The First Diggers- The “Silver Roll”

Above we have an old "French Canal"
image from 1886 of a West Indian
excavation crew in the Paso Obispo Cut.
Image thanks to
www.canalmuseum.com

The black employees or the “Silver Roll” labor force, as it was named from the beginning, constituted the bulk of the work force on the US Government's Canal Zone and canal construction projects at any time in the history of those projects. In fact, it had been so since the inception of the works and into the creation of what would become known as the “Canal Zone” area of Panama.

In their majority the West Indian laborers who had been contracted, largely as regular employees, would reach the ranks of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Initially, the Jamaicans, who were looked upon as skilled employees, were then the workers who met the hordes of laborers freshly arriving at the piers. Many non contracted Jamaicans, those who had not come in under contract from their homeland, in fact, were the men who would reach the work sites and pickup points first to welcome them as they were hired on the spot.
Nevertheless, as the works progressed and out of eagerness to demonstrate their skills, the pioneering Jamaicans were called upon to be the black bosses and group leaders, amongst the thousands of black workers who often resembled hordes of ants as the labor force would descend upon the excavation sites. At this time it was not unusual for the arriving Westindians, many having paid their way to arrive, to see Black men driving heavy equipment such as gigantic shovels, earth movers with the largest of buckets, and bulldozers designed to reduce even the most stubborn of mountains. The thousands of tons of earth and rock being moved by these industrious men were then piled onto waiting locomotives being attended to, again, by completely Black crews. From the engineers to the brake and flag waving signal men they, the black men, moved the trains in and out of the area after being filled.

As in the beginning, the times required the use of men who could withstand the harshness of the deathly climate and an environment of working conditions that proved to be no respecter of color, race or class. These men worked under conditions of extremely hot and humid temperatures, under torrential rains for most of the twelve moths of the year. The conditions, however, did take its toll on even the hardiest of Black West Indian workers as evidenced by the horse driven hospital coaches and the funeral trains that were kept quite busy.

On the job accidents such as men falling off trains, or the numerous dynamite explosion accidents that ripped their bodies apart were very frequent. The stoicism and sheer hardiness of the men, however, kept the works advancing and soon Blacks were being recruited as office workers, hospital and medical assistants and other field staff, which required assorted clerical skills. This crucial period between 1900 and 1910, required that people acclimatize quickly, if they did at all survive.

The year 1905 would find a black labor force really content to be employees of the so awaited works on the Inter-oceanic Canal. To endure years of unemployment and now be employed as leaders of the newly recruited workers who would assist in meeting the arriving boatload of contracted blacks from islands all over the Caribbean was now a welcomed challenge. The Jamaicans were the experienced and capable black foremen, for whites from the United States at this time were very few, and if they lasted for more than a year and did not die in this rugged and merciless climate, they would be counted among the white “Gold Roll” foremen.

Black citizens from the U.S. were not encouraged to work, and if, by chance, they were hired, they were treated as Silver Roll employees even though they were Black American Citizens. Historical records reveal that in the beginning of the canal works resumed from the French period, there was sparse representation of any American citizen at all on the work force.

As it was during the French Dig, so it was with the American project- the Westindians, as a workforce, were the bosses and foremen to the throngs of Black, Chinese and Hindu laborers. They engineered the works in the great holes known as the Cuts and were recognized as the First Diggers. In fact, since the periods of U.S. mercantilist security pacts, through the American Railway period (1848) and into the second or American canal dig, they were there to power the preliminary works that needed to be done before the boatloads of black laborers would take their first step on Panamanian soil in the later months of 1903 even before the country had been officially recognized as a free republic.

This story will continue.
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In Recognition of Our Technical Help

Image thanks to www.classroomclipart.com

Several of our faithful readers have commented on the neater and more expanded look of our template here on blogspot.

We just wanted to give a little credit where it is due. In so far as this 3 column Scribe template, all of the custom fixes have been provided by Bizwhiz over at Tips for New Bloggers . They also provide lots of help for all the other Blogger template styles. So far, they have been the most tried and tested help site and they very patiently respond to your most basic questions. Even for a real “dummie” at html code like me this site has been extremely helpful.

