Silver People

Voices from the Panama Canal

Margarita Engle

This compact historical novel told in verse is a moving introduction to the people, mostly immigrants, who willed the Panama Canal into existence.

You’ll meet immigrants from all over the world who sleep en masse in barracks and do backbreaking labor. American overseers who are, at best, more concerned about progress than people, and at worst, racist. There’s an artist and anarchists, a geologist from Puerto Rico, a laborer from Jamaica, and a local girl who sells herbs.

The story revolves around a 14-year-old boy named Mateo, desperate to escape Cuba and his father’s fists. He’s willing to do any work along the sea: sailor, fisherman, lobster trapper. Any job that ‘floats [him] away from home.’

He lies his way into a job with the Americans recruiting workers, then embarks on an adventure that includes a treacherous three-day sea voyage, extreme hunger, language barriers, homesickness, and first love.

Upon arrival in Panama, Mateo learns two harsh lessons: The workers’ first assignment is to be measured for their coffins in anticipation of their early deaths from accidents or cholera. And the men are divided into gold (northern Europeans and Americans) and silver (olive- and brown-skinned men) with segregated jobs, rules, treatment, and pay.

The silver men, including Mateo and his friends, sleep in train cars converted into barracks, 12 to a car. Their accommodations look nothing like the photos in the recruiter’s pitch — pictures of nice houses with dining rooms and tables draped with tablecloths. Instead, they eat their dinner outside, a meal of mushy potatoes and stringy meat.

The work is dull and dangerous. They dig and carry, manually moving train tracks, cutting back trees, and hauling rock to create what they called the Serpent Cut, the gash that would eventually become the Canal.

As the indignities of their lives pile up, the workers’ anguish turns to anger, and the situation in the jungle becomes even more dangerous. But it’s not all grim — flashes of romance, loyalty, generosity, and friendship sweeten Mateo’s experience.

There are also touches of whimsy: passages told from nature’s point of view. We hear from the glass frogs who like to sing and the blue morpho butterflies who soar in the sky. The trees revel in how they’re solidly rooted in the ground, and a three-toed sloth says, ‘Time is my friend: I can wait for weeks.’

Sometimes melancholy and always imaginative, this is a coming-of-age story, history lesson, immigrant story, adventure tale, and workplace drama all packed into a super-concentrated package.

The only relief is payday, no matter how stingy.

We take our wages to a makeshift town made of mud and rum.

In ramshackle tents and market stalls vendors from all over the world shout in a hundred languages.

There are Sikhs from India wearing colorful turbans, and Chinese doctors offering strange cures, and Italians selling boots, Greeks with jars of olives, Romanians telling fortunes, indios from Ecuador weaving fine white hats from dry reeds, and local children from right here in Panamá offering lottery tickets and spicy snacks — corn fritters, sweet cakes, and fried fish from the river, round eyes staring from greasy heads.

Bullfights.

Cockfights.

Card games.

Dancing girls. — Margarita Engle

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