The History of Cornish Miners in Latin America - with Dr. Sharron Schwartz

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio speaks to Dr. Sharron Schwartz about the History and legacy of Cornish Miners across Latin America.

To read Dr. Schwartz's work, the following books are now available online:

Mining a Shared Heritage: Mexico’s ‘Little Cornwall' (published in 2011)

The Cornish in Latin America: Cousin Jack and the New World (2016)

Dr. Schwartz's most recent book, The Great Trek of the Transport Party, Mexico (1825-26): A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph is to be published this May in conjunction with the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

Transcript

Jon Bonfiglio 0:00

Hi everyone, welcome back to Latin America Correspondent, where today I'm delighted to say that we're joined by a very special guest, Dr. Sharron Schwartz, historian, expert, and dare I say advocate for the great Cornish migrations of two centuries ago, which brought Cornish miners to Latin America. Sharron completed a PhD at the University of Exeter, exploring the migration of Cornish mine workers to Latin America and was the documentary research officer for the Cornwall and West Devon World Heritage Site bid, and is uh Leverhume Fellow in Migration Studies at the Institute of Cornish Studies. For those of you who uh would like to pursue um a lot of this fascinating history in book form, uh in Sharon's across Sharon's books, she is the author of uh Mining a Share of Heritage, Mexico's Little Cornwall, uh, and The Cornish in Latin America, Cousin Jack and the New World. Uh, and her most recent book, The Great Trek of the Transport Party, Mexico 1825-26, A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph, is to be published this May in conjunction with the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Of course, all of those are available online, and we will link to the titles in the notes on this episode. Sharron, welcome to the show. Uh, we'll get on to the histories in a minute, but it strikes me that this incredible heritage of corning mining has, to an extent, had you following in its footsteps as you now also, in studying these movements of your ancestors, now um additionally have an incredible, long-established relationship with Latin America.

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 1:32

Absolutely. Um, I have cousins uh both in Bolivia and in Chile, and incredible number of friends in Mexico, where I visit on a regular basis. Um, yeah, um, I I absolutely love Latin America. Um, I fell in love with the with Mexico and also with Chile when I first went there years and years ago, 20 odd years ago now, um, even though my Spanish isn't particularly good, I do enjoy traveling there. I particularly love the Atacama Desert and the Altiplano of Bolivia. I love the solitude, the wide open spaces. It's just an incredible place to be. Um, big, big starry skies. And it's it's also really nice to follow in the footsteps of the Cornish miners who went to Latin America in their thousands, and yet it's a story that really hadn't been picked up on until I decided to do my PhD uh 20 odd years ago now. Um it and it's really vital to understanding the whole Cornish migration phenomenon because it's the earliest migration flows outside of the British Isles, and uh many of the facets which came to characterize the Cornish migration phenomenon have their roots in Latin America. This is where the Cornish miners um basically became uh the hard rock runners par excellence, if you like. Um, and that occurred basically in the very early 19th century.

Jon Bonfiglio 3:04

I think you're totally right. I mean, I've been around these parts for a long time now, and um, and I've definitely been aware of the the the sort of the history, the legacy, the heritage of Cornish mining as it relates to industry and also football and cricket and sort of cultural um relationships, but um uh and discourse, but really there was no great detail in in evidence until you uh came along. How could it feel? Uh, I guess the being almost at the coal face at the at a point of discovery and um noting of this of this legacy of this history, which was present but really so largely unexplored.

