Panama
A portrait of young Ngäbes who migrate out of the comarca
For three years I crossed between Panama and Costa Rica time and time again, visiting and revisiting the settlements of Ngäbe people in different cities
to learn the ways that migration is changing this ethnic group. Here we present some findings this research uncovered.
José Idiáquez
The Ngäbes are the largest ethnic group in Panama, comprising 59.3% of the Panamanian indigenous population. In a lot of writings they speak of the Ngäbe-Buglé as if they are one ethnic group, but they’re actually two indigenous peoples with distinct languages, myths and histories living in the same territory: the Ngäbe and Buglé Comarca, or district, a territory demarcated in 1997 from the provinces of Bocas del Toro, Chiriquí and Veraguas.
Governmental repression of the Ngäbe people—who fought in July 2010 and again in February 2011 and 2012 to prevent mining and hydroelectric plants from being established in the district and affecting their environment—and the xenophobia of some Panamanian sectors against immigrants are not accidental or incidental “mistakes.” It is a continuum, an apparatus formulated through the different historical and socio-economic stages Panama has passed through. Ngäbe resistance continues today and forced migration to Costa Rica, or from their district to other Panamanian cities, is a survival strategy, a new expression of this people’s culture.
Abysmal povertySince Spanish colonial times, the Ngäbe people have inhabited the land in what is today Panama and Costa Rica. The border between these two countries was defined with the Arias-Calderón Treaty in 1941. The Ngäbes living on the Costa Rican side of the border faced many difficulties in getting recognized as Costa Ricans. And the Ngäbes located on the Panamanian side continue to experience rejection and neglect as second-class citizens.
The poverty in the areas where Panama’s indigenous peoples live can only be described as abysmal when we consider that over 95% of the residents in these areas survive in conditions that put them under the poverty line. Social exclusion, poverty and what the corporate perspective sees as economic unprofitability form a triple scourge on the life of indigenous communities in Panama.
The border is a meeting placeEvery year, 20,000 Ngäbes make the decision to “dare” to cross the border from Panama to Costa Rica to pick coffee in the neighboring country. The follow 28 “routes” or paths and, depending on where they begin their journey, it can take them from 5 to 24 hours to arrive. It’s estimated that this journey costs US$20-25 per person. The two main destinations are Coto Brus and Los Santos.
Costa Rica is a country where the non-indigenous majority disregards indigenous people. Most Costa Ricans see both Panamanian Ngäbes and Costa Rican Guaymís as backward and discriminate against them.
In the migratory waves crossing the border to Costa Rica, both historically and today, Ngäbes have always been categorized as docile, easy-to-handle, illiterate workers, cheap labor to be hired on a temporary basis, putting them at a disadvantage not only to nationals in the labor market, but also to other immigrants. In Costa Rica they only have access to basic health care, not social security. They are inserted as workers but are socially invisible.
They don’t go there to “take food out of the mouths” of Costa Ricans but are actually development agents, contributing to the economy and strengthening this society’s cultural diversity, forcing it to rethink basic political concepts: citizenship, coexistence, identity and management of public areas.
The border isn’t just a barrier for the Ngäbes who live on either side of it; it’s a meeting place as wll. The border has a new identity for Ngäbe youth, consolidated by their comings and goings between the Ngäbe Comarca in Panama and the Costa Rican coffee-producing areas. After years of these round trips, many young people feel connected to both places. This feeling is stronger when they have family members who have decided to stay in Costa Rica. It’s not the same for Ngäbe adults, who see themselves as farmers and are very attached to their lands in the comarca.
Important cultural changesEmigration to Costa Rica and internal migration from the comarca to Panama City and other Panamanian cities is making significant changes in the Ngäbe people’s culture in such sensitive areas as the family, the role of women, education, politics, religion, etc.
Ngäbe women’s experience of migrating to Costa Rica, working in Panama’s urban areas and studying in the university has enabled them to acquire new awareness about sexuality, pregnancy and marriage and they have also acquired greater knowledge about the rights of indigenous peoples and even more specifically their rights as indigenous migrant women. This awareness explains young Ngäbe women’s widespread rejection of machismo, domestic violence and alcoholism as well as some Ngäbe women’s leadership role in the struggle to open arenas in the urban world.
Whether on the level of the Ngäbe Comarca, on a national level or through cross-border migration, it isn’t easy to build social coexistence that is respectful of the rights of indigenous women and youth, nor is it easy for girls and women to coexist with their people’s traditions.
