Emigration and education. Galician emigration to America and its impact on the processes of literacy, schooling and civic education amongst the rural and seafaring popular classes

Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the course of the final 30 years of the nineteenth century, and well into the early decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Galician people migrated to different areas of America. There they found a new world to contend and interact with – a world that was more advanced and developed socially and culturally. From the perspective of a new awareness and heightened by processes of collective organisation, mainly identity-based, many of them set out to help advance the cultural and social development of Galicia through self-organised political, social and educational processes. In this way, during the 1920s, a growing number of primary schools – roughly 300 – all over Galicia felt the influence of the Galician emigrants. This is a genuine phenomenon characteristic of Galician emigration that has not been observed in the collective actions carried out by any of the other European migrant communities.