Domestic Empires, Imperial Ruins: Changes in Panamanian Cultural Geography

Domestic Empires, Imperial Ruins:

Changes in Panamanian Cultural Geography

Laura A. Leibman, Reed College

Abstract

The Panama Canal has played a crucial role physically and symbolically

in U.S. empire-building in the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the

cultural geography of the Panama Canal Zone in the early twentieth century, the

transformation of the “Zone” into Panamanian space near the century’s end, and

the incorporation of imperial motifs into late twentieth-century Panamanian

domestic architecture, I demonstrate how the changing role of the canal in the

U.S. empire was mapped onto the landscape. Late twentieth-century Panamanian

architecture reflects and comments upon the failed U.S. imperial project. The

earlier vision of the canal as a “gateway to the east” was eventually replaced by a

discourse of imperial ruins.

Domestic Empires, Imperial Ruins:

Changes in Panamanian Cultural Geography

1

Although little had been written about the architecture and cultural

geography of Panama or the Canal Zone, the Panama Canal historically played a

crucial role physically and symbolically in U.S. empire-building in the twentieth

century.1 When it was built, the canal was a weighty symbol of the United States'

strength--her ability to triumph where France and her dying empire had failed.

Moreover in times of war the canal proved essential for maintaining U.S. power,

as it allowed the U.S. to transfer the fleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back

again quickly and efficiently. By the end of the twentieth century, however, other

forms of moving cargo have made the canal less necessary, both economically

and militarily (Smolowe 1989). The changing role of the canal in the U.S. empire

was mapped onto the landscape. Late twentieth-century Panamanian architecture

reflects and comments upon the failed U.S. imperial project: just as the United

States used imperial symbolism in the original urban planning of the Canal Zone,

in the late twentieth-century U.S. residents and Panamanians used the motif of

ruins to build contesting narratives regarding the end of U.S. imperial rule. While

the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone were constructed at the opening of the

twentieth century to embody the triumphal connection between East and West,

Panamanians at the last century's end busily transformed their recent acquisitions

into a new vision of empire, a vision that transformed the wreckage of earlier

imperial powers into a new aesthetics and ethos.

The imperial power embodied within the actual canal was reflected

symbolically in the original architecture and urban planning of the U.S. Canal

Zone, the strip of land extending 10 miles wide on either side of the canal and

running the width of the country from Colon (on the Caribbean side) to Panama

City (on the Pacific). These two concepts--the canal and the Zone—were

LEIBMAN, “DOMESTIC EMPIRES, IMPERIAL RUINS”

2

historically so intertwined within the Panamanian cultural imagination, that when

Panamanians refered to "the canal" they tended to include the Canal Zone and the

resources within that zone within that title. In part this is because there is

coherence between the architectural program of the canal and the Zone. The canal

became part of the architectural landscape of the ideal city. Likewise in the

Panama Canal Zone, the imperial power embodied in the canal itself was rife

throughout the symbolic architecture of Canal Zone's urban spaces. Much of this

architecture was still in place when the canal reverted to Panamanian control at

the end of the twentieth century, and its presence continued to shape people’s

response to the Zone.

In its heyday, the demarcation between the Zone and Panama proper

would have been perceptible even to the most naïve of viewers. One summer in

the 1970s when the Canal Zone was still owned by the United States, my parents

worked at the Smithsonian-run research station in the center of the canal.

Although I was quite young at the time, the difference between U.S. space and

Panamanian space was palpable, though I would have been hard pressed to

explain how the difference was created. When I lived in Panama City as an adult

at the end of the last years of the twentieth century, the reason for my earlier

reaction was clearer to me. Even after the Zonian cities of Balboa and nearby

Ancón had reverted to Panamanian control, the transition between Zone and City

was jarring. Whereas the edges of Panama City were congested, colorful, and

disorderly, the houses of Balboa and Ancón were uniform in design and color.

The former zone’s streets were wide and empty; palm trees lined them regally in

tall thin rows. Historically this hollowness was enforced by the U.S. military

police, who deterred and harassed Panamanians who tried to drive or walk around

the cities of the Zone. The lawns between the houses were regular, neat, and so

finely trimmed that they could be part of a golf course. The jungle was present in


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the verdure and lushness, yet everywhere it was controlled and held at a distance.

