Between the 18th and 19th century, nearly one fifth of Switzerland up and left.
Half a million people who were starving, persecuted, over-populated and industrialized.
Just picked up their things and headed off for the new world.
That's a percentage of emigration that overshot even most of the colonial powers of that time.
And yet you almost never hear anything about the Swiss in the Americas.
They didn’t leave that imprint that we remember as history.
There was no bang.
Their government conquered no land.
Their arrival heralded no genocide.
They came and farmed.
But on that on that rare occasion, like here in Uruguay, their legacy still hangs in the air
like that faint smell of cheese.
Today’s story is about the Schweitzer folk, and this is Nueva Helvetica.
Maybe it’s the Sound of Music or the seven euro croissants but we’ve all sort of seemed to accept
that the Swiss are best defined by their wealth and neutrality.
That's their thing.
That’s been their place in the world for as long as virtually any living person can remember
and there is basically no media that's painting them as otherwise.
It’s actually hard for me to imagine them as poor.
But poor they once were, and the massive technological upheavals of the 18th century created
a population boom there that drove that poverty to its very limits.
In that one century alone, Switzerland doubled in size.
Or at least in population.
A million and a quarter people became two and a half.
And it didn’t exactly double their land.
So while medical breakthroughs now meant that second and third sons who would have once died
in childbirth were now surviving to adulthood, it also meant that there was nothing left
for them to inherit.
The family farm can’t go to everybody.
You can only split it so many ways.
And on the top of that, a new era of thinking had come to pass, and the laws that would have
once allowed them to find fortune abroad as mercenaries were now being abandoned.
Switzerland was aiming to keep its manpower at home.
However poor that manpower was.
In turn, the cities swelled and burst with the unemployed.
And alongside all of this rose the factories.
In 1801, for the first time in Swiss history the Canton of St. Gallen imported a textile factory from England.
A third generation, but they were a bit late.
But in turn, they learned how to produce those machines, and within a few years they had begun
a rapid development towards industrialization that would change their entire society forever.
For the factory owners, the population boom of that last century was like the serendipitous miracle.
Because the more people living in poverty, the better.
The more people they had, the more workers.
The more workers, the lower the pay.
And the lower the pay the more capital for the owner, and the more they can compete with their neighbours.
There wasn’t even really any social guilt attached to it at this point.
In the 1790's, O.G. prosperity gospel evangelist Thomas Malthus basically said, well,
the poor had it coming, they are basically like deer.
They're just going to keep overpopulating and dying in cycles of starvation anyway.
So if you give them more money, it's only going to lead to more children,
and that's just going to bring on the starvation faster.
So what could you even do with them?
The naturally intelligent and worthy people, rich people, on the other hand would always be rich
and therefore why should they care?
This was the natural course of things.
You don’t mess with the deer.
And you will not be surprised to find that that worldview was very popular among the rich.
Among the poor... Less so.
But the only real way they could show that, well, without being killed in response was
to just pack up and leave.
So in the mid-1800’s, with Switzerland experiencing two major famines, people did just that.
Very little help was sent down to the bottom.
This wasn't just a period of poverty.
It was a poverty so deep and so black that the options were essentially leave the country
or starve to death in the street.
One by one, then by the thousands, people started to leave Switzerland.
Those feeling persecuted by their religion.
Those feeling unsafe from Europe’s convulsions.
Those who were watching their families starve in front of their eyes.
Each left for their own individual reasons, but no matter the reason they left, they did.
The Americas might have had their problems, sure, but at least there was food.
There was freedom.
For their part, Uruguay needed people.
The wars of independence were now all civil, Britain had basically silently guaranteed their existence,
and now they needed to fill some vacancies.
And just as the wealthy landowners and factory heads of Switzerland were pretty pissed
to see those people leaving, the new world was thrilled to see them arrive.
And few more than Uruguay.
Because after all, they weren’t exactly the first on the list for most colonists.
Most Europeans had not even heard of the country.
It was basically brand new.
But in the 1850's America was looking mighty tense and by the end of that decade
they were going to be in a vicious civil war.
Some colonists, at least for that ten-year period, started to look south and think it didn't seem that bad.
