Ilya and the Canal

Ilya Espino de Marotta ’85 wanted to make a statement. In her nearly three decades working as an engineer maintaining the Panama Canal, she never encountered overt discrimination for being a woman in a male-dominated field. When she took the lead role for the canal’s massive $5 billion expansion project, though, there were grumblings in the international shipping industry that sat wrong with her.

“I learned that, when my name was proposed during a meeting, there were questions asked like, ‘Why her? Why not one of these three men?’” Espino de Marotta recalled. Despite her boss insisting that she was hired for her technical qualifications, she felt like she was working “on probation” and facing undue scrutiny for her gender. “That’s when I went out and bought a pink hardhat and safety vest. It was a message to my small surrounding group: ‘I’m a woman, and I can do this job.’”

In time, that message would travel further than she could have imagined.

Crossroads of the Americas

After graduation, Espino de Marotta found work in the Panama Canal shipyards. When it was finished in 1914 after a decade of construction, the canal was a veritable gamechanger for international shipping. Before its construction, a naval voyage from New York to San Francisco required 24 days traveling around the southern tip of South America and back for 11,300 nautical miles. After the canal’s locks opened, the same trip took only 11 days and 4,600 nautical miles—60% shorter.

Panama had achieved independence from Colombia in 1903 by agreeing to give the United States sovereignty over the land where the canal would be built, dubbed the Panama Canal Zone. Up until 1979, a year before Espino de Marotta enrolled at Texas A&M, she and other Panamanian citizens were allowed very limited access to the Canal Zone. That year, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty reverting ownership of the canal and its surrounding land to Panama, an agreement that would take full effect on New Year’s Eve, 1999.

As maintenance of the canal slowly changed hands, Espino de Marotta built a steady life around its imposing locks. For her first four and a half years as an engineering technician, she commuted four hours daily from her home on the Pacific Ocean side of the canal to the Atlantic Ocean side. “The commute was along a two-lane road with a lot of container traffic and no way of passing. I would leave at 5 a.m. to get to work by 7:15 a.m. There was no place to stop and eat, so I learned to drink coffee for breakfast!”

Gently Down the Stream

Espino de Marotta spent her career aware of how few women there were around her and in higher positions in her field. If she was not the only woman in her workplace, she was often one of only a handful. “Every time I was promoted or moved lateral to another job, it was a man who chose me and a man who I replaced,” she said. “There were no women ahead of me opening doors or giving me advice, but I never needed it. I had such good mentors, bosses and coworkers that I never dwelled on it.”

When her pink hardhat and vest garnered international media attention, however, Espino de Marotta saw an unexpected opportunity to inspire women around the world. “I would tell people, ‘Don’t be afraid to take on challenges,’” she said. “I never shy away from any job. I never knew for certain how I would tackle a new position, but I trusted myself to learn.”

The canal expansion was finished in 2016 to much fanfare. In 2017, Espino de Marotta graced the cover of Forbes Central America and was listed by the magazine as one of the continent’s 50 most powerful women. In 2019, her journey came full circle when she and her colleagues greeted cadets from Texas A&M at Galveston’s Maritime Academy passing through the canal aboard the T/S Golden Bear during a summer training cruise.