A big thank you and “Cheers” to the folks at Tips for New Bloggers. Read more!

"The Diplomatic Steal of the Century" 1903

Top: Phillipe Jean Bunau-Varilla
Bottom: John Milton Hay, U.S. Secretary of State
Together they were primarily responsible for the
"Diplomatic steal of the Century" of 1903
Images thanks to www.wikipedia.com

For people of color and the lower classes at the turn of the century in that neglected province of Colombia as Panama was, the times called for innate cunning and craftiness that would transform such a person into a visible yet invisible individual, as the occasion required. However, the form that this adaptiveness would take for the West Indian Blacks and AsianPanamanians to survive such an atmosphere was used to the best of their abilities. Some of the West Indians did migrate to the far flung provinces just as the Asian Chinese did as that year of 1903 unfolded following the tragedy of the sacrifice of a genuine hero to make way for the resulting give-aways in the tenuous independence of our beloved Panama.

At this stage, the West Indian Blacks still apprehensively walked the streets of the capital city of Panama, although they strolled a bit more sure footedly up Front Street of the city named for the American, William Aspinwall of the Panama Railroad, known today as Colon. By then the undercurrents of political intrigue were emerging into their true character. Months after the execution of Victoriano Lorenzo in that benchmark year of 1903, the U.S. protected portion of the region, the railway, offered safe haven not only for the few mostly U.S. citizens brave enough to venture into a place like the Panama of those days, for it was a virulent environment known for certain and swift death for any white person due to the numerous plagues that abounded.

It also offered safety and opportunity for the operators of a rail road the control of which had been recently regained from the bankrupted French Company. Such an opportunity had practically presented itself on a platter to the eager Panamanian citizens who were employed on the rail road. The encouraging and even bribing of those “Panamanian Revolutionaries” from the elite class to accept employment assured them security as they planned the move to separate from the Colombians.

It is noteworthy to remember that a revolutionary junta was being organized at this very juncture even though the Colombian Congress had rejected the Hay-Herran Treaty which, if ratified, “would have allowed the United States to acquire a renewable 99-year lease on a 6-mile wide strip across Panama (which was then part of Colombia) for $10 million and an annual payment of $250,000.” Ratified by the U.S. Senate on March 14, 1903, it was not passed by the Colombian Senate and, therefore did not take effect.

But, a planned uprising was brewing in Panama. The Revolutionary Junta, composed of such names as Jose Augustin Arango, a young lawyer, Manuel Amador Guerrero, the president of the Junta, and Carlos Arosemena who were both from elite Panamanian families and who were all employed by the Panama Railroad Company was completely supported and aided by the United States. Jose Augustin Arango, according to chroniclers, was the brain of the brewing revolt while Amador Guerrero was an active leader.

It was also curious to note that the Frenchman, Philippe Jean Bunau-Varilla, who had not too long before negotiated the bankruptcy sale of the first Canal Digs by the same French Company, would be key man in the negotiations with the US government, and active financier of the cost and terms of the negotiations, while all the privileged actors in the region of Panama enjoyed the protection of the USA Naval forces, acting under the umbrella of the 1846Bidlack-Mallarino Treaty with Colombian authorities.

Such a treaty as the Bidlack-Mallarino had secured for the USA the rights to intervene in any disorder on the Isthmus, and already had previously in other times been invoked as the U.S. armed forces quieted what was described as the Pedro Prestan uprising, a rebellion in which a Black man of Antillean roots was tried under a US Armed forces court martial and sentenced to hanging being a citizen of a foreign country.

On the 3rd November of the year 1903 the Revolutionary Junta, acting under the authority of the city council of Panama City declared itself sovereign and independent. The then president of the United States of America, Theodore Roosevelt, recognized the Panama Junta as a defacto government on November 6 of 1903. Five days later the same Phillipe Jean Bunau-Varilla, acting as the diplomatic representative for the Republic of Panama, concluded the Canal Convention of what later would be recognized as the "diplomatic steal of the century" with Mr. John Hay, U.S. Secretary of State.

