La Voz de Galicia – August 1, 2025 →
The other day I read a piece in this newspaper that said “eight out of ten residents in Galicia were born in the region, and more than half haven’t even changed municipalities”—that 84% of Galicia’s population is native. An idea that led me to think again about that genetic study created in collaboration between scientists from the universities of Oxford and Santiago, and published in Nature Communications. A study which clearly demonstrated the community’s “genetic substructure”—that is, quoting R. Romar, who “translated” the news for this paper in 2019, “a kind of secular endogamy has existed in the region and been perpetuated over time.” One of the researchers involved in that study, the great Ángel Carracedo, said at the time that unlike his British colleagues, he wasn’t surprised by those results. And ever since that study came out, I’ve been fascinated by that particular kind of endogamy that, in some way, defines us.
That’s why, when this other piece came out about the deep attachment people feel when choosing where to live, I thought about that constant pull Castelao described in his Sempre en Galiza when writing about emigration: “there’s a force that pushes us out into the world and another that binds us to our native land”. That pull is what I’ve been clinging to ever since, twenty-two years ago, I established my moral residence in between—between Ourense and New York. And from that perspective—that of someone who lives two lives she knows will never fully reconcile— I read this news with a kind of melancholy, but also a desire to understand the complex relationship between what we are and what we say we are. Because, as the daughter of a generation of emigrants, we remain a peculiar contradiction…