They migrate due to a lack of opportunitiesPanama is a pluricultural, plurilingual and multiethnic country, inhabited by seven ethnic groups: Ngäbe, Buglé, Guna, Wounaan, Emberá, Naso (Teribe) and BriBri. According to the—much disputed—results of the May 2010 11th National Population Census and the 7th Census on Housing by the Comptroller General’s National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC), Panama’s total population is 3,405,813 persons, of whom 417,559 (12.7%) are indigenous and 313,289 (9.2%) are Afro-descendants.
In theory, the Panamanian government recognizes almost all the indigenous territories and their administration through the legalization of the comarcas. But in practice, and despite the constitutional obligation, the Panamanian government ignores these legal regulations and has no policy of taking seriously indigenous peoples’ productive and social development, culture, education, health and rights.
A clear example of the government’s lack of political will is the unavailability of job and other opportunities, which forces mainly Ngäbe children, adolescents, young people and women to emigrate. Internal migration and emigration to Costa Rica are evidence of the exclusion, discrimination, neglect and loss of rights imposed on the Ngäbe people by each government in turn.
“You see half-breed Ngäbe girls everywhere”In the Panamanian capital and the other provincial capitals, we’re witnessing the emergence of an undeniably visible, indigenous urban population despite the obstacles they have to face to be accepted. Carmen, who works in a shop in a very busy Panamanian shopping mall, put it this way: “I’ve been working for fifteen years in this store and up to three years ago we didn’t see so many little half-breed Ngäbe girls in their traditional dress. You can see them now in the supermarkets and I even find them in Tocumen airport when I go to work in the shop there.”
The highest percentage (51%) of those who migrate from the comarca to the city range in age from 15 to 34 years old and a significant portion (23%) of the workforce crossing the border into Costa Rica to pick coffee is between 5 and 14 years old.
Young Ngäbes who move to the city feel as if they live between two worlds: that of the city, which allows them greater access to consumer goods and media (internet, cinema, cell phones, iPod and television), and that of their ethnic group that stayed in the comarca. Culture and identity are hard to separate. A key feature of identity is its permanence in time and space. The identity of these young people faces the tension between continuity and discontinuity, between permanence and change. Neglecting certain cultural elements doesn’t necessarily mean renouncing their ethnic identity; it may be a survival strategy for acceptance in their new environment or an employment requirement.
Most of the adults and young people we interviewed expressed pride in being Ngäbe people. However, it isn’t easy to fight for cultural rights and ethnic identity in a world that’s hostile to them. That explains the importance of distinguishing between objective culture (dress, food, tools, etc.) and subjective culture, which is concerned with the invisible, the symbolic, the less tangible but all the more potent for being at the heart and soul of the person and their ethnic group. That’s why the defense of their forms of behavior, values, religion and language is the root cause of the misunderstandings between the national culture and that of the indigenous peoples of the isthmus and of the problems of isolation that often end in violence.
“Their customs are strange”The Ngäbe population is numerically less than that of the non-indigenous national population that also migrates to the marginalized neighborhoods of Panama City. Despite being a minority, the Ngäbe presence acquires a special relevance when they interact with other ethnic groups. This is the case in a slum in the eastern part of Panama City.
One sector of this shanty town is known as “The Comarca.” When we asked why, they told us: “Because the Ngäbe, Buglé and Guna half-breeds live there. Go in and you’ll see that they’re all Indians.” We decided it would be interesting to focus our research in this zone. By following the Ngäbe route, we confirmed that this same process of ethnic interaction, with variants, also occurred in the slum neighborhoods of Veraguas, Chiriquí and Bocas del Toro.
In another small urban area of the capital city we found Afro-descendants from the province of Colón and Bocas del Toro, Chinese and peasants who had migrated from the central provinces of Herrera, Los Santos, Veraguas and Coclé interacting with Guna, Ngäbe and Buglé.
Ramón, who works in a tailor’s shop and migrated to Panama City twenty years ago from Guararé, in the Los Santos province, is a good example of the peasant population’s perspective on the Ngäbe population: “These half-breeds come and go. Indians always move from one place to another. They keep moving about all year. This is their way of being and you can find them everywhere nowadays. Their customs are strange. The women dress differently and you can’t understand them when they talk.”
The Ngäbes who live in the slums share the poverty, unemployment, violence and everyday conflicts of the city with the rest of the population but the others consider them “strange.” In Panama, certain words—chombo (nigger), Indian, cholo (half-breed), Guna, machigua (slop eaters), immigrant, refugee and even Ngäbes—have been codified and
turned into emotionally charged labels, automatically creating phobias and prejudiced responses.
