Genaro Rodríguez left Galicia, where he grew up, at the age of sixteen. He was one of millions of Spaniards who came to Switzerland in search of a better life in the 1960s and 1970s. He now lives in Bern.
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A journalist at Swiss Radio International, the predecessor of SWI swissinfo.ch, beginning in 1999. Started out as an investigative journalist and TV reporter in Mexico.
Thomas Kern was born in Switzerland in 1965. Trained as a photographer in Zürich, he started working as a photojournalist in 1989. He was a founder of the Swiss photographers agency Lookat Photos in 1990. Thomas Kern has won twice a World Press Award and has been awarded several Swiss national scholarships. His work has been widely exhibited and it is represented in various collections.
Genaro left school at the age of 12 to avoid more beatings from his teacher in the village of Fornelos near La Coruña. Four years later the young boy, trained as a builder, decided to follow a friend’s suggestion: “Go to Switzerland. There is work there which is well paid and a different world which is better.”
His humiliation at school prevented him from ever going back into a classroom. But Genaro managed to teach himself German. He later trained as a construction manager by taking a distance learning scheme.
(Thomas Kern, Daniel Wihler and Patricia Islas, swissinfo.ch)
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Iberian emigrants hope to find land of plenty
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In Spain, one in two young people is jobless and, for the first time since 1990, the number of people emigrating in 2011 is higher than those immigrating. After an economic boom at the beginning of the century, Spain and Portugal slid into a deep crisis in 2008 which has seen unemployment rise to 22.9…
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A new book, Galicians in Switzerland, shows the lives of Spanish immigrants who have traded the northwestern region of Galicia for Switzerland over the past 50 years. In doing so, they escaped poverty as well as the Spanish dictatorship. (All photos from the collection of Xurxo Martinez Crespo)
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.