Abstract
In July 2025, Wrexham AFC shared a video revealing their new kit for the football season. The video depicts two choirs, standing on the coast of Wales and Argentina, singing the Welsh song Yma o Hyd, meaning ‘Still Here’. The choirs remove cloaks, revealing a shirt with the colours of Argentina and a Welsh dragon, a design referencing the flag of Y Wladfa. An announcement by the club states that it represents the shared bond between the two communities ‘rooted in resilience, identity and pride’. 1 This open celebration of Wales’s colony in Patagonia, Y Wladfa, encapsulates the myths that continue to dominate Wales today, positioning the colony as a story of Welsh resistance, a sign of the enduring strength of the Welsh people and their language.
Often depicted, from within and without, as having a culture more inherently progressive than England’s, Wales’s colonial history has often gone unspoken in national discussions of the British empire and its long-lasting effects. The recent series of books Race, Ethnicity, Wales and the World published by the University of Wales Press represents a push within Welsh academia to seriously interrogate the colonial legacy that shapes not only research and education within Wales, but Welsh society as a whole. Within the series, Lucy Taylor’s Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia constitutes the strongest interrogation of the Y Wladfa, not only exploring the history of the colony, but also examining the myths of a friendly form of colonialism that continue to dominate the Welsh view of Y Wladfa.
In Chapter 1, Taylor establishes that writing on Y Wladfa has almost always focused on the celebration of a non-violent mission to establish a Welsh-speaking homeland in Patagonia, a story of the Welsh that always came at the expense of indigenous voices. Taylor’s book instead starts with the story of a Mapuche man named Katrülaf, a trader with the Welsh colonists who was eventually imprisoned by Argentinian soldiers after he followed the legal requirement to present himself for documentation, something he chose to do at the Welsh colony. The book not only begins with this story to centre the voice of the indigenous, but also to establish the unique position of the colony, at once physically non-violent, and in the same instance a representative of the Argentinian colonial project. In this case study, the Welsh have been depicted as both coloniser and colonised. A small religious community who believed the colonisation of what they saw as barren land would allow them the autonomy to preserve their language and culture away from English rule. Who, after accepting Argentina’s promise of land, began to lose their autonomy as part of a wider European civilising project.
Taylor explores the theoretical approach to the study of Y Wladfa in Chapter 2. Here, she utilises past studies of settler colonial relations to establish the Welsh settlers’ role in the subjugation of the Indigenous populations of Patagonia, expanded upon in further chapters. Importantly, Taylor uses this chapter to query the place of Y Wladfa within settler colonial studies, a discussion that not only prompts an analysis of the place of an oppressed people’s role in colonialism, but also an exploration of Wales’s own history of subjugation. In regards to acts of colonisation carried out by the oppressed, Taylor argues that the binary between colonised and coloniser that exists within settler colonial studies is crude and reduces our understanding of populations who, through their own colonisation, are given the opportunity to become actors in colonisation. While this discussion is important, Taylor possibly overstates the importance of Y Wladfa in this debate. Not only is Y Wladfa one case in a history of Welsh acts of colonialism in the Americas, it is also only one example of a persecuted minority’s participation in colonialism as a means to seek autonomy away from Europe. Here, numerous studies have been conducted on the role of religious persecution in driving the colonisation of North America.
As regards this, Taylor also discusses Patrick Wolfe’s work on settler colonialism. For while accepting its genocidal nature, she criticises the lack of agency his theory affords indigenous groups within their cultural struggle against colonial assimilation. To support this, Taylor invokes the example of Wales as a nation colonised for 900+ years, where colonised and colonial communities are ‘intimately mixed’. Continuing on this line, she argues that comparisons can be made between the Welsh and Patagonian indigenous groups, two locations ‘where the settler came to stay’. She states that in these cases the concept of barbarisation is a broader category than racialisation, allowing us to draw greater comparisons between the subjugated experience of both groups.
Within this discussion, we should question whether in order to develop a complex understanding of the Welsh colonial experience we need to establish a comparison between the Welsh and indigenous experience. While she herself references Chris Williams’s work Postcolonial Wales, 2 acknowledging his argument that while once a colonised nation, the Act of Union had abolished any distinction between the two nations and, in turn, the idea that it remained a colony. Taylor’s approach to this debate takes for granted the idea that Wales is in fact part of a colonial relationship with the English. Here we must reflect upon John Davies’s History of Wales. Regarding English attempts to curb the use of the Welsh language, Davies argues that it was carried out partially as means to break the consciousness of Welsh workers who were the first to raise the red flag during the Merthyr Rising of 1831. 3 The role of class oppression is key to understanding the difference between the Welsh and indigenous experience. The Welsh experience at the time of Y Wladfa was driven by a new form of economic exploitation and industrial expansion within Wales; the indigenous in Patagonia, like other victims of settler colonialism, were instead seen as surplus, leaving them to be confined, assimilated or removed.
In covering the acts of dispossession carried out by the Welsh, Taylor’s book breaks down the Welsh myth of a friendly coloniser and goes further than any other work in establishing the depth of the Welsh colonial project. While acknowledging that the first Welsh settlers did act ‘peaceably’ with the indigenous Patagonians, Taylor establishes that they saw Patagonia as terra nullius, currently unproductive and ripe for development. Following the Argentinian government, the Welsh settlers reassured themselves that their position on the land was legitimate as they had bought the land from the indigenous communities themselves. The Welsh claim to friendship is based entirely on the legitimacy of this act of possession, an act − which as Taylor acknowledges with her discussion of Wolfe’s work − has a genocidal effect. Similarly, while acting without physical violence, Welsh settlers were quick to invoke colonial narratives, not only by believing they were bringing development, but also through the infantilisation of the Tehuelche people. In fact, the religious idea that the Welsh are a morally righteous people has become cyclical, not only impacting feelings of superiority among the colonists, but continuing to evoke those same feelings of pride regarding Y Wladfa today.
Important to the story of Y Wladfa is that the Welsh colonists who travelled to Patagonia seeking autonomy, quickly found themselves at the forefront of Argentina’s ‘Conquest of the Desert’. Believing they were entrenching Welsh culture, the colony was actually seen as a part of a wider European colonial project. The Welsh settlers continued to exhibit autonomy amidst Argentinian attempts to exert greater control, and by 1899, following the need for state support after floods, Y Wladfa was fully assimilated into the Argentine state.
In the final chapter of her book, Taylor explores how the knowledge of Y Wladfa was spread in the latter half of the twentieth century, arguing that renewed efforts to fight for the place of the Welsh language at home have often led to the celebration of its survival abroad. Taylor analyses the role of a series of documentaries produced over the last sixty years that have reinforced the celebratory narratives covered within the book. These celebrations have become all too familiar to anyone schooled in Wales since the creation of the Curriculum Cymreig in 1993. Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia ends by exploring the continuation of this narrative in Wales today. Amid curriculum changes triggered by popular protests against systemic racism in 2020, the Welsh government made some attempt to reevaluate Wales’s own colonial history. A new curriculum, designed to integrate Black, Asian and minority ethnic history, was brought in amidst other changes to diversify education in Wales. However, as Taylor argues, in spite of these changes the celebration of Y Wladfa continues. The names of indigenous communities are only invoked to celebrate Welsh virtue, while their continued existence goes unacknowledged. With notions of an innate Welsh progressiveness remaining dominant, Taylor’s work is vital in challenging these myths and encouraging a real reckoning with Wales’s past.