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Voices on Panama"I still remember being in school when the treaties were signed [in 1977]. The treaties were signed on Friday and on Monday there were little changes, like the paper towels in the bathroom ... All of a sudden the paper towels weren't your regular U.S.-made paper towels, but we had these brown ones, manila-looking ones. So that was just a small change. It slowly started opening up. "I still remember a kind of frustration asking my parents, 'How come I can't go there? How come I don't have access to these certain facilities that the Americans have?' "A lot of the [American] kids I went to school with had lived there 10 or 15 years and they didn't speak Spanish. Some of them had never even made it into Panama City, because they lived in their own little world. It was paradise. I mean, they had the beach, they had the tropics, but they had all the benefits of a state, basically ... It was very obvious, the us-versus-them kind of thing, always feeling like a second-class citizen even with the rest of my classmates." |
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