(Fig. 1)

Figure 1: Historical Photograph of Balboa Heights, Ancon (Gutierrez 1984)

The physical presence of the Zone was in large part a result of careful city

planning done during the 1910s, the era immediately proceeding and following

the completion of the Canal. In every way, the upkeep and layout of Balboa, like

the other cities in the Zone, emphasized the order and splendor the U.S. had

brought to the tropics. The structural impact of the Zone was clearly felt among

Panamanians as well. Although architectural historian Samuel Gutierrez has

argued that Panamanians needed to claim the Zone and its structures as their own

(Gutierrez 1984), I found that sometimes the opposite occurred. For example one

of my students at the University of Panama--too young to remember the Zone

before it had been returned--told me of how Paitilla (a wealthy neighborhood in

Panama City) and Balboa Avenue (the street where the U.S. Embassy resides)

were once part of the Zone as well. Historically this is false. Yet, clearly in his

mind, these areas with their wealth, trim lawns, expensive new buildings, and

large numbers of foreigners were not really Panamanian in origin, nor truly part

of the city in which he lived.


4

The distinctiveness of the Zone was due to the early architectural program

as much as the Zone's city planning. The architecture of the Zone harmonized

with the order and control of the Zone's landscaping, and it contrasted sharply

with the older sections of nearby Panama City, particularly those that were built

during the Spanish, Colombian, and French eras. This distinction reinforced the

Zone's separate status.


5

Figure 2: French Style Architecture, Cosco Viejo section of Panama City

(Gutierrez 1984)

During the later half of the 1800s, the architecture of Panama (then the Isthmus of

Columbia) was, not surprisingly, influenced greatly by the French, who at the

time controlled the beginnings of the Canal. The buildings of this period are

typified by the Mansardian roofs, extensive balconies, and ironwork of the type

also found in the mansions left by the French in the Caribbean or in French

Louisiana (Fig. 2; Gutierrez 1984). Much of the ironwork has what Panamanian

Javier Erroz has characterized as the "voluptuous rhythm and wild sea-curves" of

the Art Nouveau style (Gutierrez 1984, 91), all of which combine to give the

older structures in Panama City a busy, ornate, and fanciful feel.

This architecture style stands in marked contrast to the plain, utilitarian

structures built by the United States in the Zone at the beginning of the twentieth

century. As P.O. Wright put it in the December of 1907 edition of "The Canal

Record," "The plans and buildings [of the French period] supplied some valorous

aspects of tropical architecture [which were] esteemed by the [U.S.] Department

of Architecture, and were incorporated into the design of the buildings erected by

the [U.S. Canal] Commission" (Gutierrez 1984, 123. My translation). These

"valorous aspects," however, had to do primarily with things such as heat control

and the defense against insects. For overall style the U.S. turned to the simpler

lines of Japanese architecture which at the time U.S. architects admired for its the

harmony between architecture and nature, the grouping of public and semi-public

buildings, the "enchanting interiors," and clean white walls. All of the details led

visiting artist Joseph Pennells to characterize Balboa as the "perfect Japanese

town" when he visited there in 1912 (Gutierrez 1984, 126-27. My translation).

The Orientalist architecture of the early Zone had important physical as

well as symbolic ramifications (Fig. 1). The overhangs sheltered the houses


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against sun and rain; the screened-in porches helped protect Zonians against

insects; while the nearby forest constituted the area's major defense against

terrestrial attacks (Gutierrez 1984). On the symbolic level, the architecture played

out the reality of the canal itself: the canal is the meeting point of East and West-

-the point at which "the Orient, which 'entrenched in its traditions of thousands of

years,' would now have an avenue of exchange with the West which for its part,

was 'adventurous, pushing forward, and ready to exchange its arts and

achievements for those of the mystic East'" (Armstrong 1983, 124). What better

way to symbolize this meeting ground than through an Orientalist style, one

which alluded both to the "mystic East" and the Prairie School of Frank Lloyd

Wright who deep in the Midwest was making the Eastern style his own. Quite

literally the houses of the Zone domesticate the East, and safely display the

imperialistic triumph of Balboa, the city poised to greet Asia on the Pacific side

of the canal.

