They find commonality in sickness, mudslides, bitterness, pain, fighting, and a longing for home. Henry, a Jamaican worker who watches as the medium-dark Spaniards get to sit for their meals while he has to stand, finds an unlikely friend in Mateo. At the end of the day, no matter where the working men came from, whether they wanted home, refuge, gold, silver, they were still joined in one thing: surviving the rain forest.Īlthough physical survival isn’t the only thing that bonds them. You long for a place that might give you a better life, a place that could be better, but also a place to belong to. During the night, the monkeys howl and insects bite Mateo ends up wondering “How can I miss the place/ I was so desperate to leave?” When I read that I thought to myself that even now, that’s the immigrant struggle. Although all of the men are doing backbreaking and soul crushing work each day, the white men get paid in gold, the dark Europeans in silver, and the islanders in half the silver as other men. A structure of segregation is placed: “Americans, Frenchmen, and Dutch./ Spaniards, Greeks, Italians./ Jamaicans, Barbadians, Haitians” leaving Mateo wondering how any of them will be able to work together. Through his careful observations, we are given a scope of surviving the working life on the canal.
But with a new world and new people come many challenges. His dark skin and green eyes allow him to “pass.” Like many of the men who flocked to Panama during this time, Mateo wants to work. He’s mixed, and even though this takes place over 100 years ago, the feeling of not fully belonging to one part of yourself or culture is still relevant. The story starts with Mateo, a fourteen year old boy from Cuba who lies about his ethnicity in order to get passage to and work in Panama. Told in alternating perspectives over eight years, each poem is vibrant, unique, and many times heartbreaking. MY TWO CENTS: Silver People is a historical novel written in verse. Thousands lost their lives, and those who survived worked under the harshest conditions for only a few silver coins a day.įrom the young “silver people” whose back-breaking labor built the Canal to the denizens of the endangered rain forest itself, this is the story of one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken, as only Newbery Honor-winning author Margarita Engle could tell it. It was a miracle, this path of water where a mountain had stood-and creating a miracle is no easy thing.
DESCRIPTION FROM THE BOOK JACKET: One hundred years ago, the world celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which connected the world’s two largest oceans and signaled America’s emergence as a global superpower.
0 kommentar(er)
