archival exploits, and going to church

Today was a long one: in the morning, I awoke with the construction din as usual, then proceeded to the Museo Afro-Antillano, which is housed in a little blue Methodist church in Calidonia. there i started photographing and documenting the Panama Tribune, a West Indian newspaper started in 1928 by Sidney A. Young and continued after his death by George Westerman. The museum contains two crumbling volumes of this paper, which seem to be passing inevitably into decrepitude. I hope they don't. What I've found there is a burgeoning community of sociable, intelligent, hard-working, and highly race-conscious individuals of West Indian and Afro-Panamanian (so-called "Panaman") descent. It's totally cool. There are articles about Shaka Zulu, W.E.B. DuBois, the Tuskegee Institute, and basically every other racially-inflected detail of US and European, and occasionally Caribbean and African, news. I've learned that 1) first lady Hoover caused an uproar by inviting a black woman, Mrs. De Priest, to tea and then compounded the national furor by shaking hands with a black man while on the campaign trail in the South; 2) with the fad for suntans, several white couples in DC were turned away from popular restaurants because the management thought that they were trying to impersonate the "Negroes;" 3) black workers were prominent in the 1929 May Day celebration, along with Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese workers; 4) Bessie Coleman was a prominent black female pilot; and 5) during an early use of the X-Ray in Cincinnati, several people were killed as the experiment went wrong and some sort of gas started a fire in a hospital; many were saved by a heroic black man; and 6) a pastor in Harlem shocked his parishioners by giving an alternate explanation for why Judas finked on Jesus - he posited that Judas was carrying on with Mary Magdalene.

And more, of course. In addition, the paper has a back-page column that is extremely sharp and prescient on issues like citizenship, Canal Zone labor and wage relations, and building solidarity networks among West Indians of diverse national origins. Of special interest to me was an article about a spokesperson for the newly-formed "Central Organization" who went to speak at a meeting of the Grenadian Protective and Benevolent Society at the Hall of the Union Co-operative Guadeloupen - this speech basically talked about how the different lodges and orders, of which there seem to be about a million, need to link up in order to protect the community from the dual onslaughts of angry Panamanian nationalists and racist imperial Zonians. Suffice it to say that self-reflexivity is high when survival's at issue.

Of course, this invites a number of questions, and I'm trying to keep track of all of them with some scribblings in a yellow legal pad that is by now rather soggy after some Panamanian monsoonlike conditions. Many of these questions revolve around the actual workings of the newspaper, for example: where are the editors getting their international stories? Is there a wire service, or is this information coming from US news services in Chicago or New York (two cities most often mentioned) - for example, from a paper like The Defender? And why these particular stories? And what about the conspicuous near-absence of labor issues in the Canal Zone, despite the recent strike that Carla Burnett discusses in her dissertation on Marcus Garvey and the U.N.I.A. (United Negro Improvement Association) in Panama? Another interesting issue is that this one irate guy keeps writing into the paper, one C.A. Coleman, who appears to be a writer for the Panama Star & Herald and keeps asserting that he's a member of the Race but is also very vehemently opposed to many of the arguments made by Westerman and others. Anyhow, the whole thing is full of mysteries, and I can't wait to go back there and look at it some more.

In terms of theatre and performance, I'm happy to report that there is WAY more substance about theatre/drama/perf than in any of the other papers that I've seen so far, including the Zonian Canal Record. Where the Zonian talks about the bored housewives putting on these amateur theatricals, the West Indian news discusses jazz, plays, parades, lodge activities, and all manner of social outings in Panama and the black parts of the segregated Zone. Also, the retention of cultural traits and activities like cricket, food preferences, the English language, and British-style educational and entrepreneurial institutions is noteworthy. I get the impression that Panama afforded (at least in the late 20s) a certain measure of financial stability as compared to the islands, one to which Panama businesses were definitely pandering, while privately (and also publicly) berating West Indians as interlopers and symptoms of US imperialism in the Zone.