The total effect of the architectural style and landscaping was powerful

and corresponds with the ideal early urban planner Ebenezer Howard

characterized in 1898 as the "Garden Cities of To-morrow." In his treatise "To-

morrow: a peaceful path to real reform," Howard provided a orderly model for

how urban space could combat the tendency towards sprawl even as it provided a

"self-contained and balanced community for work and living" (Hall 1985, xv-

xvii). Howard's vision of metropolitan utopia is reflected in the urban planning of

the Canal Zone, as Panamanian Samuel Gutierrez explains.

The low density [of Balboa], the generous assignment of open spaces, an

ambiance of urban equilibrium, the gardens, the forests, the lakes, typified

these Garden Cities [of the Canal Zone], where the city and the

countryside came together, where balanced urban communities coincided

inside of a balanced region like the one propounded by Ebenezer Howard.


7

Another coincidence with Howard's Garden Cities is that in them the land

was not arranged so as to be given or sold as private property, but so as to

maintain a common authority (Gutierrez 1984, 128. My translation).

It is the common authority of the Zone and her cities that typified and to a large

extent still typified the United States' long-standing relationship to and within

Panama at the end of the twentieth century.

Ironically, by the century’s end it was as much this green space--these

extended "Garden Cities"--that made the return of the canal important for

Panama. In the course of this transaction, the "common authority" embodied by

the Zone was undermined by a push towards privatization. The once carefully

integrated houses were sold to private investors, as were some of the green

spaces. In the process the once placid uniformity gave way to an excess of

diversity: the houses were repainted in a variety of shades and the facades were

often remodeled to create great staircases to the upper story balconies. Fences

erected to wall off one’s property broke up the connective tissue of the green

spaces which once marked the common ground of the community. External

ornamentation was “in, very in” (Margaret Scranton, email correspondence, 21

April 1999). Likewise the Causeway--the narrow strip of land connecting Islas

Naos, Perico, and Flamenco to the mainland--was sold to a private hotel to

become part of a resort. Although once a popular public recreation spot for

Panamanians and U.S. residents alike, this area threatened to become the future

exclusive domain of tourists and only the wealthiest of Panamanians. The selling

off of public resources was both politically charged and necessary. As political

scientist Margaret Scranton has explained, the reverted areas had the potential

either to make the Panamanians rich or to bankrupt them (Scranton 1998). As one

U.S. Embassy official noted in passing, the main hospital in Balboa alone cost

$50,000 per month to air condition, a price well beyond the scope of the


8

Panamanian Government's budget for health; yet, if the building were allowed to

stand for even a week without the cooling system, mold would make the building

inoperable and virtually worthless. Would only molding ruins remain of what was

once a booming and powerful city? Anxious to prevent such a collapse of empire

and with hundreds of buildings such as hospital reverting to Panamanian control,

Panamanians began to turn to privatization in order to maintain the white

elephants they inherited.

For the U.S. government and U.S. citizens living in Panama this shift

towards privatization during the late 1990s was both reassuring and threatening.

On the one hand, a common motif in U.S.-Panamanian relations during the 1990s

was the foreign doubt concerning Panama's capability to run the canal properly

(Scranton 1998). This official fear was also voiced in a series of jokes made by

U.S. residents about the future of the canal under Panamanian control. As Diane

Nelson points out in her work on resentment humor in Guatemala surrounding the

figure of Rigoberta Menchú, jokes are an important way to restore jeopardized

power relations and to manipulate public opinion (Nelson 1994). This model

might be usefully applied to jokes surrounding the rapidly changing relationship

between Panamanians and the U.S. In Panama one of the most ubiquitous of

these jokes at the end of the twentieth century was an urban legend that I first

heard from an officer in the U.S. Navy stationed in Panama, though the joke was

subsequently repeated to me by almost every U.S. citizen I met while I was in

Panama on a Fulbright Scholarship in the fall of 1998. The joke involved the

recent demise of the Panama Railroad, a once breathtaking line that ran the length

of the canal. According to the U.S. residents, soon after the railroad reverted to

Panamanian control, the Panamanians decided that the U.S. system of weed-

wacking the line was unnecessarily anal and time consuming. Opting for a more

expedient method, the Panamanians decided to burn back the grass that


9

continually threatened to consume the line. They had forgotten, however, that the

line itself was made of wood and consequently burnt down the railroad as well.

Hence no more Railroad.2 (Notably over a decade later the railroad is once again

functioning perfectly fine.)

