The Royal Cornwall Museum’s Mineral Series presents a talk by Dr Sharron Schwartz on Mexico’s ‘Little Cornwall’ on Thursday, September 19 at 6pm.

In 1824, the first party of Cornish mineworkers arrived in Real del Monte-Pachuca in east-central Mexico to rehabilitate flooded and abandoned colonial silver mines as employees of the British Real del Monte Mining Company.

They founded the first Cornish community in the Latin Americas and began a process of labour migration that persisted well into the 20th century.

The Cornish not only introduced the machinery of the industrial revolution in the form of high-pressure steam engines, they also initiated cricket and football leagues, spread the Methodist faith, married into local families and helped to popularise the Cornish pasty.

Redruth-born Dr Schwartz received her doctorate at the University of Exeter on the Cornish in Latin America. She set up the Cornish Global Migration Programme in the late 1990s, and was the documentary researcher for the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site Bid.

She is the author of The Cornish in Latin America: Cousin Jack and the New World (2016), and a founder member of the Cornish Mexican Cultural Society.

The talk forms part of the autumn event series Cornwall, Mars and Mexico, which marks the reopening of the museum’s revamped mineral gallery.

Future dates include explorations of the minerals through choreography and biosonic haptic stone massage, as well as discussions on Martian craters and the museum’s historic Rashleigh mineral collection.