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 3:45

Well, but you're absolutely right, Jon, and that's a very good point. When I set out to do this research, someone told me you're absolutely mad. There's not enough information out there to do a PhD on that. Well, that was a fallacy, that was completely wrong. But buried away in the Cornish newspapers with us with the names of scores and hundreds of Cornish people that in the births, marriages, and death columns and the occasional full-length article um recounting the exploits of somebody who made lots of money or done something exceptional in in Latin America, and slowly I began to see, crikey, you know, this is this is larger than people think. I mean, it's not in the same league as numbers-wise, as the sort of um migration flows to somewhere like South Australia, which obviously was incredibly Cornish. That was kind of almost like native um unexplored territory. The Cornish going to Latin America, we're going to areas which already had a mining industry as old in some cases as parts of Cornwall and have been heavily mined during the Spanish colonial period. Nor, of course, the flows to North America, see to places like the United States. But it its significance lies in the fact that, you know, it's early, it's and it's where the Cornish first encountered gold and silver deposits. Now, when they first arrived, they were all at sea with understanding the mineralogy and the mining and metallurgy of gold and silver, but they soon learnt to add those skills to the ones they already possessed in working with tin, lead, and copper. Um, and and that stood them in incredibly good stead. And they became known as well, a sort of breed of superminers. And that's where I claim the cult cousin Jack hard rock miner par excellence has its has its beginnings in the mines of Latin America, in the silver mines of Mexico, in the gold mines of Colombia, in the gold mines of Brazil. Um, and and and this then allowed the Cornish to dominate the global metalliferous mining labor market for the next century or so.

Jon Bonfiglio 5:54

Could you give us a sense of the size and the scale and the timing of these migrations across from Cornwall?

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 6:02

That's particularly difficult. I've spent it's a good question, and it's one I'm often asked. And it's it's very hard to answer purely because there are no records. And the Cornish, of course, were registered as English, and and in and of course, in across most of Latin America, the none is Los Ingleses, so just the anybody English speaking is termed that way. I've spent my career trying to disaggregate the Cornish names from those English names, and I do that by nominal record linkage. So I have a name and I have to try and tie that name back using several different records to a parish in Cornwall. So it's very difficult to um put numbers on it. We'll never know the true number because we just don't have the records. But what I will say is it's um the countries that come out really strongly for this process are Mexico, Chile, and um probably Brazil. Those are the three big ones in Latin America. There were never more than a handful of Cornish miners in Bolivia because it's uh it I mean it was just a very difficult country to work in, no British consular presence, uh incredibly primitive, locked away high up in the Andes. Um there were Cornish miners there. And in fact, I'm writing the biography of one of those men, uh Captain John Pemberthy, and he spent eight years at a mine called Huanchaca, which was at the time the largest silver mine in the world, until it was knocked off its perch by um a mine in Australia, uh Broken Hill, I believe it was. Um so you know, the history is kind of quite unknown because it's difficult to get at the material. Also, a lot of it's in Spanish. When I set out, I had to read scratchy old microfilms um in the Cornish Studies Library and Redruff to extract the stuff from the English newspapers. Very difficult to get hold of uh newspapers from Latin America. Thankfully, things have changed now, and all the Mexican newspapers are online, and they are literally a cornucopia of information. They're there in both English and Spanish. I make incredible use of those. Um, I have done for the book that's coming out in May. So, you know, gradually we're building up a picture. This takes time, but there's a lot of interest in Latin America. I run a Facebook page called Cousin Jack's World. And just recently, there's been a young man posting up photographs of his family graves in uh in Chile. His family came to Cornish family, came from the parish of Gwennet, came to work at the Canada's eel mines, and also we're in Antofagasta. I had some incredible material sent to me uh not so many months ago by a chap in Venezuela who's interested in the Aurora mines. Venezuela uh once belonged to the liberator Simon Bolivar. So again, important copper mining area and had a lot of early Cornish involvement. So, yeah, there's a lot of interest in Latin America. And slowly, slowly, the the a picture is beginning to emerge um of just how important it was in the terms of Cornish global migration, especially in the in the early 19th century.

Jon Bonfiglio 9:10

Do you get a sense? Um, because of course, with these migrations, they happened to lots of different areas, geographies, locations, and Latin America is not a small region. Um as these as these individuals arrived um across these industrial locations, do you get a sense that they um there was a they sort of stayed in touch, that they were a broader Cornish community across Latin America, or did they become sort of islands in in in in each location? I I guess I guess what I'm asking is do they is could you sort of say there is a shared ongoing history of of the Cornish in in Latin America or on at a point of arrival, does it become divergent?