“They smell really bad”The experience of oppression and ethnic and class discrimination can be personal or by group. The latter is the case of the Ngäbe population that migrated to Isla Colón in the Bocas del Toro province.
About 75% of the 30,000 people who live in the barrio called La Solución are Ngäbes and the rest are Teribes, peasants from Boca del Toro and Chiriquí, and Afro-descendants. Their houses are located in a mangrove swamp, forcing them to breathe in the strong stench of garbage from a landfill, whose contents rot in water full of human and animal excrement. They have to walk on planks and if they lose their balance they can’t avoid contact with the polluted water. In the course of our research, these were the worst conditions in which we found the Ngäbe population living.
A group of young Ngäbe women, most of them aged 18-25, met in a house to feed their children and discuss the daily survival problems they face. In addition to those unending struggles, they’re worried about the possibility of being evicted. Emilia told us: “Many years ago they said we were going to be evicted because they want to make something for tourism here. And some Ngäbe families have been living here for 20 years.”
The fact of living in a mangrove swamp used as landfill and adjacent to a septic tank evokes discrimination. When asked about La Solución, people immediately associate the Ngäbes with filth, with contamination. An employee of the Ministry of Health from Isla Colón told us: “The Ngäbes live in La Solución. Contagious diseases start and end there.” We heard something similar in the district of Volcán, in Chiriquí province, while we were waiting for a bus to take us from Volcán to David. When it arrived, the people advised us: “If you want to arrive with lice and stinking of smoke take that bus; only Ngäbe Indians go there, those half-breeds who pick coffee. They have lots of lice and smell really bad.”
Cultural and economic rightsIn her book Purity and Danger, the British anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007) analyzed concepts of pollution and taboo. With great acuity she lets us see how belief in the danger of pollution is present in social delegitimization and demands. If we apply this thinking to the world of the Ngäbes in La Solución, their eviction won’t be seen as unjust by the other inhabitants. To evict them and build a Maritime Center for tourists would mean ending a focal point of pollution. For investors, small business owners and the unemployed, it would mean good business and jobs. And, most of all, it would mean cleanliness and order.
In Panama, internal migration is never considered an expression of the unjust distribution of wealth and even less is the displacement of Ngäbes recognized as correcting the unequal distribution of assets, theoretically intended for the whole population. Hence the importance of always connecting cultural rights—reclaiming policies of difference—with economic rights, which seek policies of equality. To achieve this balance it’s necessary to link the language of rights with the language of discrimination, exposing the fact that, despite having similar rights, Ngäbes in Panama don’t have the same possibilities of social mobility or public location as non-indigenous peoples.
“Studying isn’t for us”The Ngäbe traditional dress symbolizes dirtiness. To get rid of that dirtiness, it’s better to avoid contact. Hilda, a young Ngäbe woman, described her experience of rejection: “We Ngäbes are used to hearing that we ‘Indians’ aren’t civilized, that we’re drunkards, lazy and dirty and that’s why we’re always poor. I’ve heard these insults ever since I first came from the comarca. I felt nervous. I didn’t understand Spanish. I came to Santiago to work as a maid with people who have a lot of money.
“When the mistress spoke negatively about the Ngäbes, I kept quiet. She did me the favor of giving me a job and I slept and ate in her house. When I told the mistress that I wanted to study she told me that it would be better if I learned to cook and wash well; that I should learn how to dress because Ngäbe women always wear the same clothes and have dirty hair. She told me that I would waste my time going to school because we Ngäbes don’t know how to speak Spanish well, that studying isn’t for us. And that’s why we never progress. She told me that I’d come back from school pregnant. They treat us Ngäbes as if we were capachos, that bird that lives and sleeps on the ground, flies low and lays its eggs right on the ground.”
The power of symbolic violenceFor Hilda’s mistress, the Ngäbe woman is far from reaching the sociability parameters considered ideal by the Panamanian ruling class. In their racist judgment, poverty is related to a supposed lack of discipline or a weakness of character. And, while she thinks they should be taught how to supplant their inadequate cultural patterns, the mistress maintains just enough inclusion to allow her to use the indigenous woman: she must learn to cook and wash well Present in this relationship is the concept of “symbolic violence” used by the French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). It’s the violence that generates submissions that aren’t even seen as such; a violence that’s exercised with the complicity of the dominated. Hilda recognizes that her mistress’ comments bother her and is aware that there’s some kind of anomaly, but keeps quiet because the person who maligns her ethnic group has all the powers enjoyed by the dominant social class. In addition, she feels indebted to her for her generosity in giving her work and allowing her to eat and sleep in her house. The mistress’ benevolence allows the violence she exercises over her Ngäbe employee to not be seen by her as violence.
