IRELAND AND LATIN AMERICA: A CULTURAL HISTORY

According to Declan Kiberd, “postcolonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance.” The Irish in Latin America – a continent emerging from indigenous cultures, colonisation, and migrations – may be regarded as colonised in Ireland and as colonisers in their new home. They are a counterexample to the standard pattern of identities in the major English-speaking destinations of the Irish Diaspora. Using literary sources, the press, correspondence, music, sports, and other cultural representations, in this thesis I search the attitudes and shared values signifying identities among the immigrants and their families. Their fragmentary and wide-ranging cultures provide a rich context to study the protean process of adaptation to, or rejection of, the new countries. Evolving from oppressed to oppressors, the Irish in Latin America swiftly became ingleses. Subsequently, in order to join the local middle classes they became vaqueros, llaneros, huasos, and gauchos so they could show signs of their effective integration to the native culture, as seen by the Latin American elites. Eventually, some Irish groups separated from the English mainstream culture and shaped their own community negotiating among Irishness, Englishness, and local identities in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Cuba, and other places in the region. These identities were not only unmoored in the emigrants’ minds but also manoeuvred by the political needs of community and religious leaders. After reviewing the major steps and patterns of Irish migration to Latin America, the thesis analyses texts from selected works, offers a version of how the settlers became Latin Americans or not, and elucidates the processes by which a new Irish-Latin American hybrid was created.

This research is about the cultural representations of Irish settlers in Latin America and the Caribbean. 1 Literary, archival, and critical sources were studied seeking to identify shared values and attitudes among the Irish and their families in Latin America. The diversity of cultures has been considered, not only in Ireland and Latin America, but also among different social groups of Irish emigrants, as well as in the diverse receiving societies. This thesis is based on my examination of Irish-Latin American literature and cultural representations, and draws on research conducted in Irish Studies and Latin American Studies. The case of the Irish in Latin America is worth studying for three main reasons. Common to other human displacements, the migrants were the point of contact between different cultures, languages, and sets of values. They came from a colonised territory – in the heart of the British Empire – but when they arrived in a space perceived as empty and wild, scarcely populated by peoples who were ethnically and culturally different from their previous English masters, the Irish became colonisers and occasionally oppressors themselves. And third, through generations the Irish settlers and their families experienced a distinctive process of identification, by which they became English, then Latin Americans, and, eventually, Irish.