The Path Between the Seas: Panama Canal

I have been reading The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, by David McCullough, and I was struck by the following passages:

Matachín was best known as the place where Chinese workers, hopelessly lost to “melancholia,” had committed suicide en masse. Matar is Spanish for “to kill,” it was explained; chino, the word for “Chinese.” The fact that matachín is also a perfectly good Spanish word meaning “butcher” or “hired assassin,” and that the place had been called...