The Embassy of Panama together with the Fundación Nosa Terra is organising the conference From Galicia to Panama: the Galicians in the construction of the interoceanic canal, next Thursday 29 September at 11 a.m., in the Miguel de Cervantes hall of Casa América. Admission is by invitation only.
The conference will be given by Ricardo Gago, president of the Nosa Terra Foundation, with the presence of Allen Sellers Lara, Panama’s ambassador to Spain. Spanish workers were the second largest contingent recruited by US agents to build the Panama Canal (1904-1914), which enabled the inter-oceanic link. Of these Spaniards, three out of four were Galicians. Galicians were attributed with broad occupational qualities, such as hard work, honesty and docility. In addition, “Galician” was an appropriate gentilicio because it avoided the association with the decadent image of Spain that propaganda had spread at the end of the 19th century, after the Spanish-American War (1898).
The official figures of the Isthmian Canal Commission indicate that 8,298 Spaniards were recruited for this great project, most of whom worked as labourers on the railways and, above all, as pick and shovel workers. However, the preliminary results of a new investigation financed by the Nossa Terra Foundation show a larger number of Spanish workers, in addition to those who arrived illegally by their own means after the Spanish government banned them from emigrating to Panama in 1908.
