From the porch of my uncle’s apartment, you can see all of Panama City, Panama. To the left, sparkling high-rises stand with famous names like Trump sprawled across their fronts. To the right, an ever-expanding mall filled with insignias satisfies the American taste for luxury. Immediately below it all, in the shadows of the towers, throngs of the working-class live in tin-roof shanties.
My parents were born and raised in Panama City and have done everything they can to pass on their culture to my sister and me. While I have never had much success at learning Spanish and have yet to acquire a taste for the language, I have inherited their keen love and appreciation for their home country. Many relatives on both sides of my family worked on the Panama Canal—they were part of the thousands of West Indian men who came to Panama to move earth and water.
This trip was the first time I ever actually visited the Canal itself. For years, I’d driven past the locks and seen the wildlife in the surrounding areas, but I’d never taken the time to step foot on the grounds that provided my family’s sustenance. My parents had always told me their grandparents went to Panama to build the Canal, but the specific names and histories have been erased, eroded with the ages. At the Canal Museum, I was able to see the history of Panama’s greatest landmark from start to future. The failure of the French to build the Canal before the Americans intervened somehow made it all that much more enjoyable. But most importantly, in the computer archives that documented all of the men who worked on the Canal, I saw the names of my great-grandparents and great-grand uncles who changed our family’s destiny.
The Canal was designed to reverse Panama’s fortunes, to separate the country from the banana republics of the region. Military dictatorship, drugs, and corruption left a trail of destruction throughout the country. The physical scars of crumbling ruins from the old city dot the rapidly industrializing seaside as a constant reminder of the pain of the past.
Both of my parents and many of my other relatives were involved in the anti-dictatorship protest movement that pitted the former Panamanian government and many students against a CIA-backed strongman. When I was a child, my grandmother would tell me stories of the day she found herself at a rally and realized she’d been yelling the wrong chant for hours. Anytime I complained about the doctor’s office, my mother would recount the horrible conditions at the hospital where she worked, putting my minor gripes in perspective. My father, on the other hand, refuses to tell me his stories, afraid of causing me to romanticize the protest movements of our time.
Our family vacation reminds us all of just how little progress the country has made in the intervening years. Just days before Christmas, the highest court in Panama ordered the arrest of lformer Panamanian president, Ricardo Martinelli. His long list of alleged crimes includes bribery, illegal pardons, and the use of public money to spy on political enemies. In a move of seemingly-unintentional absurdity, Martinelli waited out the backlash in a Miami apartment complex made famous by the Scarface movie.
Nothing would make me happier than to watch Panama come out on the other side of this a better nation. Still, I can’t help but return to one memory from the last time my family spent the holidays in Panama.
My sister had asked to see where our parents grew up, to get a better sense of our roots. So we drove. As it turned out, though in one sense my mother and father had lived only 20 minutes from the high rises, in another they’d lived a world away.
We never got out of the car. We drove quickly. And after all these years, we realized nothing much had changed.