The rights granted to the United States in Bunau-Varilla Treaty (signed on 18 November 1903) were extensive, to say the least. However, considering the times, when piracy was one of the acceptable ways in which governments acquired land and kingdoms, the USA acted with some restraint. This story will continue.
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The Changing of Attitudes- Looking for a Bonding Source

Decades have come and gone since the first and larger groups of eager laborers arrived on the Isthmus of Panama to survive the harshness of the climate and the overpowering burden of laboring daily from before the break of day until long past sundown. We will soon see, as we enter the canal construction era, that the earlier period brought untold sickness and death among the laborers both on the area of the railroads, banana plantations and the Inter Oceanic Canal projects, all without the proper recompense for time and the type of labor. Whether it took human power or with the assistance of heavy machinery, the planned projects drew from the presence of all groups of coolie labor.

It would seem that destiny has left it to our rapidly changing times for us to be able to see such changes occur, particularly the medium we have gotten to know as the Internet. For us who have braved total illiteracy and many other obstacles and have sought to find, through this medium, that bonding agent with a powerful agglutinating force is a miracle of untold value. Indeed, to be present in these historic times and to continue in the hope that we may witness any unifying event that would bring together the remnant of all the Diasporas of our peoples from the four corners of the world is extraordinary in and of itself. We eagerly, and lovingly, share our prayer that our people here in the country of Panama, related as human beings, if not by blood, then by historical events, would, for once, come together united.

We who belong to the groups of foreigners at the turn of the 20th century in Panama and took part in the major projects of construction designed and aimed at making our world more tolerable for all people, cannot help but remember that we were targeted for expulsion and derision. Despite the best of governmental intentions and political propaganda, our world today remains a myopic one, still as confusing as the times when our forefathers disembarked on the beaches and docks of our country.

As wrong as it may seem, we remain as lost as separate groups of citizens alienated from the country's political scene as we are of one another, having nothing to do with one another. We, as second and third generation Panamanians, however, who have been blessed to be born citizens of a great patrimony, should, during these crucial times, come to the light of the matter and adopt one another as people who “shared” ancestors during the same historic times.

It was our ancestors who were decimated by the arduous labor that took most of them to their graves and left their traces buried in this land which became their adopted home and which was, and still is, visited by the spirits of all our ancestors. It is time enough for us to come to terms with the indisputable historic facts and that our existence in this part of the planet earth is directly related to the “feelings” our ancestors had about freedom and justice. Of such ideas and ideals, can we second guess the insight of our beloved ancestors? If not, then we must strive to understand that we have a direct line of inheritance to claim on unpaid labor that our ancestors could not even dream of demanding payment for.

Such a debt cannot be perceived as a token recognition but, together as one force of the Panamanian citizenry, we can demand that such a debt be paid. At this moment in time we owe it to our Black, Chinese and Hindu ancestors to demonstrate the awareness required and learn to reject what today is the traditional mode of “relating” to one another reflecting negative attitudes that still persist in our midst. We should unite to reach out to each other as powerful groups, as our ancestors would have dreamed of doing, forsaking the old attitudes of those who are not willing to accept themselves and our ancestors as being a part of our Panamanian cultural heritage.

Our aim should be to reeducate our people to desist from accepting attitudes encouraged by even our present society. We do well to join the spirit that abhors racial discrimination and even go as far as rejecting that present way of thinking found among most people of Asian ancestry in our country who possess a standoffish attitude towards us, the heirs and remnant of West Indian Blacks. They still refuse to remember that we descend from our ancestors who shared the same pains of those historic times and were joined with their brethren in labor struggles. We must underscore that attitudes can be changed although we have felt such attitudes coming from among our Asian counterparts for decades.

In all candidness, however, we Blacks have been rather naive as history goes, always willing to share and to use whatever we had at our disposal to communicate to all factions of the "Arrabal" community of the country of Panama our particular abilities. We cannot, in fact, say the same for our Asian counterparts who have rarely been willing to communicate with us, or share the leanings and teachings of their language and culture with us who did share our history of Panama with them. The time now is ripe, a time for us all to come out of that quagmire of what has been keeping us apart, virtual strangers in our country.