The people that Malthus has deemed as useless little deer, came to the Americas
and showed the skills that they truly had.
In the Swiss colony they founded here in Uruguay, the trade for the poor was simple.
If you came here and worked, and never drank, this is very important they said it twice in the contract,
if you never drank, you were obligated a good meal and place to stay.
The value of a person here wasn't written in their birth.
Of course, that still played an incredibly strong role, but they could also still give something to the community
and grow from it.
In a place like Uruguay, especially a newly found country virtually empty of people,
if you had a skill, you'd probably find opportunity to use it.
It was a chance to better your life.
To better your station for your children.
To be born as more than what Malthus said you were going to be.
When those Swiss arrived in Uruguay it had only just opened up to the non-Spanish.
It would been uncomfortable for both sides.
There would have been people praising a different god, speaking a different language
and upholding a different culture as neighbours.
An insular people who didn’t want to adapt to the culture around them.
People who felt different.
But for Uruguay this was less important than the fact that they would come and they would work.
They would be bringing skills to a country that needed them.
They were manpower, they were ideas, and just because the country couldn’t get a good God fearing Spaniard
to set up shop doesn't mean they were going to kick out the next best thing.
In 1862, they formally founded the town that would eventually become Nueva Helvetica.
And through it they introduced to this region virtually everything that we now associate with the Swiss.
Well, perhaps except watches.
I didn't see any watches.
But they did bring cheese-making skills and advancements in dairy technology,
as you would imagne.
They brought ideas of democracy which they used to hold secret votes for their leaders.
The first democratic votes in the country if I'm not mistaken.
They also brought the protestant religion, which isn't in of itself a good thing,
but in the entirely Catholic Uruguay, it forced them to incorporate religious diversity
at a starting point, at a young age.
But really most of all, what they brought was manpower.
They brought farmers.
They built up the land.
These were a different people from their neighbours.
Surrounding them were colonies of Italian, Spanish, Austrian and French immigrants
trying the exact same in their own regional colonies.
In their own unique flavour.
But despite having that different culture from them, that different language, that different religion and history,
it didn’t take long before they all just sort of became… Uruguayan.
By the early 1900’s famous Swiss locals would be sporting names such as Juan Carlos and Pedro Ignacio.
You know, classic Swiss names.
Their local delicacies would be taken and adapted to become national treasures.
What were once uniquely Swiss cheeses, were now Uruguayan.
The culture would learn to accommodate them just as they would it.
The thing most associated with the Swiss in this country is undoubtedly Colonia.
A type of cheese.
It doesn’t taste anything like what I think people would normally expect when they hear the word Swiss cheese,
but that’s kind of the point I'm making.
They didn’t bring the region with them, they didn't bring geography, they didn't bring the cows.
They brought themselves. The knowledge.
It isn't the cheese that's Swiss. It’s just Swiss inspired.
On the walls of this town, people are proudly putting up a symbol to say that
this is the canton that their forebearers came from.
But virtually nobody inside those houses speaks German.
I tried with over fifty people and only one person could speak back.
Which I'm not shaming them for.
Some of them even spoke a little Italian.
But they just said, for the most part this is my ancestry.
Which I understand.
My ancestry also contains Hungarian, but I don't speak Hungarian.
Canada speaks English, so I speak English.
Uruguay speaks Spanish.
So they speak Spanish.
The locals put on a yearly festival here to celebrate Swiss Confederation that lasts a month.
That's beyond anything they do in Switzerland.
But at the same time, I don't think almost anyone putting it on here knows the history behind it.
It's not a celebration of Swiss confederation truly, it's an Uruguayan party.
And the flags in the centre of town are waving with Swiss memories, but at the same time
it's no longer just a memory for the people who were descended from those original Volk,
but this entire country as a whole.
The Americas are immigrant continents.
And just because the history books don't remember, it doesn't mean that the story here is
no more than war and genocide.
Uruguay remembers the skill of those farmers not in the texts but in their markets.
They honour their memory with their vote.
You don’t need to be born somewhere to change its culture.
The world doesn't need to know your name for you to be remembered.
This was once New Helvetica.
And now it's almost two hundred years old.
This is Uruguay.
This is Rare Earth.