In July 2025, Wrexham AFC released details of the club’s third kit for the upcoming season. The design uses light blue and white horizontal stripes as its main motif. At a glance, the kit appears identical to an Argentinian rugby or football strip. Such were Wrexham’s intentions. The club’s kit honours the history of a largely overlooked part of Welsh, British and world history. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Welsh settlers began migrating to Argentinian Patagonia.
This settlement came to be known as y Wladfa and over 70,000 Welsh-Patagonians still call Argentina home today.
These people and their history were the guiding light for Wrexham’s kit. Although the fan response was overwhelmingly positive, there were some notable critical voices. Some fans rejected the commercial use of y Wladfa (the kit was revealed in a promotional video with new club sponsor United Airlines). For others, the use of the colour of blue went against Wrexham’s traditional club palette of red and black. However, a certain few took issue with the positive Argentinian narrative – a supposedly tasteless gesture in light of the tragedy of the Falklands War.
The real tragedy is far more complex.
Unpicking the story of y Wladfa reveals the constructed nature of political narratives on the international stage. For too long, Argentinian-British relations have been understood in the context of the Falklands. With Milei’s increasingly right-wing and nationalist dialogue, it is now more vital than ever to refresh the relationship between London and Buenos Aires. Y Wladfa can make that possible.
The roots of y Wladfa extend deep into the bedrock of Welsh history.
Between 1277 and 1283, Edward I achieved a total annexation of Welsh territory. Land was confiscated from Welsh lords and divided up between English barons and the Crown. Welsh peasants were evicted in forced resettlements. Fortified towns like Flint and Aberystwyth were raised to deter any would-be rebels from challenging English supremacy. By 1542, Wales was completely integrated into the legal and administrative systems of England.
Nevertheless, against all the odds, the Welsh language persisted.
In the years that followed, as Britain came to establish the largest empire in the history of the world, the Welsh understood that the imperial gaze would soon be focussed inward. In the mid-nineteenth century, their fears were eventually vindicated. In 1847, the British government published the ‘Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales’. A flagrant attempt to curb the use of the Welsh language by excluding it from public education, the Report presented its aim of severing the Welsh from their native tongue as a civilizing crusade.
In his 2017 work Why Wales Never Was, Simon Brooks argues that the Report of 1847 was responsible for the failure of Welsh nationalism to bring about an independent, Welsh-speaking Wales. The Report brought about an implementation of a national non-Welsh curriculum. When modern Welsh nationalism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, Welsh had been supplanted by English as the language of the political establishment. English soon became the language of economic and social mobility, of industrialization and of the cosmopolitan world. As a result, despite plateauing in recent decades, the number of Welsh speakers has declined sharply since the mid-nineteenth century. Effectively everyone spoke Welsh in Wales in 1850. 170 years on, and only around 1 in 6 Welsh people can speak the language.
While Brooks’ argument holds water, it must be remembered that languages are not only socio-political phenomena. The question of cultural attitudes must also be addressed. Following 1847, it appears that Welsh became a language of loss, a language understood in terms of its threatened status. In a world where translation means forced assimilation and cultural extermination, a language must cocoon itself for its own protection.
Today, Welsh remains awash with ‘untranslatable’ terms for the non-native speaker. Eisteddfod. Hywl. Cynefin.
It is therefore fitting that (perhaps) the hardest Welsh word to translate into English speaks of this threat of loss. Often compared to the German Sehnsucht or the Portuguese saudade, the Welsh term hiraeth describes a mélange of nostalgia, wistfulness and yearning. The term describes an almost paradoxical blend of homesickness and an escapist longing for otherness – a desire to travel to a past that you never had or a home that you never knew.
In truth, hiraeth is more than a Welsh word. It is perhaps the Welsh word – the language distilled into a single unit. In the Welsh cultural consciousness, the word has come to signify a desire for a Wales that never was. A desire for a Wales without the events of 1277, 1542 and 1847. A desire perhaps for a Wales that never could have been.
On May 28th, 1865, hiraeth took physical form.
On that day, the Mimosa, a ship carrying 153 Welsh settlers, departed Liverpool. Two months later, she made landfall on the Argentinian coast, just a little north of where the Chubut River meets the ocean. Here, the settlers established Porth Madryn, naming the city after a castle in North Wales owned by one of their party. Looking inland from the city, there would have been little to meet their eye save the vast Patagonian Steppe. This was the genesis of y Wladfa.
The settlement was the brainchild of Michael D. Jones, a clergyman with a penchant for nationalist politics. In the early 1850s, Jones had spent time among the Welsh emigrant communities in Ohio and witnessed how quickly these people had lost their cultural heritage. Jones’ desire to create a ‘Wales beyond the seas’ was kindled by his particular mythologization of Welshness. His essay outlining his vision for an overseas settlement begins: ‘Er yr oesoedd boreauf, y mae’r Cymry wedi hynodi en hunain fel ymfudwyr’(‘Since the early ages, the Welsh have distinguished themselves as emigrants’).
This portrayal of the Welsh as a fundamentally nomadic people is central to Jones’ rhetoric. In order to bolster support for the founding of y Wladfa, Jones invoked the tale of his compatriots’ Celtic ancestors. In his essay, Jones underlines how the Celts of the Iron Age migrated across Europe from the banks of the Black Sea to the far Western reaches of the British Isles. For Jones, the Welsh had to maintain this tradition and push ever westward.
The Mimosa was carrying much more cargo than its 153 passengers. Its journey was conceived from a collective sense of hiraeth. The dream of a Welsh land abroad encapsulated its delicate enigma. Y Wladfa promised both an opportunity of a new space in which Welsh could flourish away from the growing influence of English and a way of reflecting more deeply on the old narratives of loss and oppression. In separating themselves off from Wales, these settlers were able to reclaim the programme of linguistic and cultural separation that the English had been imposing on the Welsh for centuries. This was a new kind of Welshness, but it played the same old tune. The grass is always greener on the other side. And from the streets of Porth Madryn, that Welsh grass would not just appear greener. But impossibly evergreen.
No one quite knows for certain why y Wladfa did not become the permanent Welsh outpost that Jones envisioned. The community faced logistical difficulties when they realized that the land that wanted to farm was little more than desert. Nevertheless, the settlers founded towns across the Chubut Valley. Yet the call of the evergreen Wales seems to have been too much. Between 1870 and 1914, almost half of the Welsh-Patagonians population returned home.
At the outbreak of the Falklands War, Plaid Cymru objected to the deployment of Welsh troops on the basis that they could be required to fight Welsh-Patagonian troops. These soldiers likely shared grandparents and great-grandparents from the same communities on either side of the Atlantic. The Welsh Guards would bear the highest rate of casualties of any British unit in the war.
The beautiful untranslatable nature of hiraeth lies in its mutability. The object of its desire changes with each beholder. By its very nature, it invites a plurality of narratives. Some may follow it to the shores of South America. Some carry it back to Europe. Others do not. These narratives transcend natural and political boundaries, cross borders and traverse seas. Crucially, it would seem, at least on the evidence of Welsh history, that hiraeth can never be quenched. It is a story that does not present itself as written fact but rather something to be constantly rewritten.
Remembering y Wladfa ensures that the possibility of different kind of relationship between Britain and Argentina remains open and that the Falklands War is not the last page of that story. Y Wladfa is another one of those Welsh ‘untranslatables’. The name literally means ‘The Colony’. However, to use that term in English in the Argentinian context calls 1982 and not 1865 to mind. Meanings can change. We must use y Wladfa to do so.
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