HISTORY + POLITICS
The Shifting Ebb and Flow of Transatlantic Migration
One family’s generational journey there and back again, and how it questions contemporary certainties
Just over a century ago, a young man in rags — barely more than a boy — slipped unseen aboard a steamer moored in the Spanish port of Vigo. He had no idea where it was going, nor the fate that awaited him. He’d never been to sea before, or even seen the coast. All he knew was that whatever happened, it had to be better than the desperate life he faced back home.
The youngest of a family of seven siblings with a meagre plot of land in the harsh, windswept mountains of León, he had no prospects. And the whole country was collapsing into economic and political turmoil around him.
Stow away or starve.
A week or so of nausea and beatings later, and he disembarked in a new world. The New World, for his chosen escape vessel had ended up in Havana, Cuba. A land of plenty, the Eldorado for Spanish emigrants since the seventeenth century, and the country whose war of independence had ultimately plunged the Spanish empire into its final death spiral.
That young man was my wife’s great-grandfather.
