Norwegian Immigration to Latin America
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Expectations Unfulfilled <UN> Studies in Global Social History VOLUME 24 Studies in Global Migration History Editor Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona, Phoenix, ar, usa) Editorial Board Bridget Anderson (University of Oxford) Adam Hanieh (soas, University of London) Immanuel Ness (City University of New York) Jose Moya (Barnard College, Columbia University) Brenda Yeoh (National University of Singapore) Vazira Fazila-Yacoobaliis Zamindar (Brown University) Min Zhou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) VOLUME 8 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgmh <UN> Expectations Unfulfilled Norwegian Migrants in Latin America, 1820–1940 Edited by Steinar A. Sæther LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: Ottar Enger, Ole V. Høiby and unknown worker resting in ‘Hiet’ (The Lair) at the estancia ‘El Mate’ in Argentina, ca. 1927. The photograph is taken with the camera of Ole V. Høiby. Photograph courtesy of Ove Høiby. Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-6705 isbn 978-90-04-30738-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30739-1 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures, Tables and Maps viii List of Contributors X 1 Introduction 1 Steinar A. Sæther 2 Making Sense of a Minor Migrant Stream 17 Steinar A. Sæther 3 From Adventurers to Settlers: Norwegians in Southern Brazil 57 Ellen Fensterseifer Woortmann 4 Migrants on Skis: Norwegian-Latin American Return Migration in the 1890s 77 Cecilia Alvstad 5 The Good, the Bad and the Rational: Desirable and Undesirable Migration to Cuba and Mexico (1907–1909) 102 Mieke Neyens 6 Opportunities for the Few and Select: Norwegians in Guatemala (1900–1940) 127 Synnøve Ones Rosales 7 Male Narratives from the Margins of the Country of Immigrants: Two Norwegians in Argentina in the 1920s 162 María Bjerg 8 Three Norwegian Experiences in Post-Revolutionary Mexico: Per Imerslund, Halfdan Jebe and Ola Apenes 184 Ricardo Pérez Montfort 9 The Blikstad Family: Saga of Emigrants in Norway, Spain, and Brazil 225 María Álvarez-Solar List of Works Cited 241 Index 255 <UN> Acknowledgements This anthology is a result of the research project “Desired Immigrants – Frustrated Adventurers? Norwegians in Latin America, 1820–1940” which was funded by a grant from the Latin American committee of the Norwegian Research Council from 2011 to 2015. We owe a special thanks to Ellen Vollebæk of the Research Council for administrative support and keen interest in our endeavour. In addition to the authors of this book, Rannveig Elisabeth Vik, José Alejandro Huidobro Goya, Knut Djupedal and Nils Olav Østrem participated in the project and helped to make it both a demanding and pleasant experience. Relatives and descendants of Norwegian migrants in Latin America have provided a wealth of material such as letters, photographs, diaries, memoirs and oral testimonies without which this book could never have been written. Some of these sources have been used directly by the authors, and we have tried to identify and acknowledge the donors in footnotes of each chapter. Many more have contributed, and we are very grateful for all the material made available to us. All of it has been read with great interest and has informed our interpretation of the Norwegian migratory experience in Latin America. The development of the hula (Historisk register over utvandrede nord- menn i Latin-Amerika) database was possible thanks to the relentless work of Morten Erlandsen who designed the database. A grant from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo facilitated the first phase this work. Graduate students Clarisse Carvalho Figuereido, Cathrine Dale, Lars Langås and Mats Borgan Johnsen did much of the tedious work of entering lists into hula. Several fellow researchers have contributed with their own list of migrants in Latin America. We appreciate especially the generosity of Per-Olof Grønberg, Kristin Ranestad, Aase Hjelde, Jostein Molde and the staff at cemla (Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos) in Buenos Aires for their willingness to share their material with us. The series editor Dirk Hoerder, and Jennifer Obdam and Ester Lels at Brill have been most helpful in leading this work to fruition. <UN> List of Figures, Tables and Maps Figures 