Imogen Herrad, author of Beyond the Pampas, set off to find the descendants of the 19th-century colony of Welsh settlers in Patagonia and discovered Welsh-speaking communities, proud of their heritage, still exist there today. Here she shares how she also discovered a country and way of life hugely different from her European experience.
A German's Welsh Dream
Herrad, a German who went to live in Wales and London, fell in love with all things Welsh and even learned the language, Cymraeg. It was the land that first captured her: the mountains in the north and the rugged hills and cliffs of mid Wales. Ever since her first visit as a student nearly 40 years ago, she knew she wanted to return.
She got her chance to spend a year in Aberystwyth as a foreign language assistant in 1989, but before that she spent two months in Lampeter on the Ulpan course to learn Welsh. The grammar, including initial consonant mutations, made her brain hurt but held a strange fascination.
The Fateful Talk
In Aberystwyth, she lived in a Welsh-only house share. One evening, a flatmate excitedly mentioned a talk about Patagonia at the college. Herrad didn't attend, but the idea of Welsh people in Argentina stayed in her mind, and she began to dream of going.
A dozen years later, living in London and working as a freelance translator, she pitched a radio programme about the Welsh community in Argentina to a German public radio station. They said yes, and she finally stood on the dusty airfield of Trelew, craning her neck to see the arid brown Patagonian steppe.
The Welsh Settlements
The main Welsh settlement in eastern Patagonia is Gaiman, famed for its exotic tea shops. On that first visit, Herrad was dazzled by the Welshness: the choirs, the remembered stories of ancestors from Llanuwchllyn and Mountain Ash, and the connections to family back in Wales. Speaking barely any Spanish, she found she could get by almost exclusively in her rusty Welsh.
Patagonia was just as she had dreamed: a small Welsh outpost in far-away Argentina. But the place had got to her. After returning to London, she started to wonder about the rest of Patagonia, took Spanish classes, and an unexpected tax rebate allowed her to go back and stay for a while.
A Brutal History
She bought books on local history and dug into the Welsh settlement's past, finding tales of idealism and dreamers who craved autonomy. But she also found mention of other people: the indigenous Tehuelche and Mapuche, who had lived on the land long before the Welsh arrived. They had greeted the settlers hospitably, traded meat for Welsh bread, and taught them to hunt the guanaco. Some even sent their children to the Welsh school.
The descendants of the settlers stressed their pride in the friendship between their forebears and the Indians. But the indigenous people were only ever talked about in the past tense. Herrad found a brutal history: once the Welsh had shown how fertile the Patagonian soil could be, the Argentine government decided the arid steppe was worth having. In the late 19th century, it sent an army south in the so-called Conquista del Desierto (Desert Conquest) to remove the indigenous people. Many men were killed; women and girls were distributed as prizes amongst the soldiers or given as servants to upper-class families in Buenos Aires. A few hundred survivors were herded into reservations on the poorest land.
Another Community
Herrad found the descendants of these survivors, who guard their history and culture as well as they can. They met her questions with a wariness resulting from decades of persecution, but eventually decided she was harmless. In their houses, and in a hilltop settlement in the Andes foothills, she found another community and another welcome.
She fell a little out of love with the Patagonian Welsh when she realised most don't really care about that part of history, especially indigenous lives in the present. A Mapuche activist told her: "They always go on about the great friendship between the Indians and the first Welsh settlers, but how come today this isn't a mixed community? How come the Welsh live in the most beautiful parts of the valley, and our people in the poorest neighbourhoods on the edge of the city?"
Patagonia gave her new friends and adventures, horizons as endless as the sky, tales about discovery and new hope, loss and despair, endurance and dignity and survival. Beyond the Pampas: In Search of Patagonia by Imogen Herrad is out now, published by Parthian.
