Abstract
This chapter explores the maintenance of Irish tradition through the twentieth century, with the preparation of food and the English language emerging as significant markers of self and group identity. It shows how the domestic sphere provided a unique avenue by which Irish women in Argentina became the keepers of tradition and devotes careful attention to how and why the English language was maintained in Irish-Argentine homes and communities.
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How our identities are shaped and contrived is a preoccupation of the masses and one that is especially relevant to the emigrant, whose transference to a different state and its accompanying class, welfare, religious and labor institutions demands an overhaul of social identity. In the previous chapter we observed, through memory and discourse, the portrayal of an Irish woman in the pampas as a bastion of the estancia, an identity allowed to her both by the memory of the narrator and by the nation’s positive bias toward white, landed Europeans in the late nineteenth century. The peculiarity of this positioning is best understood when compared with the popular image of “Brigid” in nineteenth-century Merseyside and New York, whose coarse manners and simian features stand in polar opposition to the revered head of the household that is portrayed in the Irish-Argentine narrative.Footnote 1
That identities can vary according to the environments in which they are created has led cultural theorist Jacques Derrida to conclude that identity is always incomplete, unstable and ultimately undecidable.Footnote 2 Yet we know that certain tangibles—nationality, sex, gender, class—play important roles in the construction of identity, even if these categorizations are themselves temporal and prone to change. Further, the production of identity around these categorizations is facilitated by language, and it is with this point that we are most concerned, given that the nature of this study depends on the medium of oral language as a gateway to Irish-Argentine identity.Footnote 3 Variance in oral language and oral histories, its multiple voices, accents, digressions, idealizations and inconsistencies of memory, perhaps best symbolize the fluid and temporary nature of identity. That oral histories are always embedded in rich visual contexts—a literary café in the case of Bernardo Kelly, the books lining her apartment’s shelves in the case of Rita Cahill—heightens both our understanding of the discourse and our awareness that the context informs the content and that both, then, are highly unstable forces. Yet certain enduring images survive across the collection of narratives that help us to develop a sense of who the Irish-Argentines are at a moment in time, and of the tangibles that they have used and continue to use to construct and preserve a sense of self. In this chapter, we consider food and language as two such tangibles and explore the extent to which they are used to pay homage to ancestors, validate class claims and legitimize ethnic distinctiveness, revealing both the plasticity and endurance of social and cultural identity in an Irish-Argentine context.
The narratives that precede this chapter have suggested the import of English language for the Irish-Argentine community and attest to its economic rather than cultural or ethnic function. Bernardo Kelly reveals that, because the Irish in Argentina were English speaking, “We were bookkeepers, we had jobs all over the place.” Michael Donoghue, speaking for the emerging generation of Irish-Argentines concurs by acknowledging, “Knowing English is something that gives you an edge.” These values are reinforced in the conversations that follow and are particularly meditated upon in Leo Castrillon’s memories of English class in Fahy Boys School and his determination to take the Cambridge exams in Buenos Aires. While the narrative clarifies the prestige associated with the attainment of English language, it also betrays the sense of intimacy and tradition associated with the language, which allowed him access to the exclusive world of Father O’Sullivan and to fulfill the promise that he had made to his father. The intimacy of language is also conveyed in Bernardo’s earlier portrayal of his childhood visits to family’s houses. “You had to speak English to the old aunts,” he explained, while the lyricism and flexible anecdotes embedded in Irish idiom (“you can stick that tube up your arse, I’m going to Arrecifes”) that he employed during the interview became a consistent and subconscious reminder of the maintenance of tradition and group identity and its mediation through Irish-English dialectology.
Analysis of Leo’s narrative allows further insight into the filtering of identity through language. His opening remarks, which discuss his European ascendancy, echo contemporary Argentine society’s preoccupation with its Old-World heritage and its perpetuated attempts to distinguish itself from the Andean and Amazonian nations that surround it.Footnote 4 This sense of Anglo-European superiority is what drives Leo’s father, and Leo himself, to excel at the English language, and is precisely what motivates the boy’s brave confrontation with Father O’Sullivan. Here, the tendency of Irish-Argentines to juxtapose English and Irish cultural tropes is made particularly evident. Though influenced by the increased popularity of Irish nationalism in the twentieth century, as evidenced in Rita Cahill’s references to Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in In the Name of the Father and Bernadette Devlin’s autobiography, and more recently by the bloody outcomes of the Malvinas War, the Hiberno-Argentine community nonetheless seems to aspire to distinctly English cultural norms throughout the twentieth century. Even fierce Father O’Sullivan, the personification of Irish-Catholic nationalism, treats with reverence the Cambridge exams, the English Cultural Institute in Buenos Aires, and the BBC. Later in this chapter, Pilár Cortina, refers nonchalantly to the playing of hockey and rugby in the Hurling Club, while the social proximity between the Irish and English is suggested through the employment of the Irish of Junín in the British railways, the story of which is brought to life in the Miller narrative. This blurring of lines between Englishness and Irishness is also identified by Argentina’s literary luminaries, in particular Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story La Forma de la Espada follows an encounter with a solitary man who is taken to be English:
I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman by resorting to the least perspicacious of passions: patriotism. I said that a nation endowed with the spirit of England was invincible. My interlocutor agreed, but added with a smile that he was not English. He was Irish, from Dungarvan. Having said that he stopped short, as if he had disclosed a secret.Footnote 5
If class, ethnicity and religion thematically dominate the narratives to date, then it is gender and its role in the formation of Irish identity that distinguishes Pilár’s discussion. While brief references to the particular role of women are made in Noel Kavanagh’s narrative, where he states that memories and stories were passed down through his aunt and mother, it is Pilár’s conversation which provides a sustained account of the extent to which the matriarch and the domestic sphere preserved and transferred Irishness from one generation of her family to the next. The preparation and ritual of food was the most concrete indicator of Irish ethnicity in Pilár’s home and she insists that it continues to be so to the present day. Recipes that do not feature in South American cuisine, such as scones, marmalade, tea and roast chicken, were shared among her family and visiting Irish priests, symbolizing a neat accommodation of Irishness and Catholicism and providing the family with a mode of ethnic distinction from its European immigrant neighbors. It is a marker of identity that does not emerge in the United States or Britain, where the culinary cultures of the host and home society were evidently too similar to suggest an ethnic distinction and where Irish nationalism was associated with exclusively masculine domains such as the pub, the GAA field and the building site. As a consequence, feminine Irish identity maintains a particularity and autonomy in Argentina, challenging the notion of Irish nationalism as a product of masculine loss and masculine hope and centralizing the feminine voice in the performance of the Irish-Argentine diaspora.Footnote 6
Nonetheless, though Pilár’s narrative powerfully evokes the endurance of Irish tradition in Argentina, it is tinged with nostalgia. She is aware that her daughter will not carry on the domestic traditions of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and she feels dispossessed by the closure of Saint Paul’s monastery, which seems to symbolize a lack of guardianship over the Irish in Argentina and the falling away of its physical foundations. That this concern with the decay of Irish institutions is felt across many of the narratives across this book provides an important indicator of the present psyche of the Irish-Argentine diaspora and the sense of an ending for the community, at least in a physical and institutional sense.
Pilár’s reflections on the macho drinking binges of Irish-Argentine men in Buenos Aires Hurling Club is further evidence of the gendered expectations and experiences of the Irish migrant enclave. She portrays her uncle as a tragic hero, incapable of coping with modernity and the moral temptations of urban Buenos Aires, just as Lorenzo Miller was earlier portrayed by his grandchildren as a man beaten down by the demands of English industrialization. Indeed, alcohol dependency is an aspect of the Irish-Argentine community that is rarely discussed, contradicting as it does the idealistic belief that the Irish in Argentina did not drink or self-destruct like their contemporaries in Camden, London or New York. Interestingly, Pilár’s narrative uses the rural-urban divide to justify her uncle’s alcohol-fueled exploits, just as historical commentators have accounted the psychological suffering of Irish men in London and Birmingham to their separation from the countryside. This suggests another strand in the gendered notion of Irish identity, wherein the land is considered a masculine preserve and a masculine solution to the corruption of the city.
The final remarkable quality of Pilár’s narrative is its bilingualism, which makes for a fascinating observation of linguistic identity and linguistic memory. I was surprised when Pilár began the recorded conversation in Spanish as, up until that point, we had spoken almost exclusively in English, given that my control of Spanish was relatively weak at the time. Recalling her childhood in Spanish was evidently more natural for Pilár, though it may also symbolize an effort to take control over the vulnerable situation of being recorded. Pilár may also have been authenticating the interview by speaking it in her native language, much like GAA members make speeches in the Irish language as a symbol of original identity.Footnote 7 That code-switching back to English occurred during reminiscing about the Irish priests and the Hurling Club, may say something of the cognitive relationship between memory and bilingualism; invariably, the Hurling Club was an English-speaking domain and Noel Kavanagh insists that Irish priests rarely spoke fluent Spanish upon arriving in Argentina, suggesting that Pilár’s oral narrative was rooted to the memory of its linguistic context. The recovery of a linguistic-bound Irish identity is also revealed in real time in the moment when Pilár stumbles on the word “tipsy” while recalling her stories of the Hurling Club. “That’s an expression, I remember, ‘tipsy’,” Pilár smiled and in so doing, an element of ethnic origin was temporarily restored.
In comparison, Noel Kavanagh, Leo Castrillon and John Kelly spoke exclusively in English and comparisons may be made here between Irish-Argentine men’s retention of English and Irish men in Britain’s narration of story through a strong Irish accent.Footnote 8 That Irish-Argentine women seemed more willing to punctuate their narratives with Spanish words or explanations, just as Irish women in Britain displayed more dialectic flexibility than their male counterparts in a previous study of the migrant enclave in post-World War II England, suggest the ability of linguistic analysis to reflect gendered attitudes to and experiences of immigration over several generations.Footnote 9
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Verse Pilár Cortina in conversation with the author, 5 November 2010
My great-great-grandfather was married to _____, and they had lots of children. And they were from Westmeath. Eh, _____married _____. He was their son. And then this is _____, that’s the one I met. _____was a brother of _____, but he came alone. What a pity, he came when he was fourteen years old and he never went back to Ireland, never saw his family again.