Symbolic violence has the power to transform the relationships of domination and submission into affective relationships. In order to be successful, symbolic power requires that those who are subjugated believe in its legitimacy and in that of those who exercise it. For Bourdieu, symbolic violence, more than physical violence or any other form of repression, becomes the main mechanism of social reproduction and the most powerful means for maintaining order.
Women who are changingIt’s claimed that the feminization of international migratory flows is causing changes among immigrants in general and women in particular. This also happens in the internal migratory flows in Panama.
Female migration is producing changes of identity and women’s perception of themselves, about gender relations and family roles. To migrate alone or with her partner, separating herself from the family nucleus and leaving life in the comarca; to have new work experiences, to take the initiative in finding resources, building new relationships, undertaking struggles to defend the rights of her children in school and their rights in the health centers, among other activities, are disclosing new facets of themselves and their personal skills to the frequently undervalued Ngäbe women.
The United Nations Development Programme’s analyses that appeared in the Atlas of Human Development and the 2010 Millennium Goals show ongoing difficulties to achieving comprehensive development in Panama, despite the progress. Of the 169 countries studied in 2010, Panama improved its human development index to rank in 54th place but, on measuring gender inequality, the country fell to 81st place.
“She knows more people than I do”The social stereotype of woman/housewife and man/public power figure still has a lot of weight in Panamanian society. In the rural sector this stereotype is responsible for making women’s overload of work in the fields and the home invisible. This overload is common in the Ngäbe family and productive structure, where women are producing food, and are both biological and socio-cultural reproducers, transmitting language and the values, habits, skills and abilities that go to form a strong ethnic identity.
Migration is responsible for ending Ngäbe women’s social stereotype as housewife because a new family model is emerging in urban arenas in which women take on a public and visible role and men have to deal with domestic affairs. Young Madenays commented: “In the comarca you didn’t see a man cooking on the stove, that’s only for women. But here in Panama City my husband has to heat the food and some Sundays he washes clothes for our daughter.” And her husband, Bernardo, added: “Here in the city nothing is easy. I grew up in the country and there everything is different. My partner knows more people and places than I do here in the barrio and in Panama City. I only know from work to home. Women walk everywhere.”
As this young Ngäbe man acknowledged, his partner has more possibilities to make contact with the host population, which makes her into an excellent agent for promoting integration and mediation between the migrating family and the new urban environment. Bernardo gave us a very concrete example: “One of my wife’s brothers had a drinking problem. She talked with some men from neighborhood’s Alcoholics Anonymous group. Now my brother-in-law is in this group and has stopped drinking.”
“Eleven women joined together”Although, like other immigrants the whole family lives between two cultures, it’s the women who take on the responsibility and are in charge of establishing links between the two. This forces them to reinterpret their role within and outside of the family nucleus. And, as producers of intercultural integration they have to be agents of their own culture and become bridges to access the new culture.
This integration process in urban arenas is plagued with conflicts that the Ngäbe women have to overcome in order to combine the traditional and new of both cultures. Leonor related an experience that perfectly illustrates the point: “The teacher in the school my son goes to called me to say that he doesn’t speak Spanish well. The teacher thought it best if my son studied in a school in the comarca or in Chiriquí. My son is studying in third grade in this district’s public school.
“I also had this problem when I studied. My language is Ngäbere. Right now I’m studying in the university here in Panama City to get a degree in education. I explained to the teacher that my son is studying Spanish in a program given by the nuns in the parish where I live. This program takes place every Saturday.
I told her my son is gradually adapting to living in Panama City. I later learned that other Ngäbe women had the same problem with their children. So we got together as a group of 11 women. Some of them also go to the university and so we know about academic requirements. We spoke with the director. We told her that our children have the right to study in any public school in the country because they were born in Panama, just like all the children living in this neighborhood. This will be a struggle for us. It’s easy for the teachers to say the children don’t understand the explanations because they are Ngäbes and they should be expelled from the school. This is discrimination because we’re indigenous.”
The attitude of Ngäbe women who have dared to fight for the rights of their children is novel and hopeful. It’s even more novel to discover that three of these 11 women are studying social work, education and law in the university.
The school that discriminatesOn their own initiative and in the face the educational system’s excluding actions, these Ngäbe mothers have made themselves into intercultural mediators. Norma, aged 22, explained: “We have now found the way to help our children in the school and we’ve said that if we have a problem we’ll go together to talk to the teacher. Together we feel accompanied and strong. Those who can’t read and are afraid of talking go along too, and we all help each other. Nothing is easy for a Ngäbe but we’re learning that we have rights and we have to talk.”
