Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal by Margarita Engle (review)

If they think about it at all, contemporary students are likely to take the Panama Canal for granted, not realizing the amazing, horrifically dangerous engineering feat that it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. This verse novel offers multiple perspectives on the enormity of the project, highlighting the material difficulties as well as the racially based system of inequality that governed the types of labor and the pay scale: white American and European workers had safer jobs, better housing and food, and were paid in gold, while islanders from Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti were housed in boxcars, worked in constant danger of mudslides that resulted in mass casualties, ate substandard food while standing up, and were paid in silver. Engle gives voice to Mateo, a war orphan from Cuba; Anita, an herb girl from the forests of Panama; Henry, a laborer from Jamaica; and Augusto, an engineer from the States, who cultivates Mateo’s artistic talent to record the indigenous flora and fauna. To fill in gaps in her story, she providesoccasional poems from real historical personages, such as a ruthlessly expansionist Theodore Roosevelt and the agents he dispatched to manage the project. She also devotes poems to the forest dwellers: the howler monkeys, various types of ants and birds, giant hissing cockroaches, the trees, and other native animals displaced and unsettled by the building of the canal. As always, Engle’s poetry captures with sympathetic wonder and delicate beauty the plight of these disenfranchised voices; here in particular she highlights the natural beauty and love that Mateo, Anita, and Henry find and cling to in the midst of their back-and heart-breaking labor. A prose epilogue in character from Augusto and a historical note from the author provide context for the Engle’s project of giving voice to the “silver people.”