Well, I don’t know the whole story but B_____and M_____ must have met in the camp, en el campo. As I told you, they used to make encounters to meet Irish people, organized by Father Fahy. They always tried to marry each other. My grandmother and grandfather had nine children. [One is a] religioso, a Passionist priest. I have a picture of him. He passed away recently. He was a captain in the Marines. And as he wanted to help his sisters that were Irish, not much education, they were very poor, he went… how can I explain it? He entered the marines as a chaplain, as a priest. And he had a lot of problems with the desaperecidos, the missing people. And the School of Mechanics for the Navy, which is in Buenos Aires, he was stationed there. Bueno, he knew a lot of things. So they made him disappear. Sí, one morning he wasn’t feeling well at home—he was at his sister’s house—and he was taken to the naval hospital. And we have people that told us that when he went into the hospital they said, “A este, no lo salen. Dejálo morir. Esta en un troco de ataque de alma. Y como Killian sabía tantas cosas sobre lo pasaba allí, no le mataron pero directamente le dejaron morir. No le atendieron.” [“Don’t let this one leave. Let him die. This is an attack of the soul.” Because he knew a lot of things about what had happened there so they didn’t kill him but they let him die. They didn’t attend to him.] The brother of my mammy. And he worked with them to get money together for his brothers and sisters. That’s why he worked for years with the mechanical school of the navy. We noticed how much he changed there. He became a sad person, he didn’t talk. It was a terrible thing. He was pretty quiet anyway; you see the Irish, they’re very introverted. He lived with fear. And we didn’t know what was happening with the military. So he became a very sad person. And the only thing he told us about what was happening was…we knew he was sad but he’d never tell us a word about it. He didn’t want to speak, he was afraid of it. So that happened when he had an ataque de alma [attack of the soul], and he passed away in the hospital. I remember that he told me that, when he was in navy school, they went around the world on a boat. And one day when they were in the middle of the sea they said that they’d send messages in a bottle, to see where they’d land. And can you believe that the first reply that they got was from Ireland? From Galway. It was on the coast and someone saw the bottle and grabbed it. And they made contact. Then he went and met them and took photos, and he was so delighted to be in contact with Irish people.
He stayed in the camp a lot. All the brothers and sisters, two boys and since he was small he had a vocation because he was a priest, according to Mammy. And my grandmother was very Irish but very strict. For example, she didn’t want Mammy to marry my father because he was Spanish. She was very Catholic, too much, very closed. During carnaval, she didn’t want us to leave the house because she thought, “The Devil is in everyone, the devil is in him!” At times I do it to my son as a joke. I say, “The devil is on you! Behave yourself.”
My grandmother always spoke in English. I don’t have too many memories of her because I was sent to Saint Brigid’s boarding school. According to Papa he put me in Saint Brigid’s so that I’d learn to speak English well. Also my mother went there, and all my mother’s sisters. Saint Brigid’s was founded for orphans or poor children. The women with a lot of money, with Monsignor Dillon and, well, Father Fahy, they established the school and everyone went there, including me. Papa said as well that I was always looking in the mirror and dancing. And in Saint Brigid’s I learned how to dance.
No, no, no. In the morning, we had regular classes—grammar, math—all in Spanish. But in the afternoon, they gave us classes in English. The nuns there always wanted us to be like our mothers, to follow the Irish traditions. In the house, with my mother and grandmother, is where I followed the Irish traditions; that really conserved the traditions. With music, with everything. All the Passionist priests would come to lunch and to drink tea. They would cook a special meal; they’d have the special seat for them, I remember the seat in the house, tall and really beautiful, but the best chair was for Father John, Father Bernard, Father so and so. And it annoyed us, we would think, “Why do they get all this?” And the best part of the chicken, because that time they cooked chicken. Not anymore. But they cooked the chicken on Sundays and the priests came and it would be a feast. And then in the afternoons Mama baked scones, and made toast with marmalade. And to this day in my home I do the same. But my daughter, no. She says, “Mama,” and she says, “I don’t have the time to make meals and bake like this!” And you know what that’s like because you’re young too, you know that you can’t arrive home and start to bake. And more so because she’s fifth-generation Irish. But my friends, they’re from here and they drink mate because that’s what’s traditional to them, it’s a very rigid tradition. Whereas for me, during the year I invite people and I bring out the tea, very Irish, five or six cups of tea, teapots and teapots. Then I invite other friends, friends that aren’t Irish, and I do the same and they say, “How wonderful, how delicious!” Because they’re not used to it, yet they drink just as much. And that’s how we preserve the customs. And later, when we were in Saint Brigid’s we started to learn how to dance. When we finished classes for all of the festivals we would dance jigs, reels, all Irish people with Irish surnames. And there was one nun there and she taught us how to jump with the legs and arms straight out like this. That was fifty years ago. Now in contrast my mother never learned how to dance, she knew nothing about it.
FormalPara What about your father?Papí liked everything. He was a very content man, the son of a Spanish. They came from Spain during the war and they came here. Mammy, I don’t know, I think she met him in the barrio where they lived in Buenos Aires and they got married. And look, I have a picture of Mammy and Daddy when they got married.