Many teachers in Panama’s educational system have stereotypes and prejudices concerning cultural minorities in the classroom that warp their impressions, assessments and ways of acting towards the minority students. As an institution that’s part of society’s global project, the school has a reference culture: that of Panama’s dominant sector. This reference culture builds and imposes the standards that decide how Panamanian reality is presented It decides what happens with the curriculum and the operational procedures dealing with people and things. The socio-economic and political factors ensure that teachers are on the same page as the reference culture.
Conflicts arise when this reference culture is different to that of the students, as happens with the Ngäbe children. In this case the organization and curriculum are not only inappropriate but the teachers, as people trained in the patterns of the reference culture, are insufficiently prepared to communicate with immigrant or indigenous students, and aren’t trained to react flexibly to their needs.
Jules Henry, author of Culture against Man, and other writers point out the economic usefulness of producing large groups of students who see themselves as failures and uncomplainingly move into the lowest positions in the bureaucratic and industrial work structures. In our Central American countries, many of these young people find work in the assembly plants or are forced into technical studies—welding, carpentry, sewing, baking—because they don’t have the economic resources or because they’ve been told they don’t have the ability to pursue higher education.
Classroom ethnography Different socio-linguistic studies have shown that certain languages or linguistic dialects are categorized as inferior or superior according to social stereotyping and not objective facts. The US linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes (1927-2009) said that when a child’s way of talking is rejected, what is probably communicated to the child is his rejection as a person… It has always been believed, and still seems reasonable to many people, that the stigmatized individual is the one who has to adapt. When we see the enormous limitations of this approach, which we could consider its massive failure, we find it reasonable to also insist that those stigmatizing do the adapting… Attitudes are critical but it’s obvious that volition isn’t everything. The best teacher may unconsciously transmit rejection of a black child while favoring a white child, simply through differences in how the teacher asks for or pays attention…Hence the need for classroom ethnography.
The denial of equal education opportunities for diverse sectors of the population is a possible key to understanding education deficiencies in Latin America. Panama is no exception. When ethnographers have focused their research on the relationships between the staff in educational centers and the ways they express their assumptions, values and cultural structures in the classroom, the school appears as the place that perpetuates social stratification based on social classes and ethnicity.
And dynamics have shown that they limit equality of opportunity. One such dynamic is the one Leonor described when the teacher advised her to take her child to study in the comarca.
“Without my language, I’m dead”The urban Ngäbe’s problem isn’t limited to the classroom. The Ngäbere language isn’t just devalued in primary education but also in the universities and in the world of the market. The experience of Rodrigo, an education student, is significant: “I told a teacher that I wanted to do my thesis on my Ngäbere language. I want to return to the comarca and work there. The teacher asked me: ‘What are you going to do with your language if it’s only spoken in the comarca? Learn Spanish and English well then you’ll have opportunities to earn a good salary. With Ngäbere, who’s going to offer you a salary when it’s not even known except among you all?’
“That hurt me because I remembered my grandfather. So I told the teacher that if I forget my grandfather’s language, I’m dead. Back in the comarca when I studied in primary, the teachers weren’t Ngäbe and they forbade us to talk in Ngäbere. They told us it was disrespectful and we couldn’t even use it during recess. I couldn’t understand this because I was only eight years old and I couldn’t find the words in Spanish so everything came out in Ngäbere. I got nervous when I asked the teacher something in Spanish. I felt strange and all those who weren’t Ngäbe laughed. Some Ngäbe no longer want to teach their children our language. Some Ngäbe feel ashamed if we use our own language but we don’t have to feel ashamed of our own. I want to die talking Ngäbere.”
The Ngäbere language Rodrigo’s defense of his language is related to his struggle to maintain his identity. Each language is a system for interpreting reality that lets us understand human experience from the human (anthropological) and religious (transcendence) vision of the world (worldview). Language isn’t just a group of phonemes and morphemes, a way of articulating words, a way of naming things: it expresses a people’s worldview.
In a questionnaire we put to a focus group of 34 young university students and those in their last year of high school, the Ngäbe women appeared as a unanimous bloc in their desire to continue speaking their language and transmit it to their children. They also valued the importance of learning Spanish as an effective means for defending themselves in the urban world. The young men showed no such unanimity.
