Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal
At what price progress? Margarita Engle follows four individuals involved in the building of the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century. Mateo is a fourteen-year-old Cubano whose dangerous work digging the canal helps him escape a cruel father. Henry is a Black Jamaican wanting to earn money for his family. His job is blasting through rock. Augusto is a Puerto Rican mapmaker who can’t ignore issues of race and class that mean he is treated better than laborers like Mateo and Henry, but worse than the white engineers who oversee the project. Anita is a local Panamanian girl, adopted daughter of the village healer, who knows all the flora and fauna in jeopardy because of the canal. These “silver people” (dark-skinned workers paid in silver rather than gold) are living and laboring under Colonialism, and their voices illuminate the impact of its arrogance. Engle also, strikingly, gives voice to elements of nature—trees, birds, insects, and the ever-present screaming monkeys—whose world is being brutally destroyed as work on the canal progresses, offering another critical perspective on “progress” in a stirring work that invites thought and discussion. ©2014 Cooperative Children's Book Center
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 12 and older
Age Range:
Grades 6-8 (Ages 11-13)
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Formats:
Novel
Poetry
Subjects:
20th Century
Building/Construction
Class Issues
Colonialism
Cubans and Cuban Americans
Economic Hardship and Poverty
Environmental Challenges
Historical Fiction
Jamaicans and Jamaican Americans
Novels in Verse
Panamanians and Panamanian Americans
Perspective/Point of View
Puerto Ricans
U.S. History
Work and Labor
World History
Diversity subjects:
Black/African
Latine
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publish Year: 2014
Pages: 260
ISBN: 9780544109414
CCBC Location: Fiction, Engle