We may site many examples and there remain with us people willing to give witness to personal accounts of our Black Antillean teachers who gave wholeheartedly of themselves. These were individuals who, in those early years, used their meager resources towards the cause by turning Panamanian children, sons and daughters of neighbors and friends, into functionally literate persons; into persons who could ultimately compete with official school graduates, and hold positions as qualified professionals. Often, these products of the West Indian school masters were very able and literate in both English and Spanish.

It is our humble view that we are in need of each other, for we each have views to make public of what has been kept us from realizing that dream of our ancestors, to keep that dream they had alive to be free and able to come and go like the ships that transit daily from Asia to Panama and vice versa. No one who has been knowledgeable of the Panamanian Westindians could accuse us of being a people that are not willing to share the changes of our times. The facts have always proven our case, and they continue to even today and, today, with the aid of the tools of cyberspace we challenge the old, callous and misguided attitudes. This story will continue.
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Did the Chinese Relate to the West Indians?

A Chinese Coolie circ. 1900
Image thanks to www.wikipedia.com

Since the earliest days of the rail road and the Banana Plantation development in the Central American and Caribbean region of our continent, the Chinese have appeared alongside the Black West Indian slaves. So close did they labor and relate to each other that studies have shown the African serfs to have adopted some of the nuances of the Chinese culture in their day to day folk ways and even in their outlook on life.

However, in the Panamanian and Central American Theater, very little has survived the long gone days of coolie contracted laborers to be of any noticeable influence in our cultural life derived from the Chinese interaction with us. We, especially, that are taking a closer look at that bygone age can find very little of the black West Indian influence in the Panamanian Chinese culture of today.

Today, from our globalized perspective we can allow ourselves a closer look at what has become of such a close relationship between the two largest groups of the most segregated of human beings in the country of Panama. If we hang on to the premise that humans are rational beings sharing some of the same moral and ethical values, then we must review our common human values for proofs that those moral precepts have the same meaning for all of us, the heirs of our planet. We can argue, then, that since the Panamanian West Indians shared common experiences with the Chinese and Hindu, then we should have fostered a strong alliance.

In fact, Panamanian history reveals that the Asians and West Indians, despite being the key to the making of the country called Panama, have suffered shameful episodes of expulsion and the derision of being declared “prohibited immigrants.” Even as late as the 1940’s, during a time of relative peace in our country, a period of potential for economic and social progress, there did not appear to be any agglutinating force or sentiment that would make those three groups of foreigners remain together as an invincible force in one of the most backward countries of the hemisphere.

Nothing, in fact, could be further from my most idealistic notions, since of all of the most noticeable factors to emerge during those years that they shared as a community of laborers, very little has survived to demonstrate that there would have been any sharing at all with those communities of Asian people. I’ve often asked myself, “Was it the intransigence of the Black West Indians that promoted that shameful separation?” However, as a participant observer I can emphatically testify that it was not so, since the respect for the Asian civilization that our ancestors felt was passed down to us, the remnant of the West Indians, even today. Our ancestors, upon the arrival of the Chinese, knew that they were a wrenched people coming from a long and illustrious culture.

Although we have our thoughts as to whether our ancestors were aware of that venerable Chinese teacher, thinker and philosopher, Confucius, whose teachings have deeply influenced Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese life and thought, we still look back in amazement at finding a surviving ancestor in the person of Luisa, a West Indian mother of the Pueblo Nuevo area of the city of Panama, who had been married for over 70 years to a former Hindu coolie man. I further wonder how often this phenomenon actually occurred and if these examples of the union of our cultures were all as successful as Luisa and Jack’s union.

Still, until the times of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, our people the Westindians, kept arriving in Panama, as did the Chinese and Hindu, and as immigrants to Panama faced one overriding possibility- death. Between the years 1848 and 1906, when most of our ancestors arrived, some under contract and others paying their way to obtain employment, our people became the salvation of most of the people who arrived later, since most of them met their death as soon as they arrived in these parts.

Today, as we witness the rapid disappearance of our peoples’ influence upon all of these other groups of survivors from the four corners of the globe, we continue to ask what are the real traces we have left in our small nation.