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 9:54

Well, uh it it some of the areas had discrete colonies, and there were but there were very early on, there were um Cornish colonies, uh lots of Cornish people in one mine, like Gongo Soco in Brazil, or uh Morovelha, uh run by the St. John Daray Mining Company in the 1830s. There was Cobra in Cuba, which was had a discrete colony of Cornish people that didn't last after the Ten Years War in 1868 that went. But then you have like Real del Monte Pachuca, where you have the Cornish arriving in 1824, and their descendants are still there today. You know, really important. And this is a living, thriving heritage that's now Cornish Mexican. You know, they have their own flavorings in the past days. We have a fusion of Celtic and Mexican music, for example. There's even a pipe and drum band there now. Um, I took the tartan, I collected the money for the tartan from the Cornish diaspora, and we took that out last year. It was called the Great Trelawney Hug. Um, and the diaspora chipped in so the young lads and lasses there could have um Cornish tartan to make their kilts for their band. Um and in Chile it's a lot more, it's different. So it's different in different parts of Latin America. The Chilean mines, of course, are spread out. Chile's a big country, it's a big thin country. You know, you think the Norte Chico and the Norte Grande are enormously um large geographical areas. So the Cornish were in places like Copiapo, inland in some of these mines, and they didn't have access to a sort of Cornish community that you would have found, like at um Morovelio or Rea del Monte Patruca, where you would have had Cornish events such as um tea treats and Sunday school events, you would have had chapels, you would have had um Queen Victoria's birthday celebrated and various other things, and football, cricket, wrestling, that type of thing. These were miners who were spread out in into desert mines in the Atacama. Um, and I've been to those mining camps, and you know, they are remote. And you can only imagine just how difficult it would have been living there in those days. Many of the men who had been good Methodists back at home became backsliders. So, you know, they became, yeah, they they led dissolute lives, you know, gambling and fighting, knife fights and gunfights and and uh cock rest uh cock fighting and swearing and cavorting and carousing, um, which wasn't um which was frowned upon, obviously, back in Cornwall. Um, one man who was sent out, we went out to join an uncle in Chile. His father said to him before he left, remember that your God in Cornwall is your God in Chile. In other words, don't misbehave. So, yeah, it was it was different, different in various parts of Latin America. We're talking about an enormous area, aren't we? You know, it's a big geographical area, different climatic conditions. I mean, those desert mining camps, um, I've been to some of the cemeteries there, and it breaks your heart to see just how ramshackle they are. And some of these men, they just vanished in Latin America. They never came home. And when you think that um in 1891 a third-class ticket home would have cost in the region of 18 pounds, that was a lot of money. So a lot of these men, they didn't ever come home. They stayed out. There's some of them married local girls and they have families there today. So there are there are lots of people of Cornish descent in Chile. Some of them might not know it. Um, but there's a Trewela school, for example, in Santiago, and um, that's an interesting story in itself, how it came to be called that and the migration to Chile of that particular family. And there are lots of stories like that. But the big place was Mexico. You know, it has everything. It's uh it's called Mexico's Little Cornwall for good reason. It has the engine houses and the beautiful relic mining landscape. Many of the engine houses have been restored, they're turned into museums. We have the pastes, your paste festival, an enormous multipeso industry there now. Um, we have chapels, we have a living, thriving heritage and one of, well, the best expatriate cemetery in the Latin Americas, the English cemetery above Real del Monte, which is um incredible. It's beautifully looked after. So, yes, it's it's different across across the Latin Americas. But as with the internet and obviously with more access to people talking to each other, I'm always keen to do this with the materials that I share online. I want people to be put in contact with each other. I want them to reach out and discover their Cornish heritage, and that's happening.

Jon Bonfiglio 14:38

Interesting what you say about these how these austere mining outposts drive certain behaviors. Uh kind of to paraphrase what happens at your 19th century remote mining outpost stays at your 19th century remote mining outpost. And I guess it's no surprise that a lot of these individuals would would would stay. Um the Real del Monte Panteon, the the graveyard, uh the English graveyard, the Panteon list there. Um am I right in saying that all the graves face back towards Cornwall?

