Abstract
Memories of Galician migration to America feature the image of Indianos, those who returned wealthy. What they lacked in terms of cultural and symbolic capital, they made up for in terms of a globalized vision. Some promoted philanthropic enterprises in their homeland, including hundreds of schools. Our study focuses on two of them, the brothers Juan and Jesús García Naveira, who returned to Galicia in 1893. In the small town of Betanzos they financed the construction of schools, trade union centres and hospices. Moreover, they built a theme park, the Pasatiempo (Leisure Gardens). The Pasatiempo was an act of self-affirmation, a compilation of the learning accumulated through their travels through America, Europe and North Africa. It also documented their faith in the capacity of technology and education to support human progress.
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Notes
- 1.
The challenges of the Galician economy at the time, and in particular the agricultural sector, were increased in this case by the effect of the Spanish administration reform in 1833, which eliminated the province of Betanzos (and deprived that urban centre of the government functions it had been carrying out through the entire modern age).
- 2.
From the beginning, Juan attempted to make the interpretation of this iconographic programme explicit, and this is demonstrated in several news reports of the time.
- 3.
The high relief reproduced a famous oil painting by A. Gisbert: the “Execution of Torrijos” (1887), housed at the Prado Museum in Madrid.
- 4.
“The Last Prayer of Our Christian Martyrs”, oil painting by J.L. Gerome (1883) is housed in the Walters Arts Museum of Baltimore.
- 5.
The parallels seem evident, especially keeping in mind that this part of the Park was created around the time of the movie's premier; however, I have not been able to document through my research that the Naveira brothers or their advisors had watched the film.
- 6.
In Fig. 6.9, the sketch of the wall is not visible, since it is covered by a tree. Only a fragment of the Panama Canal map, occupying more than 30 m to the left, is visible.
- 7.
With this title the expedition was publicized in the American newspapers of the time.
- 8.
The Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Educational Institution) had been founded in 1876 by the Spanish pedagogue Francisco Giner de los Ríos, striving towards revitalizing pedagogical ideas and practices. Juan García Niebla personally knew Francisco Giner de los Ríos: he had been introduced to him by another one of the Institution’s founders, Bartolomé Cossío, whose family home (where he vacationed) was in Vixoi (Bergondo), a few kilometres from Betanzos.
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Cardesín Díaz, J.M. (2018). A Theme Park in Early twentieth Century Galicia: A Case Study on the Globalized Visions of “Indianos”. In: DePalma, R., Pérez-Caramés, A. (eds) Galician Migrations: A Case Study of Emerging Super-diversity. Migration, Minorities and Modernity, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66305-0_6
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