Coming back to Vigo!

The first Gallego novel I read was a O fillo do emigrante by Pablo Vaamonde Garcia. Only a short book, it tells the sad little tale of a young man who leaves his native Galicia to work in a factory in Switzerland, probably sometime in the mid 1980s. There he meets and marries a Gallega girl who gives birth to their son. For economic reasons she returns to work when the child is six months old and they take him to live with his grandparents back in Galicia, seeing him only briefly each year for holidays, sending money to the grandparents and expensive presents to the child to compensate for their absence. Eventually they return to Galicia for good but it is too late to establish a proper relationship with their son who goes from bad to worse, from alcohol to drugs and finally to a fatal motorcycle accident. As I said, a sad little tale.

I was reminded of this when I saw an article recently about Gallegos who had emigrated to Switzerland finding it impossible to return home. Gallegos have always emigrated. They go all over the place. I have come across a number of them working for the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester. You find them running restaurants in the middle of the USA. They emigrate, but they like to come back. Many have come back wealthy from the Americas and invested in their home country: that is Galicia, not Spain.

I had never thought of Switzerland as one of their destinations but apparently there are thriving Gallego communities in that country. They have their asociacions de vecinos, meet up to eat cocido, play the gaita and dance in traditional dress. One spokesman said that some Swiss entrepreneurs like Gallego workers and prefer to employ them for their reliability. According to the article I read, the small town of Cerceda, 5597 inhabitants, has 1000 registered voters currently resident in Switzerland, 400 of them in Geneva.

Most emigrants stay there for four or five years, save money and then return to Galicia. Now, however, la crisis is causing problems. Some are looking at the employment situation and deciding that it just is not feasible to consider a return to Galicia. Others have given it a try, only to give up and go back once more to Switzerland: another sad little tale!