Scots in South America

[Nick the DSM]

I've been searching for documents or articles on Scottish or even British/Irish immigration to South America.

I've found a few, but nothing substantial.

I know there's a huge population in Chile and Argentina, especially in the ports and the Patagonia regions, so there has to be something.

[Phil]

Lots of Welsh people in Argentina. Don't know about Scots. They went to Panama a while ago but things didn't work out too well for them ( see the Darien Expedition).

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

We've got quite a few M'Millans in South America. My guess is that most stuff written about the Scots in South America is probably in Spanish...

[Nick the DSM]

We've got quite a few M'Millans in South America. My guess is that most stuff written about the Scots in South America is probably in Spanish...

Thankfully, I'm good at spanish and I got a Chilean mother to help me out.

[AFS1970]

I read about Confederates leaving the southern U.S.A. for South America after the war, and there still being a fairly large population of their descendants there. Since there was quite allot of Celtic population in that region, that might explain it.

[Lyle1]

I can not vouch for the information found on any of these sites which I found by doing a quick and dirty search, but at the very least some of them contain citations that might be reliable. Also, try Google Books.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/scotsinargpat/colonist.htm (this one is interesting, and there are links to other websites)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottis...f_the_Americas

http://www.newworldcelts.org/index.p...d=18&Itemid=27

http://www.freesurnamesearch.com/search/america.html

[M. A. C. Newsome]

My Argentinian priest attests to the fact that there are lots of Argentinians of Scottish descent. We were talking about it one day and he rattled off a list of Scottish surnames he recalled from growing up.

[B R Gordon]

There are seven or eight pipe bands in South America. I know that that does not correlate directly to the number of Scots, but it does show that the influence is there.

[Nick the DSM]

I know there's a large amount of descendants, especially being one of them, so I've gained interest in finding more about them.

Chile has a couple pipe bands and even a St. Andrew's Society.

The ties between Great Britain and Chile have been strong since the Independence war from Spain, Bernando O' Higgins and Thomas Cochrane come to mind.

[Cygnus]

The Wikipedia Brasil article on immigration to Brazil states that most Scots (among others) came to South America in the first part of the 20th Century as a result of the widespread and unfortunate "whitening movement" of the time. Apparently various South American countries chose to implement policies that made immigration very attractive to Western Europeans at that time. Prior to this, it seems that British immigration to South America was a bit of a rarity.

My Portuguese is a bit rusty, but if you encounter an article that you'd like translated (or to get the gist of), I'm at your service.