Sunday, January 12, 2014
Hundreds of peons from neighbouring Venezuela came to Trinidad as seasonal workers. An ethnic mixture of Amerindian, African and European, they were known as the cocoa panyols and with them came several Spanish traditions, the most recognisable being parang.
In the last column we looked at the early origins of Trinidad’s cocoa industry up to the time of the British conquest in 1797 and the early 1800s.