{"id":30143,"date":"2013-04-05T03:40:25","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T03:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30143"},"modified":"2013-04-05T03:40:25","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T03:40:25","slug":"%e2%80%98una-raza-dos-etnias%e2%80%99-the-politics-of-becomingperforming-%e2%80%98afropanameno%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30143","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Una Raza, Dos Etnias\u2019: The Politics Of Be(com)ing\/Performing \u2018Afropaname\u00f1o\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Una Raza, Dos Etnias\u2019: The Politics Of Be(com)ing\/Performing \u2018Afropaname\u00f1o\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 3, Issue 2<\/a>, 2008
\nDOI: 10.1080\/17442220802080519<\/a>
\npages 123-147<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9e Alexander Craft<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies
\nUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill<\/em><\/p>\n

This article analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panam\u00e1 by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panam\u00e1nian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category \u2018Afropaname\u00f1o\u2019 at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panam\u00e1 exists around the politics of Afrocolonial (Colonial Black) and Afroantillano (Black West Indian) identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. This essay examines the major discourses that shaped \u2018blackness\u2019 in four key moments of heightened nationalism in 20th-century Panam\u00e1. I refer to these moments as: Construction (1903\u20131914), Citizens versus Subjects (1932\u20131946), Patriots versus Empire (1964\u20131979), and Reconciliation (1989\u20132003).<\/em><\/p>\n

In Panam\u00e1, Blacks are not discriminated against because they belong to a low social class, they belong to a low social class because they are discriminated against (Justo Arroyo, African Presence in the Americas)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Los blancos no van al cielo,
\npor una solita mafia;
\nles gusta comer pa\u00f1ela
\nsin haber sembrado ca\u00f1a<\/em><\/td>\n		[Whites do not go to heaven
\nfor a single reason
\nThey like to eat sweet candy
\nWithout sowing sugar cane]<\/td>\n		\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\nChorus to a Congo song<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On Friday 26 May and Saturday 27 May 2006, I witnessed the inauguration of the first ‘Festival Afropanarneno’ in the Panam\u00e1 City convention center. Supported by the Office of the First Lady, the Panam\u00e1nian Institute of Tourism and the Special Commission on Black Ethnicity, the event included 20 booths featuring black ethnicity exhibitions, artistic presentations, food and wares representing the provinces of Panam\u00e1, Cocl\u00e9, Bocas del Toro, and Col\u00f3n\u2014the areas with the highest concentrations of Afropanarne\u00f1o populations. As the Friday celebration drew to its apex, a special commission appointed by President Mart\u00edn Torrijos<\/a> in 2005 presented him with the fruits of their year-long endeavor: a report and an action plan on the ‘Recognition and Total Inclusion of Black Ethnicity in Panam\u00e1nian Society’. Using public policy advances in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean to bolster their case (such as Colombia’s 1993 Law of Black Communities, Brazil’s 1998 Body of Laws against Racial Discrimination, Nicaragua’s 1996 Law of Autonomy of the Atlantic Coast, and Peru’s 1997 Anti-discriminatory Law, 1997), the Special Commission built on the progress made through ‘El D\u00eda de la Etnia Negra’<\/em> [‘The Day of Black Ethnicity’] to open a wider space for the recognition of social, economic, and cultural contributions of black ethnicity to the nation-building process.<\/p>\n

Instituted into law on 30 May 2000, ‘El D\u00eda de la Etnia Negra’<\/em> is an annual civic recognition of the culture and contributions of people of African descent to the Republic of Panam\u00e1 (Leyes Sancionadas). The date 30 May coincides with the date in 1820 when King Fernando VII abolished slavery in Spain and its colonies, including Panam\u00e1. Significantly, the law stipulates that the Ministry of Education and the Institutes of Tourism and Culture should organize relevant activities to commemorate the holiday, and that all schools and public institutions should celebrate it as a civic proclamation of ‘black ethnicity’ contributions to the culture and development of Panam\u00e1 (Van Gronigen-Warren & Lowe de Goodin, 2001, p. 83). I have witnessed black ethnicity day celebrations in the cities of Panam\u00e1, Col\u00f3n and\/or Portobelo (located in the province of Col\u00f3n) each year from 2000 to 2006 and have watched them grow from a celebration limited to 30 May to an informal, week-long commemoration, to its most recent form ‘El Mes de la Etnia Negra’<\/em> [‘The Month of Black Ethnicity’].<\/p>\n