The ethnic minorities’ languages have limited domestic markets and that’s why their cultures are the most vulnerable and exposed to cultural penetration. This may be on the minds of sociolinguists who make pessimistic predictions about future decades, estimating that half of the 6,000 Earth’s languages that are still being spoken could disappear in the next fifty years.
Ngäbere is part of the Chibchan language family, indigenous to the area extending from eastern Honduras though Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama to Northern Colombia. According to the 2010 census, probably two thirds of the more than 260,000 Ngäbes in Panama speak Ngäbere. Use of the mother tongue has declined with the imposition of Spanish in schools and the almost total absence of bilingual education. Most young people and children hardly speak it outside of their homes and almost none read or write it. With such a scenario the future of Ngäbere is bleak, at best, even though a law was passed in 2010. officially accepting writings in native languages and requiring bilingual intercultural education. The immense wealth safeguarded by this language will gradually be lost.
“It’s worse if you live far away”At the 45th committee meeting of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), held in Geneva in February 2010, a Ngäbe woman took the floor to speak in favor of indigenous women obtaining better services when they go to a health institution, since they are discriminated against because of their ethnicity.
According to United Nations Population Fund data, one of every five pregnant women in Panama (20%) is a teenager. In the comarca it’s one in three (33.3%).
María, a community leader from Müñüni, Kankintú, expressed her concern because she’s seen pregnant indigenous women die from lack of medical care or good supervision of their pregnancy: “It’s worse for those women who live far away. We hear about it when the radio announces it.” Marta, a leader from the area of Jelerabitdi, Müñä, added: “There are places in the comarca where we haven’t had a health center for 15 or 20 years. When you go there, an aide offers something for the flu or a cold, but if you go with something urgent like a snakebite you could die.”
The World Health Organization reports that five million people a year suffer from snakebites, of whom 100,000 die. In Panama, the Ministry of Health in 2009 reported 2,203 cases of snakebite, an incidence of 48 affected per 100,000 inhabitants.
“I no longer keep quiet”Discrimination in the health centers affects Ngäbe migrants, particularly children and women, in both Costa Rica and Panama. In Coto Brus, Costa Rica, one of the ethnically diverse strategies used to provide solutions to Ngäbe women’s maternal/child mortality was to resort to intercultural medicine, letting midwives be involved with care during childbirth. But ignorance of cultural diversity and professional jealousy on the part of the Costa Rican hospital’s obstetrics staff led it to reject this initiative.
In contrast, the University of Costa Rica’s School of Nursing has an intercultural program that supports this initiative, although it is not without tensions and misunderstandings.
Rosa, a 20-year-old Ngäbe, commented on her experience in Coto Brus: “We knew some people don’t treat us well, but here in Costa Rica we learned that we’re entitled to care as women. Here we listened to lots of talks about our rights and we’re learning that our Ngäbe culture should be respected. That’s why we’re not afraid to go to the health centers here in Coto Brus or in Los Santos and when we women are together, we encourage each other.”
What happens to Ngäbe women in Costa Rica is no different to what happens to them in hospitals and health centers in Panama. Dominga, a 23 year old, commented: “After my second child was born I didn’t want anything to do with the hospital or health center. I was very ill and almost died. But I felt bad when a doctor told me Ngäbe women don’t listen and understand what we’re told in the health center so it’s a waste of time caring for us because we have infections through what we do in the comarca.
“I didn’t understand some words the doctor said about my illness. I told her about my first childbirth, which was at two am, and I was helped by my grandmother, who’s a midwife. Everything happened in the dark. I only had a little alcohol, a little water, a knife and a skillet. It was raining. But I told the doctor that in the comarca it isn’t like in the city. There you have to walk a lot and if it rains it’s dangerous. When it’s like that you don’t feel like going. Now I don’t keep quiet. I’ve learned in workshops that we Ngäbe should talk and we women are always quiet and that isn’t good.”
Indigenous women also perceive a real danger of being raped and of sick people dying from poor care on being admitted to hospital, not just from the mistreatment they receive, but also for cultural reasons. Migdalia Bejarano was taught from childhood that death comes dressed in white: “We Ngäbes are taught that the color white is connected with death. We’re afraid when we dream of people dressed in that color.” This is also why Ngäbe women are afraid of being cared for by doctors and nurses wearing white uniforms.
The young people are causing the changesNgäbe adults view the young peoples’ changed ways of thinking and acting as a “problem.” They see the new models taken on by the youth as resulting in “disrespectful attitudes in the family and the community.” From the young people’s perspective, in contrast, they are “urgent and necessary because Ngäbe women are suffering from the men’s machismo.”
