English-Speaking Communities in Latin America (review)

During the long nineteenth century, Britain's influential presence in Latin America encompassed diplomacy, mercenaries, trade, banking, settlement, immigration, and cultural models. Great Britain's power and success accounts for much of this influence, but the extraordinary diversity of the British presence in terms of its origins, religion, and class was what made it so effective. Witness Buenos Aires merchant Joshua Waddington, born into an Anglo-French family of Catholic faith, who in 1817 moved to Chile, where he became a wealthy landowner and founded an elite family (p. 185). Important as the British presence was, however, it did not endure. In full retreat after 1914, by 1950 it was gone. Its legacy includes sports, schools, churches, surnames, and among some, a sense of distinctive identity.

The present volume is the result of a 1997 London conference that brought together a number of specialists on English-language communities in Latin America. This book is about as good an introduction to the subject as there is, particularly because the various contributions do reveal the diversity and complexity of the British presence. Argentina, Chile, and Brazil receive the most attention, with a temporal emphasis on the nineteenth century; this distribution reflects the actuality of the British presence. In the "northern tier" of Latin America, the role of the British was less developed and subject from the start to U.S. competition.

To understand the nature of English-language communities in Latin America, readers might begin with Patrick McKenna's study of Irish-Argentines and Deborah Jakubs's analysis of work, family, and identity among Anglo-Argentines. Taken together, they show that Argentina hosted not a unified British community but rather a series of distinct but overlapping ones encapsulated within, and yet closely tied to, the host society. For the Irish, their Catholicism, their lack of identity with Great Britain, and their economic success brought about rapid assimilation into Argentine society. In contrast, the Anglo community remained obstinately distinctive, if not separate. The communities in Argentina were significant but not exemplary. In Chilean Patagonia and the Esmeraldas province of Ecuador (discussed by Laurie Nock and Geoffrey Fisher, respectively), British communities were geographically isolated, small in numbers, and—in Ecuador—never economically viable. Such was also the case with the abortive 1870s settlement at Cananea in the São Paulo province of Brazil, described by Oliver Marshall.

Three contributions provide general background for understanding the British presence in Latin America. Karen Racine graphically analyzes the British role—a mixture of trade, finance, publicity, and mercenaries—in the wars of independence. Barbara Tenenbaum and James McElveen survey the British presence in Mexico (1821-1911), while John Mayo does the same for Chile.

Commendable as parts of this book are, the work as a whole presents problems. The words "English-speaking" in the title are misleading, since U.S. expatriate communities are explicitly excluded. The term was necessitated by the final three contributions on Anglo-Africans in the Spanish Caribbean. These studies, by Ross Graham, Ronald Harpelle, and Jim Ross, elucidate a critical dimension of the African diaspora; too important to be tacked on at the end, they richly deserve a separate volume. Additionally, the present work would gain focus and coherence if they were left out. Similar improvement would result from omitting Florencia Cortes-Conde's study of the Buenos Aires Herald's response to the Falklands crisis of 1982 and Darien Davis's study of Brazil's appropriation of "football" as futebol. Although excellent studies by themselves, they don't fit temporally or conceptually with the rest of the volume. In sum, the editor could have been more rigorous in selecting contributions and more sophisticated and imaginative in organizing them.

Given these drawbacks, this volume resembles the curate's egg. (For mystified Americans, a reference to a classic joke of the Victorian era from the pages of Punch...