2.1 Faist’s model: number of migrants in each phase 21 2.2 Faist’s model: cumulative number of migrants resident in host country by phase 21 2.3 Number of Norwegian arrivals in Latin America (hula), Norwegian arrivals in Buenos Aires (cemla) and departures for Latin American destinations (emipro) by decade 27 2.4 Yearly arrivals in Buenos Aires (cemla), and yearly departures from Norway to Latin America (emipro) 27 2.5 Yearly registered presence of Norwegians in Latin America by hula, 1848–1940 28 2.6 Registered presence of Norwegians in hula by decade 29 2.7 Norwegians in Chilean censuses, 1854–1940 29 2.8 Norwegians in Mexican censuses, 1910–1930 30 2.9 Number of Norwegian vessels arrived in selected Latin American ports annually, 1865–1903 38 3.1 Advertisement in Lillehammers Tilskuer, July 30, 1850 64 3.2 Drawing of house built by Norwegians in Joinville 72 5.1 Book cover and title page of Lykke-Seest’s book (1909) 109 5.2 Cholula 121 5.3 Porfirio Díaz 122 8.1 Fragment of Dignidad Maya by H. Jebe 211 Tables 2.1 Norwegian arrivals in Latin America in hula by decade and country of arrival, 1850–1940 26 2.2 Number of Norwegian ships arrived at selected Latin American ports, 1865–1903 36 2.3 Runaway sailors in the port of Buenos Aires according to consular reports, 1871–98 41 2.4 Norwegian engineers in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru 1870–1940 45 6.1 Foreigners in the Guatemalan coffee industry (1913) 141 6.2 Norwegian immigrants in Guatemala 1900–1940 154 <UN> List Of Figures, Tables And Maps ix Maps 6.1 Guatemala 131 7.1 Train journey from Buenos Aires to La Zanja (Trenque Lauquen) 168 7.2 The journey from the city of Salta to Tartagal 174 <UN> List of Contributors María Álvarez-Solar is Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of Bergen, Norway. She has worked mainly on the history of slavery and forced migration during the colonial period in Central America, and on the methodological challenges of teaching history in multicultural societies. Cecilia Alvstad is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her main work is within translation studies, especially issues concerning the translation of literary texts into Scandinavian languages, travel writing and the reception of Latin American literature in Scandinavia. María Bjerg is Associate professor in history at Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, and researcher at the National Research Council (conicet). A specialist in migration history, she is the author of Entre Sofie y Tovellile. Una historia de la inmigración danesa en la Argentina (2002); El mundo de Dorothea. La vida cotid- iana en un pueblo de la frontera de Buenos Aires en el siglo xix (2004); Historias de la Inmigración en la Argentina (2009) and El viaje de los niños. Inmigración, Infancia y Memoria en la Argentina de la Segunda Posguerra (2012). Mieke Neyens after having obtained an ma in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Leuven, she received a scholarship of the Mexican government for postgraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam). The last few years she has been a doctoral student at the University of Oslo, and she recently (August 2015) submitted her Ph.D. thesis “The Mexican Experience Brought Home: Norwegian Travel Writing of Mexico, 1905–1945”. Synnøve Ones Rosales is Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Bergen. Her research interests are within two principal fields: the workings of colonial Spanish American government, looking at the case of New Granada specifi- cally, and foreign immigration to Guatemala. Ricardo Pérez Montfort is Research Fellow at Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antro- pología Social (ciesas) since 1980 and Professor at the Faculty of Literature <UN> List Of Contributors xi and Philosophy at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam) since 1978. He is also History Professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia en Humanidades del Estado de Morelos (cidhem) since 1996. His academic work has focused on Mexican and Latin American nationalism and cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries; Mexican historiography, and history of photography and film in Mexico and Latin America. He has written 23 books and more than 120 scientific articles. He has also worked at several radio stations in Mexico City and written five books of poetry.