Major international conference in Gibraltar to examine history of mobility

The history of how people, goods and ideas moved across the Atlantic and Pacific will be at the centre of a major international conference opening in Gibraltar on September 9. 

 The 15th International Conference of the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians (ADHILAC) is being hosted by the International Centre for Atlantic History (ICAH), which was founded in Gibraltar in 2025. 

 The conference will take place at the Sunborn Hotel from September 9 to 13 and will bring together 94 historians from 29 states across five continents, including participants from Gibraltar. 

 Professor John Cortes, Minister for Heritage among other portfolios, will attend the inauguration. Also invited are the Mayor of La Linea, Jose Juan Franco Rodriguez, and Jorge Enrique Elias Caro, President of ADHILAC. 

 The conference will examine the movement of people, goods, ideas and routes between continents and islands, tracing the history of mobility across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. 

 ICAH was founded in Gibraltar in 2025, with the late Tito Benady as its first patron. Professor Dr Christian Cwik, who is from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, is the director of the centre. 

 Six keynote speakers will take part: Sven Beckert of Harvard University, Aviva Chomsky of Salem State College, Paul Lovejoy of York University, Michael Zeuske of the University of Bonn, Stefan Rinke of the Free University of Berlin and David Wheat of Michigan State University. 

 The Gibraltar speakers will include Richard Garcia, who will speak on Gibraltar as a crucible for migration. 

 Prof Cwik will also present a paper entitled The American Shelter: Gibraltarians in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Argentina in World War II. 

 The number of speakers means the conference will include several parallel sessions. 

 Topics covered by the presentations will include Gibraltar as an Atlantic and Mediterranean intersection, the slave trade and slavery, women and mobility, church and religion, Jews in the Atlantic world, capitalism and mobility, political changes and mobility, wars and mobility, intellectual mobility and internationalist mobility. 

Other subjects will include commodities, exchanges and connections, European immigration to America, migration from the East to the Americas and voyages across the ocean. 

The conference will cover periods ranging from antiquity to the early modern period and more recent history. 

One presentation will focus on Gonzalo Piña Ludueña, a little-known figure in Gibraltar who was closely linked to the history of Venezuela in the second half of the 16th century. 

Originally from Gibraltar, Piña Ludueña spread out from the Andean city of Mérida and founded numerous settlements in northwest Venezuela, including San Antonio de Gibraltar on the shores of Lake Maracaibo. He was later appointed governor of the Venezuelan province. 

The role of Gibraltar in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century will also feature prominently. 

During this period, tens of thousands of emigrants sailed from Gibraltar to the United States and Latin America, particularly Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. 

Later, during the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War, many Spaniards came to Gibraltar seeking refuge in the New World. 

The conference is open to the public, with presentations and talks taking place in English or Spanish. 

Tickets are available online through the event booking platform, while the conference organisers can be contacted by email at secejecutivo@adhilac.org.