Becoming Irish-Argentine in the Argentine pampas: Identity Representations in Private Voices in Edmundo Murray’s "Becoming Irlandés"

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, more than a third of the Argentine population was formed by immigrants, which included the largest Irish diaspora within Latin America. Personal letters and memoirs constitute invaluable first-hand testimonies of immigrants’ lives. Becoming Irlandés: Private Narratives of the Irish Emigration to Argentina (1844-1912), formed by two collections of letters and two memoirs plus contextualized and historical information, edited by independent researcher and writer Edmundo Murray (2006a), offers rich insights about their local experience and culture. The purpose of this paper is to analyse strategies of identification in the discourse of those Irish born or Argentine of Irish descendancy, through a postcolonial studies perspective and a narratological approach.