the Argentinean
Irish and the indios would look like. De Barra
notes that it was as a result of Fr. Field's work with
La Guira that their language survived, Guaraní.
It is now an official language of Paraguay, alongside
Spanish. But I suspect that the story of the Irish and
the indigenous peoples of Argentina goes downhill from
there.
De
Barra's book has been my introduction to Argentina and
its Irish population. I am grateful to him, and it is
a bonus that the book is in Irish, and thus an important
contribution to the maintenance of our own indigenous
language. We have had books like this before, Aodhán Ó
hEadhra's Na Gaeil i dTalamh an Éisc (The
Irish in Newfoundland) (Ó hEadhra, 1998), for example.
It is hard for writers and publishers of books in Irish
to find topics that are not already well served in English,
but the story of the Irish in Argentina is an excellent
choice. I recall too that the Irish translation of Bulfin's
Rambles in Ireland, undertaken by Eoghan Ó Neachtain
and published in 1936 under the name Cam-chuarta i
n Éirinn (Bulfin, 1936) was a big success, and is
still often quoted by Irish scholars because of the quality
of Ó Neachtain's Irish. This reminds me that Brabazon's
diaries still languish in out-of-print editions from the
nineteenth century.
I
cannot say where de Barra's book fits into the growing
literature on the Irish in Argentina, or how much of it
consists of new material, but I doubt if there is a better
book-length introduction to the topic. Since de Barra,
in his Acknowledgment section, strongly urges those with
an interest in the topic of Ireland and Argentina to join
the Society for Irish Latin American Studies,
perhaps the number of new subscriptions from people giving
their names in Irish can be taken as a measure of the
book's success.
References
-
Barnwell, David. ‘Nineteenth century Irish emigration
to Argentina’. Lecture. Columbia University Irish Studies
Seminar, 25 April 1988. http://www.irlandeses.org/argentina.pdf
-
Harvey, Fernand. (1997) The Irish in Quebec. An introduction
to the historiography. (Québec City: Institut Quebecois
de Recherche sur la Culture, 1997).
-
Mooney, J. The Ghost-Dance religion and the Sioux
outbreak of 1890. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1896/1965).
-
Ó hEadhra, Aodhán. Na Gaeil i dTalamh an Éisc
(The Irish in Newfoundland) (Dublin: Coiscéim, 1998).
-
Bulfin, William. Cam-chuarta i n Éirinn (Translated
by Eoghan Ó Neachtain). (Dublin: An Gúm, 1936).
Notes
1
Eoghan Mac Aogáin is a former Director of the Linguistics Institute of Ireland and currently lectures at the Institute
Authors’
Reply
I
fully accept the points made by Eoghan Mac Aogáin in his
review of my book Gaeil i dTír na nGauchos. However, I
am sure that a tsunami of facts in the book – a fault
I have to admit to – sometimes confuses the reviewer,
as when he refers to Fr Fidelis Kent-Stone outflanking
Fr Fahy and his supporters. Of course, Fr Fahy was a good
many years in his grave by the time Fr Fidelis arrived
in Buenos Aires.
Eoghan
makes a number of valid suggestions and recommendations
in his review which I hope will be taken into account
when a definitive, scholarly, erudite book on the Irish
in Argentina is written in Spanish or English. I propose
that such a work be undertaken for publication by 2019
to celebrate the centenary of Thomas Murray’s The Story
of the Irish in Argentina (1919).
Mícheál
de Barra |
