1 Irish Diasporic Writing in Argentina, 1845-1907: A Reconsideration of Emigrant Identity Sinéad Wall Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies University College London I, Sinéad Wall, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Sinéad Wall 2 Abstract Departure from Ireland has long occupied a contradictory position in Irish national discourse, alternatively viewed as exile or betrayal. This thesis analyses how this departure as well as notions of home, identity and return are articulated in the narratives of three members of the Irish diaspora community in Argentina: John Brabazon’s journal The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the year 1845 by John Brabazon and His Own Adventures ; Kathleen Nevin’s fictional memoir, You’ll Never Go Back (1946); and William Bulfin’s series of sketches for The Southern Cross newspaper, later published as Tales of the Pampas (1900) and Rambles in Eirinn (1907). I examine the extent to which each writer upholds or contests hegemonic constructions of Irishness and how their experience in the diaspora space, that is, what Avtar Brah defines as ‘the intersectionality of diaspora, border and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes’ as well as their encounters with other inhabitants of that space influence identity construction. Drawing on Brah’s notion of home as both a ‘mythic place of desire’ and ‘lived experience of a locality’, I explore how these writers imaginatively construct Irishness and negotiate the dual identity of emigrant and potential returnee. I contend that each of these writers, to varying degrees, challenges the orthodox positionings of the Irish diaspora subject as backward-looking and the Irish emigrant as bound to the national territory, paradigms which are an important feature of anti-colonial nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Furthermore, I argue that they construct multiple subject positions in addition to contradictory notions of Irishness: national (implying fixed in place), essentialist and homogenous versus transnational, defined in terms of diversity and multiplicity – ultimately contributing to the re-imagining of the Irish emigrant identity. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Introduction 4-49 Section One: Irish Routes/Roots in Latin America Chapter 1: Missionaries, Soldiers and Settlers 51-82 Chapter 2: The Road to Argentina 83-118 Section Two: Unsettling Notions of Home, Return and Identity Chapter 3: John Brabazon – Mediating and Contesting Identity 120-158 Chapter 4: Kathleen Nevin – (En)Gendering Diaspora and the ‘tainted’ Returnee 159-213 Chapter 5: William Bulfin – Extending the Boundaries of Irishness 214-266 Conclusion 267-276 Works cited 277-293 4 Introduction ‘Identity is as much about difference as shared belonging’. 1 ‘There is the warmth and welcome from all. But there is something the heart seeks but does not get, because nothing can bring back old acquaintances either of scene or Personal reminiscences. So that the returned emigrant is as hazy as those who receive him. He is wedged in betwixt the old and the young. And it takes some time before he gets his bearings’ .2 The focus of this thesis is Irish travel and migration to Argentina and literary constructions of emigrant identity, home and return in the works of three members of the Irish diasporic community there. The narratives of John Brabazon (1828-1914), Kathleen Nevin (approx 1898-1976) and William Bulfin (1864-1910), span a period of Irish and Argentine history from 1845 to 1907. This was a period of high cultural contestation as well as political and social change in both Ireland and Argentina. In Ireland, this was characterised by events such as the Great Famine (1845-1852), the Land Reform Act of 1883 and Wyndham Act of 1903, the Irish Literary Revival and the fight for Home Rule which culminated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish Free State in 1921. 3 On the other hand, Argentina won its independence from Spain in 1810 and throughout the nineteenth century struggled with new ways to define the identity of the fledgling republic. This struggle was hampered by divisions between the city of Buenos Aires and the outlying provinces. Politics in the 1820s was dominated by the 1Paul Gilroy (2003: 301). 2From the notebook of returned emigrant Sean O’Keefe, cited in Arnold Schrier (1997: 132). 3The Famine or Great Hunger, An Gorta Mhór in Irish, saw the failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845, followed by a series of harvest failures until 1852. The Reform Act, which followed years of land clearances, evictions and clashes between tenants and landlords, opened up the opportunity to buy out a holding. Only partially effective, it was superseded by the Wyndham Act which saw the transfer of land to the farmers. The Literary Revival was spearheaded by W.B. Yeats and along with the Gaelic League (1882) attempted to evince a new sense of Irish identity divested of Anglicisation. For further information on this period see Cormac O’Gráda (1999) or J.C. Beckett (1969). 