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 15:08

No, that's a fallacy. In fact, there's a lot of fallacies about the the cemetery. Um, I've done quite a lot of research on that in um recently in in connection with uh with my my recent, like my latest book. Um the cemetery uh was set up in 1825. Um Great Britain, of course, uh was the first nation to recognize Mexican independence, the first European power to do so. Um and part of the condition of that was that the Mexicans would agree to, this special relationship would agree to recognize the rights of sepulchre for Protestants. Now, outside of Mexico City, Real del Monte had one of the most you know significant concentrations of Protestants. Um, so they had to have someone to bury them, and people were dying there from the from the get-go. Um, so the cemetery was set up then. Um, there's a there's there there have been lots of tall stories about some of the people buried in the cemetery, and there's been pushback against that in recent years, shall we say. But uh, I have my own family buried there. Um, and I whenever I go there, um I always lay flowers. And the family, the Hernandez family, who have looked after the cemetery um for several decades now, have done a magnificent job. It's a credit to the whole community. Um the the gentleman who was the former caretaker um was called Don Chencho, and he received the um MBE from her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth um for the you know the role that he'd taken and religiously carried out um of maintaining, protecting and promoting the British cemetery. His daughter Carmen, um, she now uh runs the cemetery and she's taken on her father's role. So yeah, it's a it's a very touching uh site to visit. And I would encourage anybody um that goes to Real del Monte to pay a visit to the cemetery.

Jon Bonfiglio 17:07

Sharon, given um Cornish uh, I mean, I guess geography, where it is uh in southwest of England, the United Kingdom, um, a sort of a remote uh uh peninsula region, um historically difficult to access, and the fact that Cornish identity, I think it's it's uncontroversial to say, is is distinct to um a lot of other identities or English identity and uh measures itself in relation to at least to some extent to broader notion of Englishness. Um was there a sense in which Cornish identity found a home in Latin America, found synergies in in Latin America when it when it arrived?

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 17:51

Well, first, I don't agree with uh with the statement that Cornwall is peripheral. No, it was never peripheral in the 19th century or before. It looked outwards to the Atlantic. Cornwall is a peninsula. Interesting, it looked outward to the Atlantic. Falmouth was the home of the packet steamships or the packet sailing ships before they went into steam. Um it was Falmouth for orders for the Royal Navy. So the news arrived in Falmouth before it ever arrived in London. London was peripheral, not Falmouth, not Cornwall. So Cornwall, the Cornish people have always looked outwards to a wider world. And I suppose there's a culture of mobility in Cornwall. Um lots of Cornish people were mariners, and Cornish people certainly, I mean, back in the Bronze Age, were trading, they had trade links that went right across uh right across Europe into the Middle East. So, no, we've never been peripheral. We're only peripheral from a from an English viewpoint. And another thing, the Cornish are not English. We are a separate ethnicity, and that's been recognized by the Council of Europe. We have our own language, Kenwick, which is becoming ever more popular, and there is currently a uh um a movement for us to be recognized as the fifth nation within the modern United Kingdom.

Jon Bonfiglio 19:06

Yeah, that's really interesting. Um your um your emphasis on that sort of on the um a shifting away from what would be, I guess, a an external perspective of Cornwall, but a centering of Cornwall around an international um international perspective and especially in terms of sort of uh cultural links and trade routes which which were forerunners or or it were well in advance of um, as you say, of of uh the the perspective of London at the uh at the centre of things. Notwithstanding, um I mean uh there was of course you mentioned South Australia before, um uh and this this movement towards Latin America. Beyond was would you say that there was um I guess culturally other things that beyond the industry, beyond the mining that that sort of made Cornish miners become so entrenched in a history of Latin America ?