This essay analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panam\u00e1 by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panam\u00e1nian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanarne\u00f1o’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panam\u00e1 exists around the politics of Afrocolonial and Afroantillano identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. In the micro-Diaspora of Panam\u00e1, black identity formations and cultural expressions have been shaped largely by the country’s colonial experience with enslaved Africans via Spain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, and neo-colonial experience with contract workers from the West Indies via the United States’ completion and 86-year control of the Panam\u00e1 Canal. Blackness in Panam\u00e1 forks at the place where colonial blackness meets Canal blackness…<\/p>\n

…As in most Latin American and Caribbean countries, centuries of intermarriage between African, indigenous and, in the case of Panam\u00e1, Spanish populations yielded a large mestizo<\/em> (mixed race) classification. Throughout the 20th-century, the Congo tradition has consistently been identified by the community and the State as a black performance tradition even though the bodies of its practitioners have been categorized by demographic data as ‘mestizo’<\/em>. Four centuries of evolving interchange and dialectical assimilation in a territory the size of South Carolina has rounded the edges of Panam\u00e1nian blackness and whiteness without removing them as opposing place-holders on a spectrum of privilege. Considering ‘whiteness’ at the apex of privilege and ‘blackness’ at the base, Afro-Colonials remain on or near the bottom, even within the category of mestizo<\/em>. As Peter Wade (2003, p. 263) argues regarding mestizaje<\/a><\/em> in Colombia, ‘black people (always an ambiguous category) were both included and excluded: included as ordinary citizens, participatory in the overarching process of mestizaje<\/em>, and simultaneously excluded as inferior citizens, or even as people who only marginally participated in “national society”‘…<\/p>\n

…Part of the animosity directed toward West Indians was caused by Canal Zone Jim Crow<\/a> policies, which not only segregated West Indian workers as ‘black” and therefore inferior, but also constructed a blackness elastic enough for all Panam\u00e1nian workers, regardless of ethnicity, to fit uneasily and resentfully alongside them. Although the system of paying salaried workers in gold and of day laborers in silver began under the French-controlled Canal, these labels took on racial connotations under United States control, which translated ‘gold roll’\/’silver roll’ into ‘whites only’\/’blacks only’.<\/p>\n

Not only did the US system treat Panam\u00e1nian Canal workers as black immigrants in the belly of their own country, but it privileged West Indians over them because West Indians spoke English. Living in substandard conditions, in the staunchly segregated society of the Canal and paid a fraction of ‘gold roll’ salaries, West Indian workers still received wages almost double those of Panam\u00e1nians outside the Zone. Further, the more fluid Panam\u00e1nian ethnoracial caste system that had produced darker-skinned Panam\u00e1nian presidents and allowed for greater upward mobility within the system by acquisition of wealth, education and\/or marriage stiffened as a response to US Jim Crow attitudes and legislation (LaFeber, 1979, pp. 49-51). For these reasons, many Panam\u00e1nians, including Afro-Colonials, who often fell victim to the same Jim Crow attitudes that oppressed West Indians, resented them. To make matters worse, their collusion with the United States through English had rendered Panam\u00e1nians foreign within their own home country. This enduring sense of injustice exploded into a mid-century nationalist movement that inverted the paradigm privileging Spanish and relinquishing the citizenship rights of non-Spanish speakers, thus pitting Afro-Colonial communities against West Indians…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Una Raza, Dos Etnias\u2019: The Politics Of Be(com)ing\/Performing \u2018Afropaname\u00f1o\u2019 Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies Volume 3, Issue 2, 2008 DOI: 10.1080\/17442220802080519 pages 123-147 Ren\u00e9e Alexander Craft, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill This article analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panam\u00e1 by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,21,459,8,394],"tags":[1039,10289,14285],"class_list":["post-30143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","tag-latin-american-and-caribbean-ethnic-studies","tag-panama","tag-renee-alexander-craft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}