Emigrant Arnoia
- Inicio
- Arnoia emigrante
Emigrant Arnoia
Formulario de alta na axenda de contactos do Concello.
A Arnoia, like most Galician municipalities, suffered in the 1940s a strong exodus (we may call it that) towards emigration, in search of better living conditions both for those who left and for those who stayed. The countries of destination were, above all, Argentina and Uruguay. In the capitals of these countries, the first to arrive created the “Centro ARNOIA de Bos Aires” and the “Centro Arnoia de Montevideo”. There they gathered to share their hardships and worries, and there they welcomed the new neighbours as they arrived, and together they tried to find them work, a place to live, and so on. From these centres they sent remittances of pesos to A Arnoia to ease the hardships of the relatives and neighbours who stayed here.
Those from Buenos Aires, with their help, managed to have the “electric light” installed in Arnoia. Those from Montevideo, to have the “torre do reloxo” built in San Roque, never forgetting the small direct contributions for their relatives.
Some residents also went to Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, and others, in far smaller numbers. In the following decades, emigration opened up to other destinations, focusing on Europe: Switzerland, Germany, France, and even the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
European emigration was a very important source of foreign currency. Through much hard work (with the added difficulty of the language), these emigrants achieved substantial savings that they invested in businesses, in building homes, in buying flats and in improving their living conditions. The great difference with those who emigrated to Spanish America is that every year they used their holidays to visit their native Arnoia and to care for their family, whereas those on the other side of the Atlantic, both because of the distance and because of the various crises those countries went through, in most cases could not return. With these people from Arnoia, in 1992 the Concello organised a “reencontros” programme that brought 170 people to Arnoia, many of whom had never been to the land where they were born.
Currently, the number of Arnoia residents living abroad and registered as such at the consulates breaks down as follows:
Germany
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Canada
Cuba
USA
France
Luxembourg
Mexico
Netherlands
Peru
Portugal
United Kingdom
Sweden
Switzerland
Uruguay
Venezuela
TOTAL
30
241
1
42
1
6
3
15
2
7
1
2
4
2
1
6
279
48
691
Galicians — and the people of Arnoia were no exception — are great workers and, in many cases, they built a fine future in their host countries. We can thus highlight some “prominent figures” of Arnoia, although in every case the people of Arnoia worked tirelessly to live with dignity and to carry the name of Arnoia proudly around the world. It must be made clear that they did not leave Arnoia: they took A Arnoia with them to wherever they had to work in order to live with dignity and, in many cases, to be able to return to their homeland with the means needed to do so.
There is also an internal emigration very much centred on Madrid, Vitoria and Barcelona, where there are well-connected groups of Arnoia natives. Also Vigo and Ourense, cities which, years ago, lacking today’s transport links, forced people to settle there. Nowadays many residents work in them and still live in their own village.