With the passing of time we also see how we, the West Indians, have always been on the less favored end of the scale of prosperity and that we, despite our century old coexistence with the Asians, have not retained any significant bond with our former coolie neighbors.
This story continues.
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The Christian Values of the Silver People

Images: Top-One of the first West Indian Catholic
places of worship: Paraiso Catholic Church
courtesy: www.czimages.com
Bottom- St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Santana
was later constructed for the West Indian believers.
courtesy: Mr. George Westerman

Those who would become the Silver People of Panama were and continue to be indisputable believers in Christian values having been indoctrinated since our forefathers appeared on the continent of the Americas to be Jesus loving, Bible spouting Christians.

However, the circumstances that permitted the Black Westindians to replace the native Black Latin-Americans who they found during the period we have studied revealed an attitude of “racial rejection” on the part of the all powerful Catholic Church. We do well to consider that if the Panamanian Catholic Church of the time was denying the Black Westindian a place in Christianity for being Black and foreign, were they also treating the “out-of-sight” native Latin-American Blacks the same rejecting way?

The Westindian workers not only brought their physical strength, intelligence and cunning in the ways of survival to the hostile, tropical environment of Panama, for that is precisely why the European and Yankee recruiters sought them out. They also brought with them their faith and their traditional beliefs in the Christian religion. Since the arrival of the very first “new” groups (new as opposed to the older groups that had arrived earlier to build the railroad) of West Indians on the Isthmus at the turn of the XXth century, the Bible and the Holy Scriptures would find a fresh new host country.

Many of the original “churches,” in fact, reflected the profound desire on the part of the newly arriving West Indians to express their spirituality and continue promoting the Christian values they had been brought up on in their native islands. At first, for lack of formal organization by the organized churches, the people themselves formed “churches” in their homes or, in more prosperous circles, private properties were purchased and converted into spiritual meeting places for the people to have a “spiritual life.”

These traditional churches were often founded on Christian teachings and the Holy Bible was preached. Churches like the Beji Nite church, and the healing churches set up by the various “Mothers,” which we shall cover more in depth in future posts, provided a spiritual home and a base for a people who arrived in a hostile and rejecting land but who, nevertheless, had to make the best of their new situation. These churches provided not only a spiritual and moral foundation to deal with much of the injustice that they were privy to but they often provided healing services for their physical ailments and, to a large extent, provided psychological therapy.

The history of our traditional and organized churches in Panama also reveals how many of the first evangelical churches easily took root on Panamanian soil and how the study of the Holy Scriptures was later promoted on the radio. Indeed, many of the Hispanic Panamanians were not only introduced to the Holy Scriptures by attending these services but also to the English language by way of these first Christian churches. This story continues.
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Fellows Christians in Our Midst

Top image: Boatload of Barbadian laborers arriving in Port of Cristobal
courtesy of: www.canalmuseum.com
Middle: Newly arrived Indian coolies in West Indies around 1900
Bottom: Political Cartoon of Uncle Sam dealing with the "coolie" situation in the U.S.
courtesy: www.wikipedia.com

As the River Chagres bid the people of this hemisphere to come see the Eden the Almighty had created, so did the Ganges in far away Asia, and the Yellow River take over the environment, forcing its peoples to congregate on its banks. Thus, people came from all over the continent of Asia, homeless and thirsty for the life force embodied in the rivers, the rivers that fed and nurtured them to health. And so it was with our Black Caribbean ancestors and other people who, hungry and thirsty for another way of life, flocked to the rich banks of a watershed like the Isthmus of Panama.

It was the Blacks from the neighboring British Antilles, however, the same hardy individuals who had scoured the Caribbean Basin by small boats for decades- even before the pirates and corsairs arrived on the isthmus- who knew about the different parts of the Central American and the South American coastline, thus arriving as a seasoned group of pioneers already versed in the rudiments of survival in this difficult terrain.

They, the Blacks, came to these shores before Americans and mingled with the people and the local slaves acting as freedmen. But, those who came in droves in the later part of the 19th century were trying to escape centuries of laboring for cruel slave masters who attempted to keep them in bondage in the questionable program of “gradual” emancipation called the apprenticeship system. Nevertheless, once they arrived many were able to survive the rigors and circumstances of a whole gamut of unexpected situations.