Figure 3: Railroad at Gamboa Crossing (Author's Photo, 1998)

For the U.S., the railroad had long symbolized the greatness of the U.S.

experiment in Panama. Its destruction thus mirrored the United States’ latent fears

that the once glorious Zone would soon be no more than the crumbling ruins.

Built in the 1850s by John Lloyd Stephens and updated in the early twentieth

century when Lake Gatun was flooded for the building of the canal, the railroad

was not only historically significant but also had remained a crucial part of the

infrastructure in Panama. From the nineteenth-century onwards the railroad

transported work crews, machinery, and excavated soil across the nation. As late

as the 1970s it was used to transport workers and civilians gracefully along the

length of the canal. Once, however, the railroad reverted to Panamanian control,

within a few short years the once powerful transportation system became


10

completely overgrown and inoperable (Fig. 3). For skeptcs, the incident seemed

symbolically stunning.

I found the U.S. residents version of events interesting on a number of

levels: one, it epitomized the U.S. attitude towards Panama: they (the

Panamanians) think we (the U.S.) are overly cautious and methodical in the way

we run things, but what they don't understand is that this caution is necessary if

the canal is to continue. How can Panamanians be trusted not to let the

infrastructure of empire be brought to waste? This fear was similarly expressed in

a cartoon published in a U.S. magazine. The cartoon shows a post-reversion

vision of the canal with ships lined up for miles on either side while Panamanians

bathe and celebrate in the waters. When a ship captain asks when they will be

allowed through, the wet Panamanian says "Come back in 5 days, can't you see

it's Carnival?" The second thing that I found intriguing about the urban legend

about the death of the railroad is that I was never offered a counter story. I asked

a number of Panamanians what happened to the line, and I was told that it had

burned. When I offered the U.S. legend concerning how this came about, I was

told that this was clearly wrong, although no one seemed to know how the fire

had started. My point is not that this makes the story truer, just that it clearly had

greater symbolic weight for the U.S. citizens living in Panama than for the

average Panamanian.

By the end of the 1990s, foreign fears about the future of the canal and the

Zone had started to infiltrate Panamanian thinking as well, a point which political

scientist Margaret Scranton has made clear in her essay "Dreams and Reality:

Panama Canal, 1977 and 1997" (Scranton 1998). This in turn led the Panamanian

government to sell off Zone property and rights to running the canal, mainly to

foreign investors. This privatization did not eased U.S. fears about the future of

the canal, but rather increased them. By the late 1990s, two of the main countries


11

that depended upon the canal were Japan and China (Horisaka, 1998). The

acquisition of the ports of Panama by the Chinese reflected this interest.

Similarly, Japan increased its support of Panamanians leading up to and following

reversion.3 From the U.S. perspective, however, Asian intervention in and

attention to Panama complicated the U.S. pledge to allow for more Panamanian

independence.

In many ways, Asian interest in Panama forced a reevaluation of the

United States’ metaphoric vision of Panama as the American gateway to the East.

Was it possible that Panama might actually be (or become) the Eastern gateway to

the West? Could it be that at the very moment when Cuba seemed to be falling

sway to capitalism, China might station itself in North America? The idea that

Japan might set up an outpost in Panama instead was only slightly more

reassuring. At least one contemporary novelist spoofed such anxieties. Such fears

became the plotline for John le Carré's recent popular fiction The Tailor of

Panama, a novel which centers around an incompetent would-be spy who falls

for false information fed to him by a bumbling Panamanian tailor who leads him

to believe that the Japanese are about to build their own canal. As Michael

Denning argues in Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy

Novel, popular thrillers such as those by le Carré are not only tied to crises in

social imperialism and imperialist culture, but also more specifically "the spy

thriller is a symptom of this crisis and...the fortunes of the spy thriller are

intimately tied to the task of managing and resolving this crisis in the popular

imagination" (Denning 1987, 38). The Tailor of Panama represents the dual crisis

of empire in Panama: the Western empire was failing (as witnessed by the

incompetence of their spies) even as the Eastern empire was rising. Indeed, even

a couple of years after its publication, the story seemed not so far fetched. As

Panamanians began to privatize their newly (re)acquired territories, it become


12

clear that the Japanese could just buy the current canal if they so desired. Such

liaisons jeopardized the United States' traditional rhetoric about relations with

Panama.