FormalPara Look at the dress! It’s beautiful. Very glamorous. So, did the family move from the camp to Buenos Aires?No, Mammy was born in Capitan Sarmiento. She grew up there in an estancia because her father worked there, with the sheep. And later they left el campo. Mammy said that she didn’t want to be there for all her life. And the majority went to Buenos Aires to work, Mammy as well. I think that Mammy married at twenty-two years old. And I lived in Buenos Aires, in Villa Devoto. It’s a lovely barrio, one hour from the center by train.
FormalPara Were there other Irish there?Oh, lots! Look, everyone met up at Hurling Club, because it’s all Irish descendants there. Well now it’s a bit mixed up. Hurling is more of a humble club but it’s beautiful. In Hurling you went to drink tea. Before, when we were children, after we finished our hockey games we had events at the Hurling Club. But we didn’t do the Irish dancing, we just went to play hockey and to have get-togethers and meet up with the boys. There were boys that played rugby and others played hurling and hockey. Well, we’d play and then we went to drink tea and then the boys would come in but they’d all go to the bar. To drink. Where they’d get really drunk. A lot of them depended on that, they’d make themselves tipsy. That’s an expression I remember, “tipsy.” Because Mama had a brother and he was a terrible alcoholic. She’d say, “______, are you tipsy again?! You’re terrible, why did you go to the bar?” And she’d shout at him like that. Well the poor thing, he was just very Irish, introvert and shy, he didn’t talk much. Very Irish with blue eyes but so timid from living in the campo. When they brought him out of the camp he’d lose himself. Sheep rearing was his life. And he was in the monastery in Capitan de Sarmiento. You must go there! I took my cousin but since they don’t participate in the Irish community anymore they wouldn’t let me in. And I said, “I’m Irish, my uncle was chaplain here for years!” Because there was a college there that all the Irish boys went to, Saint Paul’s. That’s where they lived and slept! The people who lived far away left their sons there as boarders, knowing that they’d be looked after.
FormalPara So did they allow you into the monastery?They didn’t allow me but I went in anyway, and I got on well with the man there. We took some lovely photos. That’s where Father _____ is buried. And all the priests that I knew since I was a child, they’re all buried there. I don’t know what’s going to happen that place. It’s a beautiful place. Last year the encuentro irlandes was held there.
FormalPara When you moved from Buenos Aires, did you find it easy to enter into this Irish community?Yes, just as if they were my family. That’s what we feel among the Irish. It’s like a family.
We have a commission that has people who work and we pay every month to help people who can’t afford their remedies, for example. We can’t afford to make a home for them, because we don’t have many poor Irish here. But we have some people that don’t have work and they’re still young, and we help them. Then we have the Catholic Club, which was founded many years ago for the poor. But as we don’t have Irish poor, we give it to someone else in the parish.
FormalPara So, are there still some Irish living out in the campo?Well, everyone who had land is now in the city. They work in some other place.
FormalPara What about the Irish community then? Presumably, since there are no new Irish here, the connection will thin…Ah, that is what we’re so sorry about. Because my children are not as much Irish as I am. They say to me, “Mammy you’re terrible, you listen to Irish music and you cry.” And the Spanish music, no. My mother inculcated that in me and my brother and sister. I have a terrible sentimentality about Ireland.
FormalPara Can you remember any stories about Ireland from your mother or grandmother?No. My grandmother never told stories. What a pity, they didn’t speak about Ireland. They kept a silence. We were the ones that were asking, “Have we got relatives? We must have!” But my Mammy said, “No, I don’t know.” Granny died when I was quite small so I don’t remember. And my aunts never told us about Ireland. You know it was hard to receive a letter fifty, sixty years ago, so I don’t even think they used to write each other. Because my granny never told us anything about her relatives in Ireland. Never.
And when I went to Ireland I didn’t think to look for relatives because my mother kept telling me there were no more relatives there. But my sister went last year and I told her that we had to enquire, to make research. I said, “Why don’t you go to Westmeath, where they were born? Go to the parish because that’s where you’ll find them.” So she went and they said, “Oh yes!” and the lady said, “I know [one of the family], he lives very close to here. If you want I’ll take you.” And she met my cousin’s mother, because my cousin was away, working. They had a great chat, and she was so happy to meet my sister and said, “What a pity ______ is not here. He always wondered, he always knew that someone had gone to Argentina. So your great-grandfather was him!” So they took pictures and all. And my sister, the next day, was supposed to be on her way to Dublin because she was going to Spain to meet friends. And the telephone rang, because she had left her cell, and it was my cousin. “I want to meet you, I want to meet you, don’t leave!” he said, and they met in Dublin. And then he rang me and we started sending pictures and mails.
The Irish community is very strong here and it’s very strong in Buenos Aires. We keep in contact with the community in Buenos Aires. It’s very followed in Buenos Aires. I know most of the Irish in Argentina, as I went to Saint Brigid’s. You feel very proud of being Irish, that’s the way we feel. To say that you’re Irish is something of pride. When my great-great-grandfather came here he went to Capitan Sarmiento and he worked there for years, in the era of the Indians. He lived in terror because the Indians came and they would kill you, and he lived during that era. We don’t have too many stories about him. What a pity. There he worked in the camp, had his children and died.