Anyhow, newspapers, as I've gone on and on about, are important for both making explicit a public sphere and determining that sphere, to some extent. With this newspaper, I definitely get a sense of a minority subculture struggling to have a voice and spread awareness, despite obvious racial and cultural constraints. The politics of respectability are very thickly laid on this reading, however, so I'm not sure how the sphere ties in to reality. I would imagine that the paper paints a rosier and more optimistic picture of the community than is really the case, because all papers sort of tend to do this at the time. English in the 1920s is a different language, and there's a lot of mediation, which would suggest that a newspaper is not the same as demographic data, a chart of infant mortality rates, the "hard stuff." I am well aware of this; but then what do we make of the news? What do we do with it? Should we treat it as something between fiction and brief historiography? And what do we do when there are few other records of the quotidian aspects of life of a community that is ever-shifting in its population traits?

I say this because the West Indian "community" in Panama seems to be somewhat of a contradiction in terms, at least in the beginning. I'm slowly learning that the migration wave that added over a quarter to Panama's population was not a monolithic thing, though the bulk of it did occur in the US Canal period - 1904-1914 - but was, rather, a continuous trickle that had been going on for centuries, especially around the banana plantations in places like Bocas del Toro and Limón, Costa Rica. It's pretty hard to chart migration "patterns," because people were continually going to and leaving Panama for their home-islands or other places where jobs could be had. Family stability seems to have been low because of economic necessity, and let's not even talk about remittances. I'm only really talking about the period of roughly 184?-1920, because after that things got even wackier, what with West Indians marrying into Panamanian society and/or living in Panama off and on, and especially with the Canal's change to hiring women in the 1930s (?), which spawned (I would imagine) quite a different migration. So unlike the Zonians, who all go back several generations in the Canal Zone, many never leaving because the benefits were so good, the West Indians were constantly moving around. Also, when did they start visiting and settling in New York? This seems to have deeper historical roots than is known (well, let's be honest: little has been written about the whole New York branch of the diaspora, with the exception of George Priestley's work).

Okay, so there are some questions. Now on to the second half of the day: this was spent flagging a taxi (much harder to get now, with the ridiculous gas prices) and traveling all the way across the city, from Calidonia to Parque Lefebvre, one of the historic West Indian areas in Panama (along with Rio Abajo). What transpired here was a drawn-out and complicated but highly festive cooking class for some of the female members of the church (and one male). I made the acquaintance of the pastor, Rev. Michael D., who hails from the US by way of Okinawa and Berkeley (arguably another country) and schools his Episcopalian congregation against literalist interpretations of the Bible that condemn homosexuality, among other issues. Yay! He gave me quite a lot to process, and the ladies made all sorts of weird and highly-wrought concoctions, such as Chicken Cordon Bleu and eclairs and some fishy things and a great deal more. I have to say that some of these recipes failed - sorry, ladies - but there were others that seemed wacky enough to work, like a fried ball of plantain and cheese and some other unidentifiable stuff. Anyhow, the best part was hearing the ladies discuss their exploits in the kitchen - each was encouraged to introduce the food and its making. One of them, this sort of awesome figure who was losing her voice, told a story about her lack of cooking skills and finally said grimly, "Maté la levadura [I killed the yeast]" after mixing it with boiling water against the advice of the course's teacher, this dapper and very animated man who was dressed in a red and black pinstriped uniform and toque. I should mention that all the ladies wore toques. The one varón was an older gentleman who bowed solemnly and said, "I made the eponymous Chow Mein," which had featured in another story about the class. He spoke in reverential and somewhat droll tones, cracking quiet inside jokes that made the whole room roar. Then gifts and certificates of achievement were presented, and the whole thing managed to impress on me the idea that this had been quite an ordeal and a bonding experience for those involved.

There were also some really excellent matriarchs present, old ladies who clearly had been total foxes in their youth, and still basically were. One of them took my hand and pumped it energetically (though she looked to be about 100 years old) as she asked me about my stay here. She seemed really approving when I told her that I walked around alone and took cabs and spoke Spanish, etc. At one point she said, "But how do you protect yourself here?" and I replied, "When the taxistas try to charge me too much, I say 'Señor, no soy panameña, pero no soy idiota!" She thought that was hilarious. Anyhow, I promised to return for the 7:30 am English-language Sunday mass, which is done in high Episcopalian style, with processional rituals and all sorts of "bells and smells." This is followed by the Spanish-language youth mass, which is a lot more laid-back, with live salsa music and etc. I'm especially excited for the jazz drummer - this is the only church I've seen with an entire drumkit in the middle of the sanctuary - as apparently he's good with the gospel. The pastor plays bass, having allegedly played in New Wave bands in San José during that time, and the whole thing sounds pretty great.

More soon, time to work on my article.