Novel
Luna verde
Not translated into English
Joaquín Beleño · 1951
Synopsis
Ramón de Roquebert, son of a Frenchman and a Panamanian woman, leaves Río Hato to study in Panama and finds work in the canal zone during the Second World War, when American bases are multiplying. His diary, made up of one hundred and fourteen tableaux, recounts the building sites, the segregation between the gold payroll of the Americans and the silver payroll of everyone else, the humiliations, the women, and his awakening to political awareness, first as a worker and then as a student.
Context
Subtitled “dialogued diary”, the novel appeared in Panama in 1950 or 1951 depending on the sources, after winning a prize as a manuscript, and was reissued in 1961 with a prologue by Ramón H. Jurado. It opens the trilogy its author devoted to the Zone, with Los forzados de Gamboa and Curundú, and was translated, according to its commentators, into several languages. Luis Pulido Ritter reads in it the shock of a young man who believed himself white, a holder of the baccalaureate and of French descent, and whom the Zone nonetheless places on the payroll of non-American workers.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no translation identified into French or English; one hundred and fourteen very short chapters, in dialogue, of direct realism.
Prizes and reception
Awarded at the Ricardo Miró competition, the year varying according to the sources, and for a long time required reading in Panamanian secondary education.
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