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 20:22

The problem I have with with with trying to educate people in Latin America is that they lump the Cornish in with Cornwall's often talked about as part of England, but it's not, you know. Um, as somebody who's passionate about my ethnicity and about Cornwall, I don't see myself as English. I don't have a I I'm just don't have any English blood. I'm 90 odd percent Cornish. Um and and it's very difficult to get the Latin Americans, and I mean our friends in Mexico get it now. Um and it's been it, but it's been you know, it's been a long haul to actually get them to understand that the Cornish are not English, um, that they are different, they're a different ethnicity. And I guess that in other parts of Latin America, that sentiment still sort of is there, and and that's something that that we as a nation need to work hard as we draw more of our cousins overseas into our diaspora, that um that they will find a home, a Cornish home, um, and that they will understand that um that they that they are a different ethnic, a separate ethnicity. But it has to be said with in fairness, in the 19th century, the Cornish did actually refer to themselves as Englishmen, but they meant that more in the respect of British, British and English were interchangeable. So to say I'm an Englisher or a Britisher was one and the same. So we do have to, you know, we do have to be careful when we're looking back in the past not to let 21st century sentiment cloud our judgment on what people were actually meaning in the 19th century. But um there is there is a gradual acceptance, and certainly Mexico's to the fore in that. Um as I said, uh um you know, there's there's an acknowledgement that uh that Cornwall's not part of England, it's part of Britain, it's Southwest Britain, but it's not southwest England. And um, you know, they're embracing the Celtic uh um heritage as well. And there's now a pipe and drum band in uh in Mexico that wears the Cornish tartan. And um, in order for that to happen, the the diaspora, you know, linked arms and and basically gave money to enable those young men and women to have kilts in the Cornish tartan so that they can promote our heritage and our our separateness. The Cornish have always enjoyed their separateness, um, one and all, if you like. Um, the persistence of difference has always been there in Cornwall. And it's not, it's never been suppressed.

Jon Bonfiglio 22:42

When I introduced you, Sharron, I um mentioned that you were also to an extent, as well as being a historian and an advocate. And it it definitely comes across that part of your your role or your your your purpose is is a sort of a redressing and making accurate of the history and the notions. Almost um, I think with a lot of these things, uh you have to very clearly define um notions uh and make accurate concepts before you then be able to tell stories.

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 23:13

Absolutely. You you read the history and you allow the history to speak. You know, I don't invent history, I present what's there, um, what's written, and I try to interpret that. But um I'm certainly, you know, I'm certainly aware that I that um that of my Cornish roots and my Cornish identity. And it's cool to be Cornish, it really is. It's it's an identity that's that's becoming ever more known. The Cornish language is growing in popularity. They run free classes in Cornwall so that people will have a chance to to sample speaking Cornish with each other. It's fantastic. Very little funding, but immense, you know, immense interest in the language. Um, I was only listening earlier today to Gweno, um, a wonderful singer who's bilingual in Cornish and Welsh. She did more for the Cornish language than anyone. You know, she's she made it cool to be Cornish, cool to speak Cornish. It's fantastic. It's a good time to be Cornish, and I'm I'm very sanguine about our future as a nation. I believe that we will get ever more recognition and diversity is strength. We keep being told that. Well, it really is. And you know, we're a part of modern Britain, and we we want to step into the limelight as a as a young, proud nation. We're a great little nation, the Cornish. I'm, you know, you can tell I'm very proud to be Cornish, definitely.

Jon Bonfiglio 24:39

It is cool to be Cornish. I think that's a very uncontroversial statement. Sharon, thank you so much uh for your time. That's Dr. Sharron Schwartz joining us um today. And just to reiterate, we'll be linking to Sharron's uh amazing books in the notes to to the podcast. Sharron, I hope that um if it's okay with you, obviously next time you're over this way, but as any stories emerge, or maybe when your book um comes out in May as well, maybe we can pick up the the conversation and talk again.

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 25:10

Absolutely, Jon. I'll see you at the Paste Festival in Real del Monte this October. In October. See you there.

Jon Bonfiglio 25:17

Sharon. Thank you so much.

Dr. Sharron Schwartz 25:18

Bye.