Panama City, Apr 13 (EFE).- The Panama Canal will be the protagonist this Thursday of the trip of the president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, to the Central American country, a visit that seeks to pay tribute to the thousands of Galicians who participated in the construction of one of the great engineering works of the 20th century.
Rueda, who arrived in the Panamanian capital on Wednesday afternoon, will have from early Thursday morning an agenda set by the Panama Canal, which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, with a visit to the Miraflores locks area.
The president plans to attend the passage of the boats through these locks, where the water is filled and emptied so that the boats can circulate in sections of different levels through the Canal, built by the United States.
An admired engineering that would have remained only in theory if, during the construction period between 1904 and 1914, thousands of day laborers had not participated, with “pick and shovel”, in the removal of earth under extreme weather conditions.
In general, it is estimated that of the 40,000 workers who participated in the construction of the Canal, some 10,000 were Galician, shipped from Galician ports or from Latin American countries such as Cuba, to which they had emigrated.
This is how the rigorous study “Pro Mundi Beneficio: Galician workers in the construction of the Panama Canal, 1904-1914”, by academic Juan Manuel Pérez (Ribeira, A Coruña), who emigrated to the United States in 1977 and worked in the Library of Congress, where he had access to thousands of documents on the Canal.
“During that examination I saw three photographs in which those photographed there were identified as Galician workers during the construction of the Canal (…) I had never before imagined that there would also have been Galicians in the construction of one of the great engineering marvels of the 20th century ”, he affirms in the book, when recounting the moment that triggered his study.
MONUMENT TO THE GALLEGOS-SPANISH
To pay homage to these day laborers, various Panamanians of Galician descent, through their Nosa Terra Foundation, devised the possibility of erecting a monument near the Canal to commemorate the important Galician contribution.
Having ruled out the initial location for the monument in an area close to the Atlantic end of the Canal, the president of the Foundation, Ricardo Gago, with roots on his father’s side in Amil (Pontevedra), explained to EFE that it will be built on the Amador Causeway, a boardwalk in the pacific ocean.
“We said, ‘this is going to be the place,’ because the Amador Causeway was originally built with earth and stone taken from the Culebra Cut, where most of the Galicians worked with picks and shovels” in the Canal, he affirmed enthusiastically, devoted to the project.
Precisely, the president of the Xunta de Galicia, accompanied by other authorities, will use one of those shovels used during the work on the Canal to officially start the construction of the monument.
Gago clarified that although at first it had been designed as a tribute only to the Galician day laborers, they believed it was fair that the monument should also be dedicated to the rest of the Spanish workers who contributed to building the great engineering work.
“We have had to change the concept of the Galician monument a bit and make it Spanish-Galician, because if it is true that the Galicians were number one, they also came from all the provinces and from as many people as you can imagine in Spain,” he said. .
What has not changed is the monument, which represents four Galician workers (for the four provinces of Galicia) taken directly from photographs of Galician countrymen in the works of the Canal, with their characteristic clothes and berets.
The casting process is taking place in Madrid, where the first character has already been finished and the second will be cast “in about three weeks”. This is how they hope to ship the four men to Panama in November and finish the monument, on a granite base from Galicia, “in the first three months” of 2024.
Before that groundbreaking today to start work on the monument, and in another Galician connection, Rueda will meet with Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo, whose father immigrated to Panama as a young man from a small town in Ourense.