He came alone, as a stowaway in a boat. That’s how he contacted Father Fahy. Fahy advised him to come to the campo of the province, where there were good people, wealthy people, people who didn’t discriminate like in England and the United States. So that’s how he arrived and met his wife. And I remember from my aunt that they got together in distinct places where it was only Irish—no Italians, no Russians, just Irish. And on Sundays they met up and danced and played Irish music. Mama played the accordion, everyone played music and danced and they’d get nostalgic and that’s how they remembered Ireland. It was a way of connecting themselves to Ireland. And of course that expanded and that’s how they met their husbands and wives. This was in the 1800s and the start of the 1900s. Mammy married a Spaniard because she stayed on in the city. The majority of the Irish community here, none of them speak English now. They carry on the traditions but their children, they don’t inculcate it in them. Me, for example, I always start with stories of the druids, the fairies, leprechauns, all of that, and they have those memories. They say, “Mammy, you bring Ireland into everything!” I’m terrible but you see how I really feel about it. So much love. My brother as well is terrible for Ireland; you talk about Ireland and his blue eyes fill up with tears. The Irish can’t believe how Irish we are here.
All the gatherings that occurred came out in The Southern Cross, the weddings and births, so that the Irish community knew what was going on.
(Laughs) At times [my husband] could kill me! Because he wants to go to Ireland but to other places too, while I just want to go to Ireland. I’m going this year. He says, “You’re going to spend that much money just going to Ireland?” and I just go, I don’t care. But he’s a man; I think it’s stronger in women. For example, and it depends on the person as well, but my sister-in-law is like me as well. She never went to the Irish dancing but she liked them and when we were little we had nowhere to go, sixty years ago. So Father Fidelis Rush, (who was Argentine but an Irish descendant like us) took us every Sunday to Mrs. Welsh’s house, where we all met up and did the Irish traditions. We talked about Ireland, we danced the Irish dances that we had learned in Saint Brigid’s and then the popular music and then he’d say, “Now let’s do our Irish dances!” He’d put on a bit of both music. He took us every month to spend a day in places like San Antonio de Areco, by the river and we’d swim in the river. First the boys, then the girls.
All my boyfriends were Irish; I never wanted to go outside of that. My husband wasn’t Irish but he spoke English and he was Catholic.
FormalPara So the priests were a very important part of your life?Oh, sí! Look, I have a memory, at home, when someone died we used to have a priest during the ceremony and the wake and when the person was buried. Baptisms, weddings, the priest always had a presence. But an Irish priest. The priest was the central figure. Now I don’t care if the priest is Irish or not, but they taught us to respect the priest. I always say the presence of the priest in the house, at lunch, at tea; it was part of the family. A lot of that is lost now.
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Verse “He’s a Porteño, kick his arse” Leo Castrillon in conversation with the author, 14 October 2011
During this conversation, Leo was accompanied by his friend, Bernardo, whose interjections are also included in the transcription.
The Fahy club! The original school was in Capilla del Señor. That’s a hell of an interesting story for you, and for the annals of the Irish here. You are familiar with the Dresden Affair? Well I brought you more information here. Saint Brigid’s was, let’s say, Saint Brigid’s is administered by the Irish Catholic Association (ICA). The ICA was started by Father Fahy. (I brought you a biography of Father Fahy. I want to check with you if this would be interesting for you. It’s written in English, by James Ussher. But it’s tremendous. Tremendous. It’s all here, all the stories before he died, and the influence he had on the Irish migration when he was alive. I’ll make a copy for you. It’s a fantastic story.) I have many, many avenues for you to explore. One is Father Fahy. To give you a scope for what the surroundings were when he was alive, and his influence when he left. I mean to say, he had a lot of power, but he used this power very positively, very meticulously. He was a protector of Irish emigrants. The Irish emigrants were mostly single that would lie out in the countryside. He would travel every six months on horseback and visit them. He would visit places he had never been to before, and visit people that he had never met before. He would just roam on the pampas and find huts where Irish emigrants were living with their flock of sheep.
Well the Fahy Institute is one of his legacies. He didn’t actually found the school. He started the ICA with the purpose of protecting girls. And he had in mind, the second approach, the problem of orphans for boys. It didn’t materialize until after he died. The ICA kept on providing shelter and instruction for girls. When the Dresden Affair happened, (it came to my mind now, recently) the orphans that were in the street begging, small children, the boys were picked up by the Ladies of Saint Joseph or their predecessors at that time. The girls were also picked up and placed in schools for girls that the ICA had in the city. That is not underlined in the story of the ICA. Fahy started everything. This is a fantastic story, fantastic.
