Male narratives from the margins of the country of immigrants. Two Norwegians in Argentina in the 1920s.

MARIA BJERG

Expectations Unfulfilled. Norwegian Migrants in Latin America, 1820-1940

Brill

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2015; p. 167 - 183

This chapter analyzes the personal narratives of two Norwegian immigrants who arrived in Argentina at the end of the 1920s, namely, the diaries of Ole Viborg Høiby, and of his friend and fellow traveler, Ottar Enger, who also wrote a series of 26 letters addressed to his parents. At the beginning of their stay, the authors of those narratives worked for over half a year as hired laborers on a farm in the west of Buenos Aires province, and later they set out on a long journey to the Chaco salteño [a wooded area in Salta province] in the far north of the country, where they got employment at the Standard Oil refinery.In different registers, the accounts of Ole and Ottar describe the same migration but two experiences; they enable a complementary reading as well as an independent one, and through both a ´public´ narrative (the letters) and an intimate one (the diaries) they provide access to the authors? representations and subjectivity . Thus, the analysis of this migratory experience will address two interrelated dimensions. In one of them, the route of the migrants will be rebuilt so as to reflect on the capacity of agency, the role of social networks in the access to the market, and the links between overseas migration and internal and seasonal migrations. In the other one, focused on subjectivity, their motivations and wishes, along with their representations and the way the social and cultural contexts affected their choices and influenced their strategies, are addressed.