Within the family, Ngäbe youth have experienced abuses of authority, repressive attitudes, restrictions (mostly imposed on girls, young people and women), violence due to alcoholism and an absence of communication. All this is the basis for the distancing and rejection they feel today towards the Ngäbe identity. On the other hand, positive relationships with parents or some other member of the family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, older brothers or sisters—incline them to positively identify with their ethnic group.
Today it seems that the young Ngäbe migrants and university students are causing profound changes within their ethnic group. However, just as we’ve found young people very interested in fighting for the indigenous peoples of Panama or for changes within their ethnic group, and have shown an interest in studying, we’ve also met young people who have no interest whatsoever in these issues, have had very little contact with urban life or don’t have resources to study.
In a survey of 300 young Ngäbe men and women who support changes within their ethnic group and the family, 50% work or have worked in institutions or organizations related to the church, in human rights or women’s development projects, and have had access to workshops on sex education, domestic violence and migrant rights; 40% are engaged in technical or university education; and 10% have finished primary education and, although they haven’t participated in workshops, have had migratory experience and in some cases their partners are studying in the university.
A professor at the National Autonomous University of Chiriquí told us that he’s surprised at the number of Ngäbe students in the various programs and even more that most of the new entrants are women.
Ligia and Gertrudis: “It can change”Ligia, a 22 year old Communications student, explained: “We know we Ngäbe women are humiliated in many ways. They force us to do things we don’t want. For example, they force a 13-year-old girl to have a husband and this girl is too young to have sex. She’s a girl. And if she rebels they make her feel bad. If we don’t study and are just in the comarca we think that that’s how it is and it can’t be changed. Then this girl stays as if she’s locked up and can’t study because she’ll soon get pregnant. Many people think that women only exist to have children and it isn’t so. This we have to change.”
Gertrudis, a 24-year-old, commented: “I’m Ngäbe and will always be seen that way and I won’t ever deny it. That’s what I told my colleagues when I studied nursing.
But I want to live differently. I don’t accept that Ngäbe men have several women. I saw how my grandmother suffered living with the five women my grandfather had. She suffered abuse, beatings and a lot of insults. I hate it when a man beats a woman. As Ngäbe women we don’t have land or a house so we have to put up with the man’s family. And if a woman doesn’t have anything she can’t leave even if they abuse her. I’m going to fight when I see violence against women. When I visit the comarca I tell the young women not to let the men do whatever they want. I was 14 years old when I went to live away from the comarca and I learned things I didn’t know. In Costa Rica they invited me to several workshops and you’ve no idea of the things I learned.”
Men tooIn the urban areas of the Panamanian capital and of the provinces as well as in the shopping malls it’s striking to see young Ngäbe couples walking with their children and in many cases it’s the man who’s responsible for their care, in contrast to what we see in the comarca and in rural areas. Another significant fact among Ngäbe youth who decide to live together is that they most often migrate as a couple.
The young men are also changing. Martín, a 25-year-old social work student, said: “I agree about fighting against domestic violence and I don’t think that we men should have several women. When I talk about these things with older family members they don’t like it and tell me I’m not a man. But I say this isn’t right and if we don’t have a lot of money we all go hungry. I also think we shouldn’t have a lot of children or a lot of women if we can’t feed them all well.”
The workshops on domestic violence, alcoholism, discrimination against women and marital customs have had a very important impact. In those meetings, with their context of dialogue and respect, young Ngäbe women and men have been able to listen to and reflect on the painful testimonies of young women who have suffered from domestic violence and abuse. Attending these workshops during our research, we witnessed how imposed resignation often turns to sadness then gives way to rage that becomes the motivation to take up the fight.
Becoming community leaders and role modelsNgäbe women opposed to discriminatory practices within the family and marriage are oftern accused of destroying the traditions and they pay for it with rejection and a break with some of their family members. Juan, a 75-year-old, told us of his worry: “The Ngäbe blood is changing. Look here, you don’t cross a hen with a drake and Ngäbe women are now marrying Latinos and our men are marrying women who aren’t Ngäbe. That’s why they’re forgetting our things.”
Another side of this same coin, however, is that these “destructive” women have earned respect and recognition from their communities’ young people. They have become leaders and role models because they’ve achieved economic independence; they participate in activities for health or production and fight to defend the human rights of indigenous women and the Ngäbe people in general. Five or even three years ago it was impossible to think of a chieftain like Silvia Carrera leading the struggle waged by the Ngäbe people in March 2012 against mining and hydroelectric projects in the comarca.
