There is a small rural town in the Province of Buenos Aires called Duggan. I know this not because I live in Argentina, but because a reel showed up on my Instagram feed highlighting the town. I live more than 6,000km away in Bogotá, Colombia. But I have a small history with the name Duggan.
The pictures and short videos on Instagram were captivating. In front of typical single-storey Argentine vernacular homes, rich orange-toned autumn leaves covered the footpaths of Duggan’s few streets. Duggan is now, clearly, a place that time has forgotten.
The town is named after the Duggans – Michael, Thomas and Daniel – who hailed from Ballymahon, Co Longford. The brothers left post-Famine Ireland and arrived in Argentina in the mid-1800s. This was a journey taken by tens of thousands of Irish at the time, seeking opportunities in sheep-farming and ranching on the Pampas. As a result, Argentina now has the largest population of Irish descendants outside the English-speaking world (some half a million).
From humble beginnings, the Duggans became wealthy cattle ranchers, with an estate, it is said, the size of Munster.
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But the rural village of Duggan today shows little of this wealthy heyday. Grass grows between the abandoned train tracks outside Estacion Duggan. Duggan, Argentina, is now a supremely quiet place, lost to the world at large, just as Ballymahon was when the brothers left it for foreign shores a long time ago.
There are, of course, lessons here. Time is greater than any of us. The tentacles of Irish emigration reach far beyond what we know. An Irish name alone can’t help a small town in Argentina escape the vicissitudes of time. Duggan, Argentina, is today just another desolate town in the province of Buenos Aires.
To paraphrase Andy Warhol, any place or every place can be famous for 15 minutes. Duggan, Argentina had its 15 minutes of fame well over a century ago. Yet, thanks to the emotive and evocative images of that village’s footprint captured by a certain @clickbuenosaires on Instagram, Duggan grabbed my attention.
My Irish Duggan connection is to Montiagh (An Móinteach) in Claregalway, Co Galway. I was aged about seven when my mother sent me to stay there with her family for a week or so. Those relatives were Duggans.
I don’t recall ever having met them before, so they were new to me. Yet, I settled in easily, and one morning in front of their remote rural home, I learned to ride a bicycle. Like all great achievements in life, it is remembered forever. I made that experience the central focus of a children’s story I later wrote called The Mysterious Imagination of Paddy Lannen.
Some of what I now know of those Móinteach Duggans comes to me from the recently released archives of the 1926 census. My mother’s much older sister, Catherine, married a Duggan from Móinteach, and at the time of that census, she was recorded as Catherine Duggan (32). It is noted that she was then a widow and mother of three.
At the time, my mother, according to that same census, was 13. There was a 19-year difference between her and Catherine. When I was young, I thought Catherine was my grandmother – she was so much older than my mother that my young mind couldn’t encompass them as sisters. It didn’t help, in my mind, that Catherine always wore black. I thought an older woman wearing black meant “grandmother”.
I imagine that the cousins I stayed with in Móinteach in the 1950s were the children of one of Catherine’s children.
Much later in life again, my mother amazed me by telling me that right around 1926, she often had to go by boat from her village of Clonboo to Móinteach. The trip required access somewhere on Lough Corrib and then along the river Clare. It was a long way to go to clean houses. Then, there was also the return journey in the evening.
It’s hardly surprising at all therefore that when, in Upstate New York, many years later, I asked my mother whether she would like to live in the country again, she immediately answered, “Never! I spent long enough there.”
All the great markers in life – we never forget them. My mother’s 15 minutes in Móinteach, Co Galway, were enough.
Duggans were part of why she never wanted to live in the country again. They are also part of why I feel more comfortable in the country than in any urban environment. With the Duggans in Móinteach, I was surrounded by the security and love that enabled me to ride my first bicycle.
In some way, It might explain why Duggan, Argentina, is now on my bucket list.
Christopher Burke is from Galway city. He left Ireland in 1971 and lives in Bogotá, Colombia.
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