The Correspondence of Asturian Emigrants at the Turn of the Century: The Case of José Moldes (c. 1860–1921)

Abstract

The private letter, one of the most representative expressions of mass literacy, was the product of improved postal services and epistolary manuals. In the nineteenth century, which also witnessed the new phenomenon of mass emigration, letter writing became one of the most common practices. This article discusses the correspondence of José Moldes, an Asturian who left Spain for Puerto Rico at the age of fourteen and settled shortly afterwards in Chile. He died in his native Asturias at the age of sixty-one. Throughout these fifty or so years, José wrote letters to keep in contact with members of his family, to control them when he became head of the household or to manage his businesses and investments. About 120 of his letters survived in the Moldes-Barreras family archive, through which we can reconstruct his experiences. The essential characteristics of this epistolary corpus emerge from an analysis of its material and graphic aspects, suggesting the profound influence of immigration on personal writing.

Notes

Notes

This article, translated from the Spanish by Professor Martyn Lyons (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia), is based on a paper presented in the workshop on “Ordinary Writings and Scribal Culture: The History of Writing in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” at the 11th International Conference of ISSEI on “Language and the Scientific Imagination,” University of Helsinki, Finland, 28 July–2 August 2008. It also forms part of the Research Project “Five Centuries of Letters: Private Writing and Epistolary Communication in Spain during the Modern and Contemporary Age” (HAR2008-00874/HIST), funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain, and directed by Professor Antonio Castillo Gómez.

1. José Moldes to his mother Adela (Taramundi), 8 April 1874, Museo del Pueblo de Asturias (MPA), Moldes-Barreras Collection, A10/2–1.

2. Juaco López Álvarez, “Memorias Asturianas: El viaje a América del emigrante asturiano Pedro Fernández Fernández en 1899,” Astura 9 (1993): 125–26.

3. Pedro Gómez, La emigración a América y otras emigraciones (Llanes 1830–1950), (Llanes: El Oriente de Asturias - Temas Llanes no.96, 2000), 34–35, 106–10.

4. Gómez, La emigración a América, 96–97.

5. Jesús María Risquez Alfonzo and Melchor Ordóñez, Cartilla del emigrante, (Madrid: Imprenta de los hijos de M.G. Hernández, 1910), 29.

6. Indianos de maleta al agua or americanos de pote refer derogatorily to those who returned penniless from their stay in the Americas, the allusions to the suitcase and the pot placing them among the most destitute.

7. Ceferino Rodríguez (Media Luna, Cuba) to Manuel Suárez (Cancienes), 26 January 1926, MPA, Suárez Roza Collection, A1/17–2.

8. Mercedes Vilanova Ribas and Xavier Moreno Juliá, Atlas de la evolución del analfabetismo en España de 1887 a 1981 (Madrid: Centro de Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, CIDE, 1992), 62.

9. Vilanova and Moreno, Atlas de la evolución del analfabetismo, 52.

10. Alfonso Camín, Entre manzanos. Niñez por duros caminos (Gijón: Ayuntamiento de Gijón, 1978), 289.

11. Juaco López Alvarez, “Cartas desde América. La emigración de asturianos a través de la correspondencia, 1864–1925,” Revista de Dialectología y tradiciones populares LV.1 (2000): 119.

12. Verónica Sierra Blas, “‘Puentes de papel’: Apuntes sobre las escrituras de la emigración,” Horizontes Antropológicos, special issue on “Cultura escrita e práticas de lectura,” 22 (2004): 129.

13. Cosme Cuenca, Maria Fernanda Fernández, and Jorge Hevia, Escuelas de indianos y emigrantes, (Gijón: Trea, 2003), 21.

14. José Ignacio Gracia Noriega, Indianos del Oriente de Asturias (Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones del Principado de Asturias para la Fundación ‘Archivo de Indianos’, 1987), 63.

15. Maria Cruz Morales Saro and Moisés Llordén Miñambres, eds., Arte, cultura y sociedad en la emigración española a América (Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo, 1992), 24.

16. Centro Asturiano de La Habana. Sección de Inmigración. Cartilla para los socios (Havana: Pérez Sierra, 1925).

17. Cosme Cuenca, Maria Fernanda Fernández, and Jorge Hevia, Escuelas de indianos y emigrantes (Gijón: Trea, 2003), 31.

18. An example of this can be found in Celestino Alvarez, Los boalenses. Esbozos de su obra cultural desde Cuba (Habana: ‘El Siglo XX’ de la Sociedad Editorial Cuba Contemporánea, 1919), 73–74. The author was president of the Educational Society for the natives of Boal municipality.

19. See, for example, the college of La Arquera, in the south of Llanes, associated with Manuel Cué Fernández, who endowed it with the means to train future emigrants, with special emphasis on handwriting and accounting. See Gracia Noriega, Indianos del Oriente de Asturias, 63.

20. Examples of this kind of institution exist in Colunga, Columbres, Taramundi and Llanes.

21. Cuenca, Fernández, and Hevia, Escuelas de indianos y emigrantes, 20.

22. A few images of different educational centres built under emigrant auspices can be found in Cuenca, Fernández, and Hevia, Escuelas de indianos y enmigrantes. Other examples, in this case from the province of Pontevedra, can be found in Xosé M. Malheiro Gutiérrez, Herdanza da emigración ultramarina. Catálogo fotográfico da arquitectura escolar indiana na provincia de Pontevedra (Pontevedra: Diputación Provincial de Pontevedra, 2005).