There was little competition for employment in an atmosphere where local Blacks were relatively few in numbers and outwardly shirked the rigorous laboring conditions. For, “Why should they work under such conditions when the land provided abundantly?” they reasoned. Even the preferred Europeans- Irish, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, and the Chinamen from Asia- died or quit the works in desperation, for it became, for all laborers, a trying of their resilience. Although thousands of men from diverse corners of the world came to the isthmus, few would last in those demanding environs.

Few scribes amongst the Blacks of the West Indies, however, would be inspired by their God to record their deeds (or misdeeds). The Book of Chronicles, one of the books of the Holy Bible translated and patterned after the English language of their former slave masters, which contained the recordings of the Jewish prophets, would avail them little at the hands of their new, cruel slave masters, who professed to be followers of the Christian teachings.

It is also not surprising that some of the Panamanian authorities on the subject of the later decades of the 20th century, in attempting to explain how they, the foreign Blacks, came to be such an influential force in their culture, said that "they formed communities separated from the larger society." Heavily influenced by racist assumptions, these same historians, in their majority of Latin American ancestry, never admittedly described any one of these Asian groups of immigrants as "a nucleus community separated by race, language religion and culture," despite the fact that those people of Asian ancestry had come from very distant lands and from completely diverse cultures and religions.

The West Indians had always been near and here, neighbors and fellow Christians, from places in the Caribbean Basin that only required hours or, perhaps, only as much as two days traversing since they were as near as a few hundred nautical miles away.
This story continues.

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No Foreigners in Our Country

The "Plaza de la Cultura y las Etnias,"
a monument paying homage to our "melting pot of races"
and cultures in Panama
was inaugurated on October 17, 2003,
and is located on Amador Causeway
just outside the city.
Image thanks to the Panamá América daily newspaper.

As we have already noted, all three actors arrived on the scene in and about the same time in the history of Panama, just as it occurs today in our country where a myriad of Chinese youth make all attempts at reaching the shores of Panama with the intention of reaching the streets of any of the Chinatowns in the USA. So it was in the days of our Black Westindian ancestors. Interaction between the Black Westindian coolies and the Asians could not have been more disastrous, as it would later develop. Today, we who observe the results of what transcended are witnesses of the often flawed relations which have followed us to this day.

To be a researcher and to find the meager sources for what had been the activities of our ancestors, is proof enough that comparisons force us to rely on our own assessment of what occurred in those earlier years, when some coolie groups thought themselves better, even superior, to the “other” coolies. For those foreigners, still obscured by the errors of the times, with some looking through the eyes of desperation for their own situation, yearning, perhaps, to die in the waters of the Sacred Ganges, there was a genuine fear to die like Westindian Blacks who were still viewing the surrounding landscape as if they were still in chains, shackled to their masters’ will and desires.

Nevertheless, there still exists a vacuum in our history, a space so wide that we have found it necessary to fill it with grains of sand- a primitive substance to build our bricks- with which we will use to construct the missing part of our fathers’ home, a home we hope will accommodate all our prodigal “coolies,” which today are lost to radicalism, vandalism and the plain ignorance which fear engenders in our human and materialistic hearts. Our tools, then, will be used to bring our neglected eyes into focus with hope to see clearly as we spread the bonding substance on them. Then, and only then, will we feel satisfied to stand back and observe with pride all who we have resurrected and placed as sustaining pillars in the structure of our historical home, who have always been our ancestors.

Regardless of their roles in our history, and the makeup of our beloved country of Panama, we are here claiming them all as part of we Panamanians. We hope that those who look through our telescope will see us today as those who have preceded us, but with a distinctly changed role to those who acted before us; through our lens we’ve become those who meet and worship together, unlike our repentant ancestors, who parted company as soon as they exited the stage of our theater in history, never again to meet.

We do well to ask, “How could we be led to find our ancestors, if it is only as recent as the last twenty years that we have been able to have real access to documents, trails, and traces of what they, our forebears, had really been.” Then, again, we have really only gotten to be “present” with each other in very recent times when we could count on our chosen sons, such as General Omar Torrijos, who really sacrificed himself to give us all, as Panamanian people, some example of Love of Country, for one can not love a country if one does not love its people.