My grandmother, they landed in an estancia belonging to the Anchorena family. My grandmother arrived in Argentina as a single girl; she must have been eighteen, twenty years old. From Mullingar. I have her baptism certificate. They were British subjects, they called them Ingleses here. And when the Argentine authorities, as ruthless as they are today, would forcefully take young men from the estancias, the Ingleses would be spared. And the Irish were Ingleses. There was an agreement. There was an agreement between Argentina and England, that the British subjects would never be forced to join the army. So my grandmother was _____. She arrived here in the 1880s, so she never met Father Fahy. He was gone then, he had died by then. He was assisting people with yellow fever and he got it. I think she arrived between 1870 and 1880. Well, she joined the Anchorena family. They tell me she took care of the boys of the family, and it’s a well-off family. They were close friends and associates with our dictator, Rosas. Rosas would order the army to push the Indians out of the land and Anchorena would come in and buy the land. He formed I suppose more than one colony. My grandmother went to one colony started by him in a township called Juarez. This colony was started by Anchorena, and he took all the Irish he could find into the colony. In fact, the Irish girls here were preferred as nannies because they were Catholic; spoke English and were Catholic. The English were Protestants. But anyway… She brought her boyfriend from Ireland and they got married… I haven’t located the church where they were married. Maybe they weren’t married in the church; maybe they were married in the Anchorena house or something. I have a photograph.
FormalPara In that beautiful dress…Yes, that dress was given to her by the family. It was taken in a studio in Florida Street.
FormalPara She had a positive relationship with that family?Well, after that, no. Only when she was single. And my mother and her brothers and sisters were all born in Juarez. But I have no record of where my mother was born. Maybe she was born in Juarez, maybe in Buenos Aires. I don’t know. I have no baptism record. So I haven’t been able to trace her. They had a big family, Irish! They had a room in their estancia exclusively for the priest, who would visit them once or twice a year. The Irish priest, Purcell. John Purcell. The priest that baptized them was Father John Purcell. And then my mother died earlier than my father, yes. I was two years old, maybe less. Infections in those days. They were here in town. That happened when they were here in town. My father died in 1937. I was at Fahy School.
FormalPara Tell me the story again about your uncle or grand uncle who went around with the salesman and came to Buenos Aires…Ah yes! Well out there in Juarez, which is in the pampas, the province of Buenos Aires. (It’s farmland, south, close to Tandíl, Azul. And the road from Azul, a bit further on is Juarez, the Mexican hero, this township was named after him.) When my uncles were teenagers the colony would be visited by salesmen. By Jik’s company, in this case. Farm machinery. And of course, the salesman would try and get someone to help him because he didn’t know Spanish probably, or he didn’t know anybody! So he would ask, and in this case asked my grandmother if she would allow her son (my uncle) to travel all around with him. And in this case she did. Many times, not once, year after year. And finally, after many years, the salesman asked my grandmother if she would allow her son to go with him to Buenos Aires, which she did. (She was very Catholic. Oh, yes! The Irish were not reasonably Catholic. Did you read the annals of the Irish involved in the Dresden Affair? Father Coughlan was the priest who traveled to Montevideo to join to try and convince the captain not to dock in the port. Because there was a hell of a lot of immigrants there and the Hotel de Inmigrantes was full. There was nothing ready for them. And the Irish in the city knew that there was 1750 passengers and that they won’t be allowed into the hotel. And there wasn’t, there was no room, they had no food. So that was Father Coughlan. He couldn’t convince the captain. He had his orders; he had to land in Buenos Aires. He describes the piousness of the Irish inmigrantes; they started praying on the deck of the ship. That was a fact that impressed me greatly.) So he went to the city with the salesman and he would write back to Benito Juarez and say, “You wouldn’t believe it, but here in Buenos Aires the street cars are electric! No horses! And when I enter my room I just flick a box and a light comes on. And there’s no kerosene or anything!” Ha! Of course, life in the pampas was hard, but they were used to it. I dunno, they had no electricity in Ireland either.
FormalPara Let’s go to how you ended up in the Fahy school.Yes, I was orphaned concerning my mother; a half an orphan. But anyway, my father was highly concerned that I should not miss speaking English. I never forgot that request of my father’s and when I was doing my last year of Moreno school, I was attending the highest grade of English and our teacher was the school director. Father Vincent O’Sullivan. He was Irish born. Oh, capincho, stiff hair, gggrrrrr. He’s in this photograph—come over here and look at it! (Leo shows me a picture of Fahy hurling team, taken in 1937.) I joined the school when I was seven; first, second, third grade in Capilla del Señor and the rest in Moreno. In 1933, I went over to Moreno and we were anxious to go there, because there was football fields where we could play. In Capilla del Señor we had nuns and they wouldn’t allow us—no fighting, no exercising, no anything. That school had hurling fields, football fields, etc. but when the nuns took over in 1930 they wouldn’t allow sports. They weren’t sports minded. In my final year, after my father had died, this higher grade in English was taught by Father O’Sullivan. So at the beginning of the last year at school he said, “I’ll pick five of you and I’ll bring you to Buenos Aires to the English cultural association to render your examinations for the Cambridge certificate.” So I studied and when the time came he read the names and I wasn’t in them. So after tea, in the afternoon, we had English classes. Tea, then football. On that particular day, instead of going to football, which we were all anxious to play—we had two football games a day after lunch and after tea—so instead of going to the field to play football I asked permission to go to Father O’Sullivan’s office. You were supposed to ask permission. You couldn’t avoid going to the field. So the permission was granted. I went over and knocked at the door and Father O’Sullivan said, “Come in.”
And I went in and he looked me up and down and said, “And what’s wrong with you?”
I said, “I am really sad that my name wasn’t read today at class. And I want go to Buenos Aires to get my certificate.”
And he said, “Oh no! That’s definite! You’re not ready; you’re not prepared for that. Your level is not good enough.”
