Bringing Panama’s West Indian Voices to the Forefront
Posted on June 26, 2008

In the United States there have been a plethora of initiatives advocating diversity and cultural awareness in school, the workplace, and in society at large. However, the histories of various ethnic and racial groups are still ignored or treated inadequately, their stories remaining undocumented. In many cases, the historical accounts that are available are neither written nor informed by the people who experienced the events themselves. In this country, history is still generally filtered through a Eurocentric perspective.

In an effort to correct and enrich historical accounts of peoples in the Americas, Dr. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo has founded a new project called “Voices from Our America”(TM): Panamanians of West Indian Descent”. This initiative was created to gather, preserve and disseminate Panama’s West Indian history—in Panama, the U.S. and beyond.

Originally from Jamaica, Nwankwo is an English professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Nwankwo and her team have been working with scholars and community members to bring the history of West Indian Panamanians into the limelight. The VFOA(TM) team includes Nyasha Warren, on-site project manager in Panama, Kari Brown, president of KCB Consulting and assistant project manager for Public Relations, and Veronica Forte, workshop leader and community organizations liaison. The project has benefited from the support of the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Science and the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt.

There are two initial core endeavors of the VFOA project: gathering individual oral histories through interviews utilizing a standardized questionnaire and disseminating this first-hand information. These efforts are foundational to VFOA’s mission to facilitate cross-cultural and cross-generational conversations about the experiences of Afro-Latino and Afro-Caribbean people in and from Panama. VFOA anticipates that schools, universities, community organizations and individuals in both Panama and the U.S. will benefit from its ongoing research, preservation and dissemination activities.

VFOA Respondents and Their Stories
Among VFOA’s interviewees are 91-year-old Edmund Gobern, who shared his experiences from his days as a student and baseball player in Panama City and Bocas del Toro. Another interviewee is Dr. Carlos Russell, an author, playwright and retired Brooklyn College professor in New York who spoke of the connections between African-American and Panamanian West Indian political movements. A third is ethnomusicologist Leslie George. George has lauded VFOA as a project that can rescue “experiences that indicate values of the West Indian identity in Panama, [such as] old Afro-religions [and] colloquial vocabulary.”

Other important insights have come from Panamanian elders who have shared their stories of the striking differences between living in the Canal Zone and living in the Republic. The Canal Zone was operated by White U.S. administrators who imposed U.S.-derived Jim Crow laws on West Indians and their descendants working and living in the Zone.

VFOA is partnering with local Panamanian organizations as part of its commitment to educating the community. In August 2007, Forte, an active member of the Society of Friends of the West Indian Museum of Panama, coordinated that organization’s annual “Conozca Su Canal” (Know Your Canal) event. Public and private schools in Panama competed to determine which school’s students knew more about their West Indian ancestry. VFOA awarded books on the history of the Panama Canal to each participating school.

VFOA has also offered workshops at Panamanian “Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages” conferences and events and participated in Martha Productions’ annual Black Ethnicity events. Just completed was an educational initiative called the VFOA Oral History Project and Student Competition(TM). In April and May of this year, students interviewed VFOA respondents and then competed to create the best PowerPoint presentation of those oral narratives as part of their Black History Month project.

In the future, VFOA’s team will continue to host workshops, interactive activities for community members and educational curriculum development groups. The team will also return to Bocas del Toro and Colón, where they have already begun work, and conduct interviews with Panamanian West Indians elsewhere. VFOA values the community and is dedicated to ensuring that Panama’s West Indian voices are heard. For they, too, are Americans.

For more information about VFOA or to share your experiences, contact the research team at voicesamerica@gmail.com, 615.322. 2329 in the U.S. or 011.507.6.750.3746 in Panama.

Violeta Donawa is a recent graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit. She can be contacted at violeta.donawa@gmail.com.