opinion

Alfredo Castillero Calvo, the promoter, director, editor, coordinator and principal author of the recently published and substantial work "Historia General de Panamá" (General History of Panama), introduces us to the same with these sage and veracious words: "The identity of a people is sustained upon the consciousness of its past. This identity is ever stronger and more solid with a sense of history, of belonging to a common past. But this accumulation of collective experiences over the centuries only acquires significance and transcendence when it is converted into written memory, now that this is how memory is made permanent and durable."

The enthusiasm that's inspired by having in our hands the five books contained in three volumes --- which contain more than 2,000 pages --- of works of research, of study and analysis, of experience and of knowledge of all those who came together for a great collective work, but "brought together under a common plan and some powerful ideas that serve as a general guide to the work" under the guidance of Castillero Calvo. Each and every one of the books turns us into discoverers of what is ours and leads us down roads that we have never traveled together, by way of the recognition of various social, political, economic, cultural and other facts of our rich, but until now unknown, history.

To try to review in a limited opinion column the reach and depth of the Historia General de Panamá is not what animates me to write, with emotion, admiration and respect, about this window on Panamanian existence. What moves me is that I want to attract the attention of my compatriots and of those who live under our same sky, to our joys and sadness, to our hopes and fears, which have been put into circulation in a work that opens eyes and illuminates our way in a situation wherein the deterioration of the professional politicians has left them too corrupted, bureaucratized and ankylosed, making it obligatory for citizens to stop being spectators and turn into actors and guides of our own future.

The Historia General de Panamá is not without reason a schematic work, and it's full of the necessary optimism that allows us to learn to reach out for that which we lack, and thus it must pass from its immediate nature as a book of readings to being something more obligatory, motivated, publicized, commented upon and analyzed, for and by every one of us, inside and outside the classroom, who cares to once and for all put us on the road toward gaining our freedoms.

The first volume, divided into two books, is dedicated to the original societies and the colonial order. A total of 19 chapters, encompassing more than 500 pages, takes us from pre-Hispanic Panama through the diverse phases of conquest and colonization, at the same time studying the social conflicts, and discussing and expounding upon "almost every human activity related to the people of the Americas and their ties with Spain."

The second volume is entirely dedicated to the 19th century and in it the works of a diverse collection of authors are added to the essays of Castillero Calvo himself to bring us more knowledge of this period. Thus we have Fernando Aparicio, Isabel Barragán de Turner, Everardo Bósquez de León, Guillermo Castro, Michael Conniff, Carlos Cuestas, Denis Javier Chávez, Vilma Chiriboga, Pantaleón García, Marixa Lasso, Aims C. McGuinness, Armando Muñoz Pinzón and Humberto Ricord, who provide us from their viewpoints valuable analyses about diverse and important subjects.

The 20th century occupies the two books of the third and final volume of the Historia General de Panamá. Closer to us, it turns out as noted in the introduction that: "it will not escape the reader that these write about facts that have touched our lives, as actors or as witnesses, reliving in this way the pristine sense of History."

Over the past four decades Alfredo Castillero Calvo, as an educator and researcher, but above all as an historian, has been known to teach us the necessary and the inspiring that is historical research and its meanings for different generations of Panamanians. The book that he brings us today, as editor of a collective work in which nearly 40 authors have participated, definitively makes him the Herodotus of our Panamanian history.



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