From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions

Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama

By Carla Guerrón Montero

University of Alabama Press

A new reading of Panama’s nation-building process, interpreted through a lens of transnational tourism

Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla Guerrón Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic.

The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, Colón, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama’s narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. Guerrón Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.

From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions guides scholars interested in the thorny questions of tourism as the ubiquitous island model of development that it is and reminds us that such questions are intimately connected with the larger (and equally fraught) constructs of national and transnational identity, diaspora, and belonging in the age of neoliberalism.’
—The Latin Americanist

‘Provides a clear and comprehensive narrative of Afro-Antillean struggles for recognition in Panama.’
—Baron L. Pineda, author of Shipwrecked Identities: Navigating Race on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast

Guerrón Montero expertly weaves together nuanced explanations of important development concepts and detailed descriptions of Afro-Antillean life. Through in-depth participant observation (1996–2014), she is able to reveal the contradictory impacts of tourism development.’
—New West Indian Guide

‘[Guerrón Montero’s] book will be of interest to scholars and students in anthropology, history, communication, and ethnic and tourism studies who are interested in questions of power, labor, culture, and representation. It will be essential reading for those working on tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean because it invites them to learn about the myriad ways in which cultural representation can be mobilized as a tool for more inclusive tourism in regions that, as this one, are utterly dependent on the activity for their survival.’
—The Americas

Carla Guerrón Montero is professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is author of El Color de la Panela: Estudio sobre la Mujer Negra en los Andes Afro-Ecuatorianos and editor of Careers in Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century: Perspectives from Academics and Practitioners.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Panameñismo and Panameñidad: Converging Ideologies in the Construction of Panamanian National Identity

Chapter 2. Panama’s Temporary Migrants: The Afro-Antillean Presence in the National Narrative

Chapter 3. “Panama Is More Than a Canal”: The Twenty-First Century and the Panamanian Tourism Industry

Chapter 4. Touring the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro

Chapter 5. Afro-Antilleanness Represented: Museums, Theme Parks, and the Manufacturing of History

Chapter 6. The Permanent Attractions: Music and Cuisine as Malleable “Ethnic Commodities”

Chapter 7. Conclusions: Afro-Antillean Identity Construction, International Tourism, and the New Symbols of Panameñidad

Glossary