And I said, “You’re wrong.”
And he said, “I’m not wrong. I haven’t included you on the list because the notes you gave me weren’t good enough. You’re not ready.”
And I said, “That’s not true. The notes I got during the year prove that I’m ready. And I studied my guts out and I’m really very upset because of this.”
And he said, “Well, you may be upset, but I won’t include you on the list.”
And I said, “But that’s unfair, Father. I can’t accept that. I won’t accept that.”
And he said, “Well the decision is mine.”
And I said, “Well it’s not fair. You’re not being fair.”
So after a while he took note that I was keen on asserting my position. So he said,
“Let’s do something. Come back this time tomorrow and I’ll give you my final decision.” So I came back the next day and he said,
“Well I have thought the matter over and the point is that I will give you a chance.” “Thank you, Father.”
“The chance is, you surrender your football games after tea.”
“I’m ready for that,” I said.
“I’ll give you peculiar lessons to learn and if you prove that you can improve and you are ready, in my view, then I’ll include you in the list.”
“Agreed, sure.”
So I came to Buenos Aires. Of the five or the six, I had the privilege of training, every afternoon. I would go over and sit down with him. He would sit and listen to the BBC in London. Oh yes, that was fantastic. I really enjoyed those meetings.
FormalPara That’s very interesting, because the BBC is very English. So there was no anti-English feeling in the school?No, nothing. Maybe some of the Spanish teachers, because the Second World War was in the horizon at that moment. There was some; they told us in Spanish classes that in Europe they thought we should know that there was a war looming on the horizon and that the trend was… admiring Mussolini, for instance. And I took note of that. But very soft, it was not overt. Just gave a glimpse of what was happening, and that was it. And it never happened again.
FormalPara Did you feel very far away from Europe here? Were you very cut off from what was happening in Europe? (Bernardo Kelly has joined us at the table and interjects.)- Bernardo::
-
No! The English were here! Argentina was a British colony! I mean, we made good when the English were here. The trains, wonderful. You could take a train to Rosario. Have lunch and dinner in it, with silver service and white linen and the waiter with a bow tie so tight that if he turned his head he’d cut his neck.
- Bernardo::
-
That was until Perón came in. He spoiled everything. We know exactly what happened with the English and the Irish, in the old history. But I have nothing to say about the English here. Most of us, ninety percent of us, we were working for English here. Until the Americans came. In the 1930s there was a revolution here. And in Europe. And the Americans’ resolution was to take the allies out and they came in and brought their business. The Americans paid better salaries than the British. Much better salaries, but with conditions. If you worked for the English, and if you didn’t steal, you could come in there and die on the job. They wouldn’t fire anybody. If there was an old fella that wasn’t doing much they’d say, “Leave him there, poor fellow. He needs to make his living.” I was working for that. But the Americans, no. The Americans would kick your arse.
- Leo::
-
Yes first job was for a shipping company. I used short pants! I was fourteen or fifteen years old. Everybody got a job. It was easy for all of us. Spoke English!
- Bernardo::
-
You could go to any company, English or American, and they’d say, “Oh!” There was two or three or four of us in each one. We used to supply the coal for their ships. There was no diesel then. All coal.
- Leo::
-
No. We knew each other from school activities. We had at least a monthly dance. And all the damas used to bring the girls. The Ladies of Saint Joseph’s were running the Fahy School. They also ran the Keating Institute for girls. There was Saint Brigid’s and the ICA, and the Ladies of Saint Joseph founded the Fahy School. But then, much later, about twenty years later, they also founded a school, the Keating Institute. They took over the administration. At the time we left school and we started our association here. We did it with the idea of playing football, soccer. We were all young and we were good at that. One manner of uniting us was football. So we joined the British Saturday Football League. They were all English, Anglo-Argentine teams. So we joined them. Our aim was to beat the English and the Scots. We were the Fahy Institute and our logo was the shamrock, green jersey. There was Fahy A and Fahy B. We rented a field. The first team we played against was The Casuals. They were English; they were not the most sport-minded team. The Anglo-Argentine were more English than the real English. They used to talk about “home.” And they were born here! But they were powerful. The British embassy was right close to the government house. They started here the railways, the packing houses, the insurance companies, shipping companies. There was a company called Aircross & Co Ltd. in Paseo Colon, the whole building full of offices and a whole warehouse in Barracas, full of machinery. All the farming machinery was imported from England. But the balloon deflated. The English were slow-working. They should have kept going but they didn’t, and the Second World War went too fast. These English guys were so famous. Out in the country they had agents and these agents were grocers and they sold everything—a kilo of sugar, of rice and two machines. So you could go and then they had a big yard with all the machinery. And a farmer could go and say,
“I want that thrasher machine.”
“Which do you want?”
“That one.”
“Fine.” (Wrote it down in the book—“Peter took a thrashing machine.”)
“When are you goin’ to pay it?”
“By the next crop. And if not, the one after that.”
“Fine.”
Everyone paid their account. The Irish and the English were very well respected here. I used to go to a company and you’d say you were Irish. “O Irlandeses, oooh!” You’d never have a problem. Because never in the newspaper would you read anything about trouble with Irish people.