23. Information about the state of the Moldes-Barreras collection has been kindly provided by Juaco Lopez Alvarez, MPA director.

24. Cécile Dauphin, “Les correspondances comme objet historique: un travail sur les limites,, Sociétes & Représentations, special issue on ‘Histoire et archives de soi’ 13 (2002): 47.

25. Daniel Fabre, “Vivre, écrire, archiver,” Sociétes & Représentations 13 (2002): 24.

26. José Moldes to his brother Florentino, 9 January 1920, MPA, Moldes-Barreras Collection, A10/4–33.2.

27. For more on the common mistakes of inexpert writers, see Rita Marquilhas, A Faculdade das Letras. Lectura e escrita em Portugal no séc. XVII (Lisboa: Impresa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2000), 237–45.

28. Marquilhas, A Faculdade das Letras, 245.

29. Béatrice Fraenkel, “La firma contra la corrupción de lo escrito,” in Cultura, p ensamiento, escritura, ed. Jean Bottéro et al. (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1995), 77–95.

30. Cécile Dauphin; Pierrette Lebrun-Pézerat, and Daniel Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres. Une correspondance familiale au XIXe siècle (París: Éditions Albin Michel, 1995), 102.

31. On the formal learning of letter-writing in school, see Verónica Sierra Blas, “Lacarta en la escuela. Los manuales epistolares para niños en la España contemporánea,” in Etnohistoria de la escuela. Actas del XII Coloquio Nacional de Historia de la Educación (Burgos: Universidad de Burgos-Sociedad Española de Historia de la Educación, 2003), 723–39; and Verónica Sierra Blas y Pablo Colotta, “De la escuela a la familia: escrituras efímeras a principios del siglo XX,” in La infancia en la Historia: espacios y representaciones. Actas del XIII Coloquio Nacional de la Sociedad Española de Historia de la Educación, ed. Paulí Dávila and Luis María Naya Garmendia (San Sebastián: Universidad del País Vasco, 2005), 482–94.

32. Verónica Sierra indicates how readers of epistolary manuals needed some basic reading and writing skills in order to make use of them. Nevertheless, there were wide discrepancies in their levels of reading comprehension and graphic competence. Verónica Sierra Blas, Aprender a escribir cartas. Los manuales epistolares en la España contemporánea (1927−1945) (Gijón: Trea, 2003), 97. There are many examples of emigrants’′ letters in the manuals: “De un hijo a su padre participando su feliz llegada a América,” in Carmen de Burgos Seguí, Nuevos modelos de cartas (Barcelona: Ramón Sopena, 1907), 133–34; or four models called– “Del hijo al dejar la patria,” “Del mismo, anunciando su llegada,” “Del mismo, anunciando el regreso a la patria,” and “De un hijo que emigra, a su madre,” in Agustín Chaseur Millares, Cómo deben escribir sus cartas los hombres (Barcelona: Editorial B. Bauzá, 1929), 100–117.

33. José Moldes (Iquique) to his parents (Asturias), MPA, Moldes-Barreras Collection, A10/2–8.

34. José Moldes to his brother Florentino, 11 March 1903, A10/2–13, MPA, Moldes-Barreras collection. A similar case can be found in the Navieras brothers’ correspondence. Eduardo, emigrant in Argentina, an assiduous reader of newspapers, sent Argentine newspapers and cuttings to his brother Emilio, living in Galicia, to keep him informed about the country where he was living. See Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas y Raúl Soutelo: As cartas do destino. Unha familia galega entre dous mundos, 1919–1971 (Vigo: Editorial Galaxia, 2005), 105.

35. Correspondence tries to preserve family roles as if physical distance did not exist, reconstituting roles and hierarchies from afar. Antonio Gibelli and Fabio Caffarena, “Le lettere degli emigranti,” in Storia dell′emigrazione italiana, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina de Clementi, and Emilio Franzina (Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2001), vol. 1, 565.

36. This behaviour can be seen in the case of the Pardo family analyzed by Francisco Quirós Linares, “Cuarenta años de cartas entre Cuba y Pravia, 1909–1947,” Astura 9 (1993): 46–47.

37. Danilo Lercari, “La “patria” e la “Merica”. Epistolari di emigrante liguri,” in Storie di gente comune nell′Archivio Ligure Della Scrittura Popolare, ed. PieroConti, GiulianaFranchini, and AntonioGibelli (Génova: Editrice Impressioni Grafiche, 2002), 73.

38. José Moldes (Montreux) to his brother Florentino (location unknown), MPA, Moldes-Barreras Collection, A10/5–8.

39. EnriqueMolina Nadal, Vocabulario argentino español y español argentino. Contiene 2412 palabras, frases o modismos…é indispensable para los emigrantes españoles á aquella república (Madrid: Imprenta de Antonio Marzo, 1912).

40. This is the case of Italian emigrants in Latin America. As Gibelli and Caffarena have indicated, a mixture of Italian and Spanish sometimes develops, symptomatic of the emigrant's level of integration in his host society. Cf. Gibelli and Caffarena, “Le lettere degli emigranti,” 572–73. Another example of this mixture is analyzed by Claudia Caputo in her unpublished study of German emigration to the United States: Claudia Caputo, Epistolari di emigrante tedeschi in America: Il centro de richerche di Bochum (Faculty of Foreign Language and Literature, University of Genoa, 1996/97), 43–48.

41. Marquilhas, A Faculdade das Letras, 239–40.

42. El arte de escribir cartas (Madrid: José Yagües Sanz, 1917), 58–59.