5 educated, liberal and bureaucratic Bernadino Rivadavia until 1829, when a conservative, dictatorial regime under Juan Manual de Rosas was installed and remained in place until 1852. In attempts to extend territorial boundaries and civilise the vast region of the pampas, General Julio Roca’s 1879 Campaña del desierto [The Conquest of the Desert] oversaw the extermination of almost all the native Indian population, after which Roca served as President from 1880 to 1886. 4 This paved the way for one of the most significant periods of mass European immigration to Argentina from the 1880s to the 1920s. 5 Historical accounts of the global Irish dispersal provide us with one facet of the migration experience, the collective. To access the experiences of individual migrants, their hopes, personal circumstances, reception in or perception of the host community, as well as to illuminate the history of settlement, we must turn to the narratives of that experience. Luke Gibbons argues that ‘understanding a community or culture does not consist solely in establishing “neutral” facts and “objective” details: it means taking seriously their ways of structuring experience, their popular narratives, the distinctive manner in which they frame the social and political realities which affect their lives’ (1996: 17). In fact, each of the writers under study records their social and political realities as well as their experiences from within a variety of contexts, in which matters of class, gender, reason for departure to textual conventions, audience or lack thereof, all inform their writing to some degree. The corpus encompasses the non-fictional diary of John Brabazon, The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the year 1845 by John Brabazon and His Own Adventures, which relates his encounters with other nationalities and native Argentines in Buenos Aires and the pampas from 1845 to 1864. The second narrative is the fictional memoir of Kathleen Nevin, a second 4Roca also served a second term from 1898 to 1904. 5See Leslie Bethell (1993), Fernando Devoto (2003) and José Moya (1998) for more on this period and Argentina’s immigration policies. 6 generation Irish-Argentine. Her novel, You’ll Never Go Back (1946), is based on her mother’s journey to Buenos Aires in 1879 and her subsequent experiences in the city. The final subject, William Bulfin, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1884 and after seven years working on the pampas began writing travel ‘sketches’ for the Irish-Argentine newspaper The Southern Cross. 6 Some of these sketches became the basis for the two works under study: a volume of short stories called Tales of the Pampas (1900) and a travel book entitled Rambles in Eirinn (1907). The combination of the genres of personal memoir, fiction and travel narrative is ‘instructive of how memory and imagination are mutually dependent [and] apparent in the differing forms of narration each writer chooses to mediate events and experiences and how, within individual texts, shifts take place in both directions along the fact/fiction spectrum’. 7 These ‘shifts’ are evident in the three diasporic voices I examine. Their narratives move freely along the ‘fact/fiction spectrum’, reflecting the fluid parameters of fiction as well as the literature of travel. This literature can be defined as an overall thematic category, with ‘loose and shifting borders [incorporating] a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel’ (Borm 2004: 13). 8 The parameters of the corpus under study extend from the actual journey over land or water to the dialectics of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ and the reconstruction of the narrator’s experiences of displacement. All three writers foreground their encounters with the multiple others of Argentina: language, culture, other migrants as well as native Argentines, rural and urban. Brabazon and Bulfin spend a lot of time with the native 6His ‘Sketches of Buenos Aires’ chronicled life in the city while rural life was depicted in his ‘Sketches: A camp story’. Camp is a Spanglish term meaning countryside, derived from the Spanish word campo. 7Tony Murray (2012: 9) examines contemporary London-Irish literature by drawing on a similar corpus of fictional and non-fictional texts. 8Jan Borm (2004) employs the term travel literature in an attempt to define the parameters of travel writing. Borm argues that rather than a travel genre as such, there are travelogues, which are predominantly non-fictional and travel literature, which is an overall thematic category that includes both fiction and non-fiction. 7 gauchos and they offer quasi-ethnographic studies of their habits and customs.