- Bernardo::
-
The Catholicism, it was once big but not anymore. The sales people that they have now aren’t too good. They haven’t sped up enough to keep with the times. Some of them are still on the old track. They changed the Our Father and the Hail Mary. I said, “To hell with that!” Who are you to change it? And instead of saying the mass like that with the back to the crowd they changed the other way.
- Leo::
-
It’s a terrorist, it’s inclined to terrorists. The Irish priests in Holy Cross Church actually tended to the claims of the Disappeared. This was the way that things started.
Helping the families that claimed their children had been stabbed by the military. Of course, the military had their sins, of course. But they were having meetings there. Officially, for the Disappeared. Officially! If you go in to Iglesia Santa Cruz you have all the pictures there on the walls with all the claims. The priests actually opened their doors to the families of the people who claimed to be disappeared.
- Leo: :
-
The beginning of the Irish encuentros, you should read that. It was a hell of a thing, caused a commotion all over the railways. The high Irish were connected with the English. So only on a telephone call the English would arrange a train for all the Irish to go to los encuentros. There is a plaque in the church in Lujan to Saint Patrick but it says there was nine or ten thousand people there. We were eighteen or twenty when we started going. We would rent a bus and they used to gather about three thousand people. Last year we gathered twelve hundred. On Saint Patrick’s Day, that was the spot to meet, in Lujan. We were very near each other in the country, it was easier. And Irish families all married each other. Then we started making mistakes.
- Bernardo::
-
We’d go off to Lujan and they had a big sign there, in Gaelic. And they were walking with the big cross and Irish and Argentine flags, and some hundred meters away from the church on the big plaza. And when all the party was gathered they would start walking into the basilica. Afterwards it was non-Catholic. My father told me that once, must have been 1910, there is a bar near the church, and my father told me that so many people went in there that the barman couldn’t attend them all. So he closed the door, let them all in there, and he said, “Well I’m going home, I can’t do anything with them.” In the old days in 1900, 1910, 1920, a fella who lived in my area, which wasn’t even that far away, he’d never see anybody. And at the encuentro he met his relatives and friends. A celebration, Saint Patrick’s Day was. I was with my father in the sulky and he’d meet someone on the road and he’d pull over and talk to them for two hours because he wouldn’t have seen them in God knows when. They were terribly shy as well. They wouldn’t salute anyone. They’d have the head down. The girls, I remember, they had to be accompanied. There was one dance a year for the Irish exclusively. No one could come in if they weren’t Irish.
- Leo::
-
By your face. They’d say, “Oh, what are you doing here? You don’t belong.” You know what the names of the associations in the provinces are? La Asocación de la Raza Irlandesa de Junín, for instance. Raza Irlandesa! And whoever was not Raza Irlandesa was thrown out. They would have known you. Everyone kind of knew each other.
- Bernardo::
-
They say there was a musician, a friend of the _____. And they tried to pass him in by the name of Murray and the man at the door said, “No, he’s not Irish.” Wouldn’t let him in. He put him out.
- Leo::
-
But then it happened, for instance, it was not only a matter of non-Irish but among the Irish themselves. We have been witnesses to situations at the Hurling in Villa de Voto. After the hurling matches, there would be tea and dancing. In the 1930s. And in those dances, if a Fahy player dared dance with the sister of a Saint Patrick’s club player they would kick a row. “What the hell! You’re not supposed to dance with my sister!”
Now things are different. Now it is far more civilized. People tend to join now. Earlier it was just a case of keeping people out. The Irish were identified from their location. “He’s an Irish from Arrecifes. He’s from Monte.” And those in Buenos Aires were Irish-Porteños. And they were despised because they were not country people. Nobody liked them. He’s a Porteño, kick his arse.
Notes
- 1.
O’Rabhaich, M., 1994, Merseyside: Its Culture, Irishways Manchester. See also Curtis, L. P., 1971, Apes and Angels: The Irish in Victorian Caricature: Newtown Abbots, David and Charles.
- 2.
Derrida, J., 1981, Writing and Difference: London, Routledge.
- 3.
Lacan, J., 1977, Ecrits: London, Tavistock.
- 4.
Penna, J., and R. Norberto, eds., 2003, Argentina, Una Identidad en Crisis: Pasado, Presente y Futuro de una esperanza: Buenos Aires, National Academy of Sciences.
- 5.
Borges, J., 1960, La Forma de la Espada, in A. Flores, ed., Cuentos Españoles: New York, Bantam.
- 6.
Free, M., 2005, Keeping Them Under Pressure: Masculinity, Narratives of National Regeneration and the Republic of Ireland Soccer Team: Sport in History, v. 25, p. 23.
- 7.
Ó Conchubhair, B., 2008, The Global Diaspora and the ‘New’ Irish (Language). In Nic Pháidín, C. & Ó Cearnaigh, S. (Eds), A New View of the Irish Language (p. 224–248). Dublin: Cois Life.
- 8.
O’Brien, S., 2009, Irish Associational Culture and Identity in Post-War Birmingham, University of Limerick, Limerick.
- 9.
Ibid.
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O’Brien, S. (2017). Eating Our Words: Food, Language and the Preservation of Identity. In: Linguistic Diasporas, Narrative and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51421-5_7
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