From Urban Northern Europe to Rural Argentina. Identities and representations in the narratives of two immigrant women in the early 20th century.

BJERG MARIA

Chicago

Congreso; Thirty-second Meeting of the Social Science History Association; 2007

SSHA

This paper is based on the personal testimonies (letters, interviews and memoirs) of two immigrant women who settled in rural Argentina in the early twentieth century.  On the one hand, Karen Sunesen, a young Danish lady arrived in Buenos Aires along with her widowed mother in May 1914.  Although, they had planned to visit relatives for only about six months in a rural village in the southern pampas and then come back to Denmark, the outburst of World War I compelled them to change the original plan. They ended up settling in the Argentina and turning from visitors into immigrants. On the other hand, Ella Hoffmann Brunswig who arrived from Germany in 1923 in the company of her three infant daughters to join her husband who had been in Patagonia, in the southern extreme of the country, for four years working in a German land estate devoted to sheep breeding.  Although Ella and her husband had entered Argentina with the firm determination to return to Germany after some years, the crisis of the early 1930s, the advent of Nazism and the Second World War hindered the accomplishment of their plans. They had to remain in Argentina for good. Karen and Ella lived long lives. They both died in Argentina at the age of ninety in the decade of 1990. They had varied live trajectories but produced in a common field. Reducing the scale of analysis by focusing on the stories of these Northern European women I intend to examine some of the following issues:  the reconstitution of identities and representations after migration; the tensions that immigrant women experienced inside their marriages and families and in their relation with the new society at large; the identification with family and “homeland” and their influence on the negotiation of their lives in Argentina; the communication through regular correspondence (letters) as a gendered phenomena;  the creation, through letters crossing the Atlantic regularly, of a sort of  transnational  women´ s social arena;  the relevance of context (or contexts) in uncovering the divergent ways of adjustment of female immigrant ´s to the countries where they settled; and the role of female immigrants of ethnic minorities  in the preservation and passing on of cultural traditions across generations.