Spanish School (circa 1900) - The Spanish Ocean Liner "patricio De Satrústegui"

Oil on mahogany panel. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the imposing ocean liners and steamships of the Compañía Trasatlántica, with their dark hulls and smoking funnels, became immense coffins or cradles of hope for thousands of Asturians, Galicians, Leonese, and Basques. These ships, departing from ports like Gijón, Vigo, and Bilbao, carried in their holds a tragic economic exile, a diaspora of souls who, driven by poverty and the dream of "making it in America," crossed the Atlantic to the docks of Havana, Veracruz, Santos, or Buenos Aires. Amid the roar of the boilers and the salty air, a geography of uprooting was taking shape, where the luxury of the upper decks contrasted sharply with the cramped conditions of the lower levels, forging a space of transit where peninsular identity merged with the immensity of the ocean, only to be reborn, with nostalgia and effort, in the new lands of the Southern Cone and the Caribbean. - Image dimensions without frame: 66 x 28 cm