Summary

In July of 1865, some 160 Welsh immigrants settled in the valley of the Chubut River, located in the middle of a Patagonian territory controlled by the Indigenous Tehuelche. This was to be the beginning of a unique colonization process. Unlike many other migratory experiences, the colonizing effort promoted by a group of Welsh nationalist leaders was aimed at liberating their compatriots from the oppression to which they felt they had been subjected in the United Kingdom. Their utopian objective was to establish a “New Wales,” in which they could work their own land, freely practice their language (Cymraeg, in Welsh) and the religion of their nonconformist denominations, and achieve a certain degree of political autonomy.

In spite of facing an unknown and arid territory, the Welsh managed to produce wheat irrigated by canals. What is more, they would overcome prejudices about the “savage” nature of the Indigenous peoples, eventually working with the Pampa and Tehuelche tribes to develop a model of peaceful coexistence based on complementary economic practices, providing a unique example of relations between Europeans and Native Americans.

Economic development allowed the arrival of additional contingents of settlers. During the first decades, Welsh was the language of daily life, in social, political, economic, cultural, and religious contexts. The valley of the Chubut River became dotted with chapels. But in 1885, after the military campaigns that deprived the Indigenous peoples of their territories, the Argentine government materialized its sovereign presence over Patagonia. Although in 1891 Argentina made possible the creation of a new Welsh settlement in a valley of the Andean foothills, the process of nationalization and assimilation was underway. Influences within the political and educational spheres, as well as the arrival of immigrants of other nationalities, allowed the national government to gradually displace the Welsh from their position of primacy in the Chubut territory.

Although the autonomous Welsh Utopia did not flourish, some traces remain. More than 155 years after the arrival of the first contingent, there are still Welsh speakers and students in Patagonia. The eisteddfod and the arrival of the first immigrants’ ship are celebrated every July 28, a date officially considered to be the founding of the current province of Chubut.