But, how can one love a people who do not love themselves, a country that mimics ways foreign to what they hope to grow to be, nurturing a group of citizenry that makes all efforts to deny their fellow citizens their God given rights to life, liberty and happiness. This is the substance of our present reality, for we are not the infant people of Panama anymore; we have joined the big leagues and partake in all the games.

In actuality we cry when our sport luminaries lose, a disgrace to our “Panamanian-ess,” and we rejoice when they bring home the symbolic gold of championship. So then we are bonded closer than we imagine by our ancestry, for we are one as our country is one and the only Panama. We have that unique feature which is in no way a mark against us, but with us and within us. Our ancestors live forever, for they have left a trail for us to follow, of course, not as they did in their day, but a path all the same.

They continue to act upon our lives as surely as if they were alive and roaming the earth with us today. They have left us Westindians with an ancestry blazoned upon our identity with the colors of every flag in the glory of Europe, just as we have blended them here in our hemisphere with the essence of the flags of Asia and Africa. This story continues.
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Foreigners or Citizens: The Presence of the Asians and the West Indians

Images: Top: Chinatown in Panama City during Chinese New Year
Courtesy of: www.panama-guide.com
Bottom: One of the Original Commercial Chinese Vegetable Gardens
Courtesy of: www.czimages.com

The issue of race discrimination, in our view, has had great bearing on how the Asian people in the Republic of Panama have been able to survive periods of xenophobia, as much as the West Indian Blacks, and be included in Panamanian history. It remains a part of history, however, as yet untold, particularly their relationship to one another and especially to the Black West Indians in their midst.

As part of Panama’s tapestry of people who have survived, reaching 21st century Panama, the West Indian Blacks, however, have not that parallel with their other former coolie counterparts. Nevertheless, our story reveals nuances that are most impacting to the issues of human relationships as we study those issues between the inhabitants of our planet earth.

The Chinese and Hindu communities which also arrived in this isthmus at approximately the same time in history played their roles in different ways to meet the demands of the powers that contracted, and employed the often wretched, poverty stricken, men from Asia, who were recruited with promises that were never kept. They, mostly men, braved the times and circumstances to become farmers and small businessmen, and soon were able to remain a source of aid and comfort, an anchor, to their fellow immigrant countrymen until our present time.

It is our hope that with this series of articles, we are able to offer our readers a story worthy of their time. We ourselves hope to be no more than reflector, a mirror, or an optical instrument, the proverbial medium by which we can provide a view to a type of human interaction no one, as yet, has been able to relate.

We must underscore for our readers, however, that we are still dealing with the times during and after the genocidal attempt at extinguishing the life blood of our native, aboriginal people. It, as we have seen in former posts, was a period of history in which the continent was giving birth to a new race of people, born of the mixture of the races. Such an era spanned from the beginning years of the 18th century, from as far away as the state of California, in North America.

The period would have significance for the small strip of land which could and did unite the Atlantic with the Pacific oceans, the first to see an intercontinental railroad built in 1848-1855. The period also saw some dramatic and bloody times as the people of Panama dreamt of breaking with the powerful but corrupt Colombian government that fate had linked them to in 1821. The native Mexican people would also pass into colonial history as they were expropriated off their ancient lands and enslaved like the Blacks of the old southern United States.

Shortly after that period a frenzied race would be undertaken to build a railroad all over the United States that would do what had been accomplished in Panama. As in Panama, the Asians, particularly the Chinese, played an important role in this significant development of the western territories in the U.S.

As the Asian people acted out their roles, first as serfs, and then as small businessmen with contacts in the U.S. and Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, they would leave a legacy that merits recounting in the annals of Panamanian history.

Some of the same men, in fact, who later financed and built railroads in the U.S. during these periods, would still have power and control in our country fifty to a hundred years later. Since before the times of our last great and martyred native Indian general, however, Victoriano Lorenzo, our ancestors remained as travelers and then laborers in Panama. They, the West Indians, as well as their Asian counterparts had seen the same events. They are the present day ethnic minorities, still considered as foreigners in many circles, but Panamanian, nevertheless.

The Panamanian born Chinese, Hindus and the West Indian Blacks, continue to deal with the challenge, even today, of transforming the views of their fellow Panamanian citizens to see them as legitimate citizens and contributors to the culture and social climate of the country. This story continues.
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