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Volume 14,
Number 20 |
Also in
this section: Oral history project underway Panama's
West Indian heritage gets academic attention, documentation
by Eric Jackson An impressive data archive that's being compiled in Panama for a project directed out of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee promises to have uses that its compilers weren't particularly contemplating. The Voices From Our Americas project, headed by Dr. Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt and the author of Black Cosmopolitanism (University of Pennsylvania Press 2005) is recording and collecting oral histories from members of Panama's Afro-Antillean community. In a year and a half of work it already has 80 of these and, as any editor would know, faces a massive editing, transcription and indexing job, even as it gets more stories from the isthmus. Nwankwo, of Jamaican parentage but raised mostly in New Jersey and educated at Rutgers and Duke, is collecting oral histories from other Caribbean lands and Antillean peoples in the diaspora that has taken them to the United States, Britain, Canada and farther afield. Panama is a major focus of the study because in four massive waves --- in the mid-19th century with the construction of the Panama Railroad, then in the 1880s with the French Canal effort, a bit later with the establishment of banana plantations in Bocas del Toro and the Puerto Armuelles area and then with the early 20th century US canal construction project --- black people of Caribbean origin came to Panama. Afterwards many of these people set roots in Panama, becoming an integral part of our culture, while many others moved on --- some back to Caribbean lands, some to other parts of Latin America, many to England or other parts of what's now the British Commonwealth, and above all, by emigrating to the United States. Here in Panama, the intertwined Caribbean roots are complex. Consider that not all of the people who came in the great migrations were black, that our Hindu community first arrived by way of what are now Guyana and Trinidad-Tobago, and that some of Panama's prominent English-surnamed families are of Caribbean rather than North American origin. Consider that not all of the West Indians who came here were Anglophones --- we have always had immigration from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and to a lesser extent from Haiti, but of particularly important yet largely concealed influence were the women who came from French-speaking Martinique and to a lesser extent Guadeloupe during the US canal construction effort and ended up marrying men from the British colonies --- after a couple of generations their distaff side surnames disappeared from the lists of Panamanians' names, but remnants of the Franco-Antillean cultural influence persist. Then consider the effects of assimilation into and intermarriage with Panama's "colonial" blacks and other sectors of Panamanian society, which despite its racism has never had the social taboos against interracial marriages that were once enshrined in miscegenation laws in many US states. And Panama's just one piece of the vast complexity of the Caribbean diaspora, all of which is contemplated in the ambitious Voices From Our Americas project. Nwankwo's an English professor who's interested in preserving a cultural record for younger people. "With globalization, dominant cultures are asserting themselves and it's important, especially for the young, to make a record to give them a grounding," she told The Panama News. But the collection of oral histories that the Voices of Our Americas team is compiling, composed of interviews, mostly in English but some in Spanish and others that move back and forth between the two tongues, will surely be of interest to linguists. In English and other living languages, Nwankwo noted, "dynamism is the norm" and specialists will be able to hear that in the recordings. The project may be oriented toward the Afro-Antillean diaspora, but its archives will surely be useful for historians from Panama and the Caribbean countries who are more narrowly interested in their own national histories. In Jamaica, the satirical poem/song Colon Man, about the local man who comes back from Panama, making a fine show in his nice clothes and gold watch chain --- but not such a substantial one that he actually has a watch at the end of that chain --- is part of the cultural canon. Thus Jamaican scholars inquiring into the cultural or economic history of their country may want to explore the Voices From Our Americas files. Novelists and playwrights, and actors looking to get the accents just right, might use the oral histories to enrich the popular culture. Teachers who notice that, when mixed in the same school systems, Afro-Caribbean kids tend to do better than the descendants of those who were enslaved in the United States, may end up looking for clues as to why this is in the Voices From Our Americas recordings. Considering how many Panamanians of West Indian descent earned their American citizenship through service in the US Armed Forces, even the people who run that immense social experiment from the Pentagon may find some of the compiled information useful for military purposes. So where is this treasure trove of information to be stored? That hasn't been decided, but there's a good probability that, wherever the raw documents collected may physically reside, the edited and indexed Voices From Our Americas recordings will be published on the Internet. The project's work in Panama continues under the professional direction of Harvard-educated science teacher Nyasha Warren, with both contracted and volunteer help. If you are interested in helping out with this project in any way, email voicesamerica@gmail.com or phone (507) 6-750-3746.
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