Discovering My Panamanian Self
Posted on May 12, 2008

Imagine an American Black girl, raised in an 83 percent African-American city, with exclusively African- American friends, attending African-American schools, who can proudly tell you about African-American history and who speaks one language, English.

You may think you know enough about me to identify my ethnicity as African American. Simple, right?

Wrong.

This American Black girl is the product of an African-American mother and a Panamanian-born father. My name is Violeta. I love to eat patacones and Panamanian tortillas. I have been to the fritangas. I know about Panamanian history. I also take pride in my West Indian roots—my father’s family immigrated to Panama from Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, to build the Panama Canal.

This is the story of a girl who identifies as bi-ethnically Black. All my life, whether around African Americans or non-Black Latinos, my multifaceted identity has been rejected and misunderstood. People’s ignorance, coupled with my inability to explain my background, made me feel invalidated. So I decided to educate myself about my Panamanian heritage, so that I could educate others.

I was born and raised in Detroit. The first few years of my life I lived in a two-parent home. When I was 4 years old, my parents split. While both my parents were always in my life, I was primarily raised by my mother. I attended all of her family gatherings and events, but seldom did I do this with my father’s side of the family.

As much as I loved them, my ears were not accustomed to hearing their beautiful Panamanian accents—the roll of their r’s and their Caribbean inflection. Every word they spoke intimidated me. Even though I understood my father perfectly well, I knew this intimidation would thwart the process of learning Spanish.

This concerned me. I felt that being able to speak Spanish would validate my name and my claim to be part of a Spanish-speaking family. I figured if I had looked “mixed,” no one would question my background. As a child, I thought that being able to speak Spanish would offset the fact that I was Black and didn’t have long, curly hair.

The extent of my father’s Spanish lessons growing up largely depended on how many times I asked for Spanish translations of English words. He also taught me Spanish numbers. Best of all, he taught me how to say “I love you” in Spanish every time we got off the phone at night.

Clearly, I needed to know more than “I love you” and how to count in order to become fluent in his first language. But I understood that a factory worker in Detroit clocked long hours and constant overtime shifts to maintain a certain standard of living—the one my father gave our family. I understood that he couldn’t always be available. So I began teaching myself Spanish and later sought out my aunt as my tutor.

I also asked this same aunt to teach me our family history. She told me about the racism that my grandmother experienced when she came to Detroit in the early 1960s to work for an upper class, Jewish family. She told me how she, my grandfather, other aunts and my father lived in Panama for five years without my grandmother while she worked in the States, until she could get their papers in order to bring them to Michigan. She taught me the Panamanian idioms that were missing from my Spanish textbooks.

I was around 20 by the time I approached my aunt, and I knew far more than she expected. I had learned Spanish grammar rules from college courses. Also in school, I had learned about Latin American countries and territories such as Mexico and Puerto Rico—everywhere accept Panama. Textbooks showed me many Latinos faces, although never a Black one. But I had already taught myself about Panamanian geography, politics, history and people.

Still, my own identity confused people, including me. I needed to understand how other Black Panamanians negotiated their racial and ethnic identities. In 2005, under the mentorship of Wayne State University professors Jorge Chinea and Nicole Trujillo-Pagan, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Karla Slocum, I was awarded funding to conduct my research project “Exploring the Afro-Latino Presence: The Afro-Panamanian Experience in Michigan.”

I could only conduct seven in-depth interviews. But even within such a small sample, identities varied greatly. Of course, my interviewees claimed Panamanian cultural identity. But some also expressed additional identities, such as Caribbean, West Indian, Latino, Black, Black Hispanic and African American.

Six participants were born in Panama and one was born in the U.S. I found that geographic location and upbringing played a large role in how these Black Panamanians identified. Factors included which language they were taught first and whether they were of West Indian heritage or were descendants of freed slaves who had lived in Panama as far back as the 16th century.

My father came to Detroit in the 1960s, when he was 16 years old, during some of the city’s worst race riots. He soon learned that racism in the States was overt. The color of your skin directed you to certain neighborhoods regardless of your ethnic identity. I believe these experiences and my father’s knowledge of the systemic racism in the U.S. brought him to raise me as “Black.”

It was important for my dad to teach me how to navigate life through a Black lens. He helped me understand how U.S. society functioned, as well as the importance of hard work, family, reading and travel. He always told me there is more to the world than Detroit. I listened.

In my hometown, the status quo is to equate Black identity with African-American identity. I never felt comfortable with this. I always felt pressured to choose between being African American or Panamanian. Why choose when you’re both? Starting with my friends and academia, I’m raising awareness about identity.

My purpose for sharing my story is simple—I want adults to understand that it’s important to teach children their history, even if they resist, even if you become tired, even if it seems that there are more pressing matters to take care of. That way, they will not have to struggle to understand themselves and their family’s place in the world.

My self-discovery is a life-long process. I need to understand the America in which I live. I need to understand the Panama from which my father came. And I need to understand the Africa from which my people came. My lack of knowledge about one piece of me, inspired me to open my mind and see that there’s so much more to who I am. And it’s all good.

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