TIL that there are about 5,000 people in Argentina that speak Welsh. And how that happened is a crazy fascinating story, some of which involves the people featured here in this first photo.
In the mid-19th century, the indigenous people of Wales were experiencing great hardships with the English occupation and the process of Industrialization. Spurred by nationalists like Michael Jones, a group of over 150 Welsh people paid a fee to board the ship _Mimosa_ and emigrate to a new land — the southern pampas of Patagonia, in Argentina, which were characterized by barren, water-sparse grasslands.
The Welsh settlers survived the first years thanks to the indigenous Teheulche Indians and the aptitude of one Rachel Jenkins, who thought to begin an ambitious irrigation project of the River Camwy in the Chubut Valley, which permanently changed the region’s water access and allowed the Welsh to survive. By 1915 there were about 10,000 Welsh-speakers in the area.
The tiny enclave faced more hardships in incoming years: the Argentinian government, which initially had offered the land to the Welsh immigrants as part of a ploy to stake the land claims against Chile, eventually wanted the local language to be Spanish. Nevertheless, there are still people in Patagonia who speak Welsh, and ties to the Welsh homeland have been fostered more and more in recent years. You can see a Welsh school in Patagonia in the second photo, and in the third, a map of the Welsh-speaking areas extant in Argentina today.
Source: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-History-of-Patagonia/, Second and third images from Wikipedia under the entry Y Wladfa, which means “the settlement”