Moreover, Panama's flirtation with Japan and China began to make the

U.S. look like a jilted lover, a parallel not lost upon the average Panamanian. At

one conference at the University of Panama, some Panamanian men took it upon

themselves to explain to me that the U.S. and Panama's relationship was like a

marriage, albeit a rather bad one which involved a history of domestic violence.

The problem, I was told, was the U.S. and Panama were not sure who was the

macho (male) and who was la hembra (female). I was fairly certain, however,

that the U.S. government did not share this confusion. Since the nineteenth-

century U.S. diplomats had often spoken of the United States' relationship to

Central America in romantic terms, but they never considered the possibility that

their neighbors to the south might be anything but feminine. I was somewhat

intrigued, then, by a speech by President Clinton when he visited Antigua,

Guatemala in the late 1990s, after the a series of disastrous hurricanes in which he

suggested that the U.S. and Central America should see themselves more along

the lines of fraternal colleagues. For a moment at least it seemed possible that the

domestic arrangement of North and South will be one of two machos.

Late twnetieth-century architecture of Panama City reflects this same

uncertainty over the future of Panamanian space and empire. The images of canal

and empire, which were once so central to the cultural geography of the Canal

Zone, were now being wielded by the Panamanians, rather than just by their

neighbors to the North. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the revival of a

neo-classical style and the appropriation of the motif of ruins in the domestic

architecture of Panama City during the last decade of the twenthieth century.

Neo-classicism can be found in many of the older public buildings around the


13

city, whose pediments, porticoes, and pillars reflected the debt both to classical

and U.S. democracy upon which the fledgling republic of Panama was modeled.

What is of interest to me, however, is the more recent integration of classical

ruins into the domestic architecture in the new wave of neo-classicism in Panama

City. The greatest examples of this late twentieth-century wave in Panamanian

architecture are two high-rises built in Paitilla, Panama City's trendiest and most

expensive neighborhood.

Figure 4: Statue of Romulus and Remus Marking Via Italia, Panama City.

Vatican Embassy Immediately Behind Statue. Platinum Towers High Rise

Above Palm Trees. (Author’s Photo, 1998)


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With luxury condominiums that tower over the city, the Mirage and Platinum

Towers are located on one of the city's most prestigious streets--Via Italia.

Marking the entryway to the neighborhood is a small Italian flag and a replica of

the famous Roman statue of founders Romulus and Remus suckling at their wolf

mother's teats (Fig. 4). Although small and partially hidden by the nearby foliage,

the symbolism of the statue is not wasted upon the citizens of Panama City. In a

city where even the taxi drivers have a B.A. in something, a good cabbie will

point out the statue as he speeds along the crowded avenue. Perhaps he will

recount a brief version of the founding of Rome before explaining how Noriega

once tried to seek refuge at the Vatican Embassy.4 Yet whereas the story of

Noriega often points to the weakness of Panama in the past, the statue points to

her future glory. The classic symbol of the origins of the Roman Empire, the

statue echoes off of the central theme of the high rises: the new empire will be

nourished by the old.

During the heyday of Roman Empire, it was common to incorporate the

spoils of captured empires into the domestic sphere. Nowhere is this tradition

reenacted more elegantly in Panama than in the Mirage and Platinum Towers.

The foyers are resplendent with Romanesque floor mosaics, rotundas, and heavy

wooden archways, all of which recall the imperialist motifs of Roman triumph,

and closer to home, the neoclassicism of the Canal Administration Building

poised in Balboa Heights overlooking the entryway to the canal and the whole of

the Zonian city. Whereas once it was U.S. architects who replicated the Pantheon

in their official architecture, here in the Mirage a miniature version is converted

into an entryway, bright and sunny with an only partially clouded sky covering its

domed ceiling. Perhaps the most famous innovation the buildings offer, though, is

their incorporation of classical ruins (Figs. 5 & 6). Here, as elsewhere in the city,

one is reminded of Walter Benjamin's description of the Klee painting "Angelus


15

Novus" (Benjamin 1968). In Paitilla mock ruins are built above real ones, much

as the wreckage of the past is hurled at angel's feet. Yet while Klee's angel is

propelled forward by progress and cannot stop to make whole what has been

smashed, someone in Panama has begun the reconstructive work. For in both the

Mirage and Platinum Towers the buildings seem to rise out of the dust of fallen

empires even as they incorporate its luxury. Fake classical ruins surround the

pool; they are incorporated into the recreational facilities that shade sunbathers

from the hot tropical sun (Fig. 5).

