In contrast to the scholarship on migration to North America, the Nordic migration to Latin America remains an understudied topic. In our research we aspire to write new histories about Nordic migration and its relation colonialism by looking at the presence of Swedish migrants who became settlers in the border regions between Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia as part of settler colonial processes related to the dispossession of Indigenous land. In this paper we will discuss the gendered aspects of the entangled processes of colonial settlement and Indigenous dispossession in the region. We will examine how gender affected the subjective experience of settlement through the comparison of two different cases in northeastern Argentina. The first case is that of Swedish migrants mainly travelling in families who became settler colonists in Misiones, bordering Brazil. The second case is that of Swedish male migrants who travelled alone and settled as colonizers in Chaco, bordering Bolivia. Our discussion focuses on the construction of gender roles and the notions of masculinity and femininity and how these affected labor divisions, social organization, narratives and self-conceptions in the different cases. Our empiric material comes from both public and private archives and collections located in Sweden and in Argentina which contain all types of documents related to the Swedish migration and settlement in the border regions between 1903-1939; manuscripts, maps, recorded interviews, correspondence, newspaper articles, photographs and diaries.

This paper draws on a project funded by the Swedish Research Council titled “New Sweden Texas: Swedish Settlers and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Texas.” It seeks to tell a cultural history of nineteenth-century Swedish-Texans that understands their inhabitation of Texas land as a form of settler colonialism intimately intertwined with the enslavement of African-descended peoples. This paper will argue that S. M. Swenson’s letters to his lawyer housed in the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin are written in the generic tradition of what Jennifer Greeson terms “plantation literature” which originated in the late sixteenth-century to attract potential investors and settlers to English colonial projects in North America. These letters and travel narratives explained and justified plantation projects characterized by dispossession of Indigenous land and enslavement of African people. These projects preceded, necessitated, and instigated an Enlightenment discourse of individual property rights and racial difference. In my paper, Swenson’s transformation from the son of Swedish farmers to the owner of Texas plantations worked by enslaved Africans on land expropriated from Indigenous peoples serves as a case study for understanding how dispossession and enslavement come together in the plantation and through it fashion Swedish-Texan white male identity.

About 20 percent of the 1,3 million Swedish citizens who emigrated to the United States during the great Swedish emigration period of 1850-1930 returned to Sweden. Sweden is often nostalgically described as old fashioned and slow-moving by returnees, but at the same time changed because the close-knit communities they left behind seem to have been replaced by an individualistic society. The Swedish perception of the return migrants was double. On the one hand they were admired for their fancy clothes and cars and other examples of material wealth, and on the other they were looked down upon for thinking they were better than the people who stayed behind. The women who came back often expressed a sense of exclusion in the Swedish society and regretted not staying in the United States. This paper digs deeper into the creation of a new type of identity, a fleeting one without clear national roots. An identity that was created through the movement between Sweden and the United States in the early 20th century. The female migrants could never loose their Swedishness in the US or their American identity in Sweden, leaving them trapped in a borderland between the two countries. A possibility for some and a curse for others. With the help of interviews with return migrants this paper will shed more light on this unique identity and the consequences it had for female returnees.

After Swedish journalist Vilhelm Moberg's emigrant novels The Emigrants, The Immigrants, The Settlers, and The Last Letter Home were published in the 1950s, they were quickly canonized as both the literary epic of the Swedish people and true history of the great Swedish emigration to the United States. Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell's strong film adaptations of the books in the 70s, starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow, both strengthened the epic's position in Sweden and became an important experience for Swedish descendants in the US who wanted to share in the history of their ancestors. Since Moberg's conscientiousness as a researcher is well established, the credibility of the books has mostly not been questioned, even though everyone knows well that Karl-Oskar, Kristina and Robert are fictional characters. But the novels also interpret significant events in the Indigenous history of the United States. The history of the Swedes' voluntary migration and settlement is forever linked with the history of the forced migration, attempted annihilation, and exile of Indigenous people. Moberg believed that their story was important to include in his novels—but why, and how? What sources did he use, when Indigenous perspectives were not included in history books published at the time of his research? And why was it then – and still today – so important to also include the voices and perspectives of Indigenous peoples in novels that are meant to narrate a Swedish migration epic? Original archival research forms the basis of this paper.