Abstract
The traditional approach relating the study of the British to Argentina has been one of the economic relationship between two trading partners, Argentina and the United Kingdom. This work places that study in the context of a perspective focussing on ethnic group relations in a society whose population has grown through large-scale immigration. It seeks to show how the characteristics of the two societies and the role members of one played in another shaped the emergence of a British ethnic identity and its persistence there for many generations. Many studies of immigrant adaptation have concentrated upon entrance to First World settings with developed institutional frameworks for participation, moulded normatively by the influence of Anglo-Saxon charter groups. This study reverses these variables by considering the participation of Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in a developing Latin context. Ethnic relations studies, which have looked at British minorities overseas, have tended to concentrate on the postcolonial adjustments of mixed-blood Anglos in societies emancipated from past British rule. By contrast, this study focusses on a minority-group which has contributed up to five generations of Argentine-born residents to a country never colonized by Britain, long emancipated from Spanish rule, and in which the participation of Britons and their descendants, while wielding them substantial economic influence, has always been subordinated to the power of ruling Argentine groups. The consequences are seen in the development of a self-sufficient community of expatriates, and in the adjustments forced on its Anglo inheritors when nearly all British-born sojourners eventually left Argentina to return to Britain.