When I think "diaspora", I think of the Jews and the Armenians and the Irish. This article from the Economist, which is a month old now, is definitely worth a read. It's about the influence that people from a nation who are living overseas, away from home, can have on their home countries, and gives a ton of examples of diasporas that I hadn't thought of--the Ghanaians, the Eritreans, the Balts, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Italians, the Tamils, and more. Thinking about it, I'll bet a significant proportion of Anglo-Canadians in Ontario are part of an American Tory diaspora; others went to Britain or the West Indies. There's definitely a Gallego diaspora in the Americas, so much so that a common Latin American pejorative for "Spaniard" is "gallego".

I remember a story--seems that the Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires came by the Casa Rosada for some reason and one of Eva Perón's parties was in full swing at nine in the morning. A somewhat exalted Evita shouted, "Get that gallego de mierda out of here!" The ambassador drew himself up to his full Castilian blue-blooded, blue-veined height, looked down his aquiline nose, and replied, "Tell Mrs. Perón the gallego will be leaving but the mierda will be staying."

Here's a link from As, one of the Madrid sports papers, to a series of articles about Dmitri Piterman, one of the Ukranian diaspora. Piterman was born in Odessa but became a millionaire businessman in America. Several years ago he bought a second-division Catalan soccer club, Palamós, for some unknown reason. He coached the team himself, but nothing particularly special happened. Anyway, he just bought himself a First Division team, Racing Santander. They're historically an "elevator" team, one that continually goes up and down between Second and First divisions. He's going to turn Racing around, he says, and his first plan is to sign Romario. He's been trying to coach the team himself but they've sued him, alleging that he doesn't have a coach's license and therefore can't be a coach. Piterman, quite reasonably, doesn't consider soccer coaching to be related in any way to brain surgery and wonders why the hell he needs a license to tell a bunch of guys in skivvies to kick the ball in the goal. This is taken as being "brash and American-style". Wait until Al Davis and Jerry Jones and that schmuck in Washington decide to invest in the Spanish soccer league and provide it with some much-needed, uh, professionalism. Actually, sports owners the world around are huge jackasses. The real Jesús Gil and our own Joan Gaspart, not to mention Ruíz Mateos's wife, are prime examples of folks who would do the NFL proud.