Improvise

Carla (USA)

[Creative experiment]

I combined prompts for Day 1 (Tell a Story) with prompts for Day 3 (Be Dramatic) and experimented with both on a chapter I am writing about prejudice in Panama (I am an anthropologist and have worked in Panama for almost three decades at this point). The chapter is part of a book entitled The Politics of Prejudice. I combined telling a story (the first part, in the second person) about the arrival of Afro-Antilleans to Panama to work on the Panama Canal with a dialogue between "any Panamanian" and me about the common views of Panamanians about Afro-Antilleans. The story and the imagined dialogue are all based on ethnographic and archival research. Many, many, many details need to be fleshed out, but it was a nice challenge to think about the piece through the Creative Catalyst piece.
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For context, here is the title and table of contents of the chapter:

A Sea of Prejudice in the Latin American Melting Pot

  1. Introduction

  2. Panama, the “Latin American Melting Pot”

  3. Coconut Drifts, Chombos, Jumecos
    a. Thinking Ill and Thinking Favorably of Blackness
    b. Thinking Ill and Thinking Favorably of Neighbors

  4. A Certain Tropical Style of Racial Democracy
    a. Prejudice Expressed Through the Law
    b. The lived experiences of Prejudice

  5. Conclusions

  6. Introduction

You work day and night in the fields of St. Thomas to bring food to the table for you and your family. You hear about a mythical place called Panama, a land where the streets are paved with gold. Work-hungry, literally hungry, you decide it is time to leave the island and try your fortune. You cannot pass the opportunity to earn three times your usual daily rate as a plantation laborer in your native Jamaica.

Your mother cries, your siblings complain, but you keep at it. It’s an easy decision in many ways: life in St. Thomas is harder than usual, never mind that slavery ended a few decades ago; and the Canal people don’t even ask you for a passport, let alone a visa. If you cannot afford to save for a ship ticket, the Canal recruiter will pay for it. And if things don’t work as you planned, you can always return. These days, you can even choose between a British or an American steamship line since there is more than one ship sailing to the port city of Colon every day. Who knows, you might become one of those men your father admires so much and who comes to visit on the holidays with elegant clothes and gifts for everyone. A man of means and worldly, a Colon man.

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It must have been a scene to remember for peoples throughout the Antilles to view ships lined up, waiting for able men (and some women) to travel to the Central American country of Panama for assumed temporary work [MORE INFORMATION HERE].

The Central American country of Panama is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the Americas due to its geopolitical position as a “place of transit.” Resulting from important infrastructural projects [the Panamanian railroad, 1850-1855; the French (188-1890) and U.S.- (1904-1914) efforts to build the Panama Canal, and the construction of the Canal’s third locks, 1940-1942], thousands of workers from the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and Asia settled temporarily or permanently in the country, producing a “melting pot” like no other. Today, eight indigenous groups and at least two distinct Afro-Panamanian groups, Asian Panamanians, rural and urban mestizo groups, and increasingly large numbers of resident expatriates inhabit the country’s 29,157 mi². Accompanying this diversity, however, also came racial and ethnic prejudice at the institutional and informal levels. I detail how prejudice has been expressed legally and informally in Panama, stressing how prejudice is lived in a self-proclaimed racial democracy [MORE INFORMATION HERE].

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Excerpt from an imagined dialogue between the ethnographer and “Any Panamanian,” with an intervention from Afro-Antillean poet and novelist Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Cubena:

Carla: I want to understand why you think a person from the British West Indies would be inferior to you. What are the characteristics of Afro-Antilleans that you find different from yours?

Any Panamanian: I am not a racist, but Chombos are the worst. I am sorry to tell you this, but it is true. They are filthy because they eat a lot of curry and fish; they have strange beliefs. They speak in a strange way; they rarely learn Spanish because they prefer their broken English or patois, and when they are forced to speak Spanish, they have this thick accent that betrays them. They are strange; they are not like us.

Carla: I am not familiar with the term Chombo. Could you explain it to me?

Any Panamanian: Here in Panama, we use the word Chombo for black people born in Jamaica, Barbados, Martinique, St. Vincent, etc., or descended from them. Those people are different from the people who came as slaves to Panama, learned to speak Spanish, and became Catholic. The Chombos are so different from anyone else that we have a saying here in Panama: The Chombo is Chombo.

Cubena: Many Panamanians hate the Chombos because they are not all Catholics (since their grandparents were originally from the West Indies, many of them practice other religions); because they prefer to speak French and English in their homes; and finally because, according to racist Panamanians, too many Chombos have failed to participate sufficiently in the process of ethnic whitening in order to “better the race”—or to put it more frankly, to erase all that is African. As a result, all traces of an African gene or phenotype are hated and rejected: the woollen hair, the flat, broad nose, the thick lips, and above all, the black skin of the Chombos (1998:41).

Victoria Silwood