Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

of dispersion and assimilation. Diasporas are about a two-way traffic in people, images and myths. There is the movement of people with their hopes and dreams to the new land, and the idea of the old country which is constructed by the settlers and their descendants. The artist M. C. Escher gives us a visual metaphor for this process in his famous picture (Drawing Hands, 1948) of one hand drawing another. Diasporas similarly are about a kind of self-referencing. Diasporas are the outcome of a mutual authoring. The production of the dias- poric experience is, therefore, an ongoing process: the end is always in the beginning. By countless Babylonian rivers many Zions have been remembered. Those who have migrated enact and re-enact who they are by reference to where they have come from; and for those who remain, the nation in distant lands forms an integral part of their history and their attempt to make sense of who they are. Diasporas are never straight lines, as many maps show them to be, so much as continuous loops ofmeaning. A diaspora consequently is not an event so much as a process: diasporas are always becoming. The sense of being a diaspora, therefore, is not about charting the movement of a group in the past, so much as how a group continuously seeks to invent itself. Diasporas are the stories migrant groups construct in order to endure and cohere. When defining a diaspora, size matters. There are obvious reasons for this: the larger the migrant group in a given country the more likely it is that they will build the kind of network of relationships and institutions necessary for it to retain a sense of identity. A relatively small number of white migrants to the USA, therefore, such as the Welsh, are not generally perceived to form a diaspora, whereas the Irish, by virtue of their numbers and history of long-term migra- tion to America, are so classified. However, if we see the issue of diaspora in terms of the process whereby a group seeks to endure, then the Welsh exper- ience is an important case for the study of diasporas. If a highly assimilated people such as the Welsh in America have, despite all the odds, retained and renewed a sense of group identity, then it may be that the diasporic experience is far more universal than has been generally accepted. The Welsh were amongst the earliest settlers in America and helped in no small way in the founding of the republic. Thomas Jefferson and a good many other signatories of the Declaration of Independence were of Welsh descent. Five of the six first presidents of the USA were of Welsh origins. The descen- dants of the Edwards family from Pontypridd still maintain a legal claim on the island of Manhattan. A string of American universities have Welshmen as their founding fathers: including Yale, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Brynmawr and William and Mary. The list of Welsh-Americans covers just about every aspect