© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/978900430739�_008 301961 chapter 7 Male Narratives from the Margins of the Country of Immigrants: Two Norwegians in Argentina in the 1920s María Bjerg This chapter analyzes the personal narratives of two Norwegian immigrants who arrived in Argentina at the end of the 1920s, namely, the diaries of Ole Viborg Høiby and of his friend and fellow traveler, Ottar Enger, who also wrote a series of twenty-six letters addressed to his parents.1 At the beginning of their stay, the authors of those narratives worked for over half a year as hired labor- ers on a farm in the west of Buenos Aires province, and later they set out on a long journey to the Chaco salteño, a wooded area in Salta province in the far north of the country, where they found employment at the Standard Oil refinery. In different registers, the accounts of Ole and Ottar describe the same migration but two different experiences; they enable a complementary read- ing as well as an independent one, and through both a “public” narrative (the letters) and an intimate one (the diaries)2 they provide access to the authors’ 1 Ole Viborg Høiby’s diary from September 24, 1927, to March 29, 1928; the letters written by Ottar Engar to his mother from January 1, 1927, to March 3, 1938; and Ottar Engar’s diary from September 24, 1927, to March 31, 1928, are found in the hula ii database at the University of Oslo. 2 Letters in particular and personal narratives of migrants in general have enjoyed a surge in interest by scholars since the publication in 1918–1920 of the sociological analysis, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. Among the several historical studies based on immigrants´ letters, see Eduardo Ciafardo, “Cadenas migratorias e inmigración italiana. Reflexiones a partir de la correspondencia de dos inmigrantes italianos en la Argentina, 1921–1938,” Studi Emigrazione 38, 102 (June 1991): 233–56; Sonia Cancian, Families, Lovers and their Letters. Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2003); María L. Da Orden, Una familia y un océano de por medio. La emi- gración gallega a la Argentina: una historia a través de la memoria epistolar (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2010); Bruce S. Elliot, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke, Letters Across Borders. The Espitolary Practice of International Migrants (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); David A. Gerber, Authors of their lives The personal correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteeth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Walter Kamphoefner, Helbich Wolfgang and Ulrike Sommereds, News from the Land of Freedom: German Immingrants Write Home (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). Some 0002611414.INDD 162 10/5/2015 12:25:44 PM