Figure 5: Platinum Towers' Recreational Level, Panama City

(Author's Photo, 1998)

The buildings mark the Panamanian renewal and triumph that must emerge out of

U.S. loss. Housing the elite of Panama's banking and business community, the

buildings embody the spirit of Panamanian optimism and a new vision of the

relationship between the old empire and the new. If there is a mirage in the

Mirage, it is the optical illusion through which the increasingly distant colonial

past can be seen. As Herodotus, the father of history, is quick to remind us, yes

empires do fall, but often from their ruins future greatness emerges. Through the


16

architectural idiom, Panamanians had began to take control of and use the

metaphors that oppressed them for over a century.

Figure 6: Mirage (Center) & Platinum Towers (Right). Ruins in Foreground. Paitilla Neighborhood in Panama City (Author's Photo, 1998)


17

NOTES

1 I am grateful to the USIA Fulbright Program for allowing me the

opportunity to study and teach at the University of Panama during the fall of

1998, and for Reed College for granting me a leave to partake of this experience.

I would like to thank fellow Fulbright Scholar Margaret Scranton (Dept. of

Political Science, University of Little Rock, Arkansas) and colleague Rishona

Zimring (Dept. of English, Lewis and Clark College) for their comments and

advice on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank my research assistant

Sophie Bennett.

2The railroad was later sold to a private investor who rebuilt as a tourist

attraction. In a similar instance of rumor that wasn't clearly meant as a joke,

Margaret Scranton recalls being told by at least two U.S. citizens working in

Panama that Panamanian maintenance of the Canal has been so bad that one of

the locks fell off the Canal. This, unlike the fall of the railroad however, is pure

myth (Margaret Scranton, email correspondence, 21 April 1999).

3 For example, in the late 1990s the Japanese government donated a

million dollar language lab to the Humanities Division of the University of

Panama--a fact that I was tauntingly reminded of by my colleagues at the

University of Panama whenever the U.S. embassy seemed to be withdrawing its

financial support. Such a lab presumably not only displays Japanese support of

Panama, but also would enable Panamanians to learn complex Asian languages

more easily with the aide of computers and new software.

4 The U.S. invasion in 1989 and its subsequent removal of Panamanian

President Manuel Noriega lingers as a wound upon national pride, and a reminder


18

of Panama's not so independent status. As Peter Eisner points out in his recent

"autobiography" of Noriega, the fact that the invasion occurred 12 days before the

scheduled return of superintendence of the canal on January 1, 1990, powerfully

insisted upon the U.S.'s right to manage Panamanian "independence" upon its

own terms (Eisner and Noriega 1997).

WORKS CITED

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Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific

International Exposition of 1915, ed. Burton Benedict. London: Lowie

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Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn. NY: Harcourt, Brace, &

World.

Denning, Michael. 1987. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British

Spy Novel. NY : Routledge & K. Paul.

Eisner, Peter and Manuel Noriega. 1997. Memoirs of Manuel Noriega: America's

Prisoner. NY: Random House.

Gutierrez, Samuel A. 1984. Arquitectura de la Epoca del Canal 1880-1914 y sus

Paralelos Norteamericanos, Franceses y Caribeños. Panama: Eupan.

Hall, David. 1985. Introduction. In Garden Cities of To-morrow by Ebenezer

Howard. East Sussex, England: Attic Books.

Horisaka, Kotaro. 1998. The Panama Canal: Is It a Past Issue? Rethinking the

Role as a Bridge Between East Asia and the Americas. In El Canal de


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Panamá en el Siglo XXI. Panamá: Encuentro Académico Internacional

sobre el Canal de Panamá.

Nelson, Diane. 1994. Gendering the Ethnic-National Question: Rigoberta Menchú

Jokes and the Out-skirts of Fashioning Identity. In Anthropology Today.

Vol. 10(6). 3-7.

Scranton, Margaret. 1998. Dreams and Reality: Panama Canal, 1977 and 1997.

In El Canal de Panamá en el Siglo XXI. Panamá: Encuentro Académico

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Domestic Empires, Imperial Ruins: Changes in Panamanian Cultural Geography

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