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.

Across the Gulf

Born in Mexico and raised in Panama, Espino de Marotta was inspired by French ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, whose work propelled her to start SCUBA diving at 16 with dreams of a career in marine biology. When job opportunities for a marine biologist in Panama proved scarce, she set her sights on oceanography and enrolled at Texas A&M University for its renowned program in 1980.

However, she soon found her prospects there similarly lacking and adjusted her trajectory once again. “My drive was to be by the water,” Espino de Marotta remembered. Having flourished in her math and science courses, she changed her major to marine engineering, taking courses both at Texas A&M’s Galveston and College Station campuses. Her new major suited her well, but the transition to a new set of coursework requirements made for a grueling final semester.

Having promised her father she would graduate in four years, Espino de Marotta only had one semester to complete the final 21 hours she needed for an Aggie diploma. “I had to request permission from the dean to even sign up for that many hours,” she said. “It was pretty intense, but I made it happen.” Though her laser focus on her studies kept her from enjoying the traditional Aggie experience, Espino de Marotta left Texas A&M having discovered within herself an unbelievable work ethic that would characterize her career.

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!”

Drawings and Dredges

Despite the commute, Espino de Marotta took to the role with its hands-on opportunities and challenges quickly. “I’ve loved every job I’ve had,” she said. “I was 23 when I started working. I learned from people who had been there for years how to draw designs for different systems, make a bill of materials and eventually watch those designs get built.”

After participating in a three-year developmental program coordinated by the American government teaching Panamanians technical skills required to take over the canal, Espino de Marotta steadily bounced up the ranks. She took on a wide variety of positions across the waterway and, after earning her master’s degree in engineering economics at a local university in 1996, breached into upper management.

In 2002, Espino de Marotta’s phone rang with a life-changing offer. Dr. Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, then deputy administrator of the Panama Canal Authority, was organizing a small task force to explore plans to significantly expand the canal. He asked if she would be interested in joining the team, and she accepted in a heartbeat.

Rising Tides

Expanding the canal was no mere cosmetic makeover or upkeep project. Shipbuilders around the world routinely built trade vessels to the exact dimensions of the canal’s locks to transport as much cargo as possible in a single trip. Classified as “Panamax” ships, these vessels could carry up to 5,000 twenty-foot containers across the canal. Some companies, however, were opting to bypass the canal completely, making up the added cost of the trip around South America by using much larger vessels.

Espino de Marotta’s team was tasked with defining a third set of locks that would accommodate gargantuan “Neopanamax” ships carrying up to 15,000 containers, reasserting the canal’s preeminence in global shipping. Because of the imposing public investment required for the project (research costs alone ran up a $40 million price tag) and as required by the Canal´s Constitutional Title, a national referendum was held to gauge the citizenry’s support.

The referendum finished in a landslide with 74% of voters approving the expansion, and Espino de Marotta and her team went to work laying the groundwork for a third set of locks. As construction broke ground in 2007, Espino de Marotta took on an administrative role and braced herself for the daunting work ahead of her. But in 2010, a series of family emergencies brought about a storm she could not weather alone.

Ebb and Flow

That fall, Espino de Marotta’s middle son, Peter, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, or bone cancer. Distraught and scrambling for answers, she researched treatment centers in the U.S. She and her husband, Peter, (a dredge captain on the canal) planned to take turns working and tending to their son as he received treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But three months later, Peter was diagnosed with prostate cancer as well.

Just as the most ambitious project of her career was getting off the ground, Espino de Marotta was forced to walk into her boss’ office and explain that she was stepping away from work to tend to her family. During the next year, she lived in New York and returned to work in Panama for one week every month.

As her son and husband received treatment, Espino de Marotta relied on stockpiled personal leave hours, but needed hundreds more if she was to receive a paycheck each month. News of her situation spread, and employees from across the canal donated their own leave to make sure Espino de Marotta could tend to her family.

Both loved ones eventually healed and went into remission. Having received kindness from close colleagues and strangers alike, Espino de Marotta worked to incorporate compassion into her leadership style. “Before, I was a very technical person,” she said. “I didn’t get involved with people’s personal lives like I do now. The experience taught me to appreciate people differently.”