Ethnic pride is revived in the young peopleNgäbe youth from the city have fully joined in the world of work and this means greater dependence on the labor market and on money, as well as radical lifestyle changes. They are showing that culturally they have the tools to adapt many of their cultural cornerstones to new urban contexts and are finding new meanings in old socio-cultural practices such as the jegi, which has begun to be known nationally as a Ngäbe dance, but is more than that; it’s one of the the Ngäbe people’s main cultural expressions.
From what we observed during our research, we’re emboldened to state that Ngäbe ethnic identity has been revived and strengthened by the violence the Ngäbe people suffered in the Changuinola protest of July 2011, those of January and February 2011 against the Tax Reform law and the February and March 2012 struggles against mining exploitation and hydroelectric plants in the comarca, in which young Jerónimo Rodríguez died.
This revival can be observed in various ways. One example: in September 2012 it was reported by La Prensa that “Ngäbes will choose symbols for the comarca… They will choose designs for the flag and the escutcheon that will represent this region of the country. The project also includes the music which will be the Ngäbe and Buglé anthem.”
Independent of whether or not this project becomes a reality, it’s already an indication of ethnic pride that isn’t growing out of a vacuum, but out of a process in which an indigenous people condemned to invisibility and marginalization stands before the powers-that-be and manages to paralyze the country, attracting the national and international media’s attention for days.
Francisco Miranda, local chieftain from the Nole Duima district, commented: “In the protests by the Ngäbes and Buglés for the rescue of rivers and mineral resources in different parts of the Inter-American Highway, they performed traditional dances to summon the spirits of the indigenous leaders who preceded them, so they would transmit their strength and accompany them in this struggle. With these dances and with the sound of the conch, warrior spirits like those of Urracá and Ulikran relive in their souls .”
Mamachi: A religious-ethnic movementAttempts by the Spanish colonizers to convert the Ngäbe people to Christianity and force them to live in villages weren’t successful. The Ngäbes were always an indomitable people tenaciously resistant to Spanish invasion. Some Ngäbe converted to Christianity and assimilated the lifestyle of the Latinos but the bulk of the population was never conquered. More than 9,000 Ngäbe burned down their houses in the missionary towns and fled into the depths of Veraguas, Bocas del Toro and Chiriquí.
This explains why the Ngäbes, unlike the Mayan population of Guatemala, don’t have their own religious expressions from a syncretism that fuses their ethnic worldview with Catholicism. There’s no religious practice among the Ngäbe of lighting candles or kneeling before an image or touching the cross and then crossing themselves or entering a church on their knees as devotees, as is customary with the Mayans.
The Mama-tata or Mamachi was a nativist religious movement that emerged in the mid-1970s in the Ngäbe Comarca. It reclaimed its own ways and culture against those of the outside. Today’s Ngäbe youth see the Mamachi is seen as something remote, weakened over time. Rodrigo, who is 22, commented: “My grandmother and my grandfather were Mamachi. They lived in Cerro Balsa. They are now sick and don’t go out. They told me that the Mamachi helped defend them from the people who came from other parts to harm the Ngäbe. In the Mamachi they said what God wanted of the Ngäbe: to behave well. I visit a Methodist church with my brothers and don’t understand much about the Mamachi. I feel good in my religion.”
Everything suggests that the Mamachi was a religious movement with ethno-political implications, which functioned to strengthen collective links against the social exclusion in which Panamanian society had cornered the Ngäbe people. It’s a case that shows that the ethics of religious worldviews don’t always adopt conservative standpoints in social conflicts. In various historical processes many religious worldviews have played a clear role in the struggles of subordinate groups.
Churches are identify references In the city, far from the environment of the comarca, Ngäbe migrants are forced to take up residence in an alien place with different rules of coexistence than those of their culture. With production skills that aren’t valued in the city, difficulties in handling Spanish and hostility from the Latino population, and without the support of the extended family, they find places of kinship, ethnic solidarity, socializing of values and standards, and building relationships of trust in the churches, which makes them identity references of primary importance.
In workshops, surveys and focal groups most Ngäbes said they belonged to the Adventist, Catholic or Methodist churches. Marcos, a young Ngäbe, explained: “I joined the Adventist Church with my partner. Over there in the comarca my family goes to that church. Here in the city it’s like a blessing. We meet up with Ngäbes we knew from the comarca. We speak Ngäbere and feel supported when we need anything. We have activities and on that day we eat together. In the city it isn’t easy even to get a glass of water. We’re known in the comarca and it’s easier to get help. The word of God unites us in this barrio.”
Martina, a 24-year-old, commented: “In my family we’re Catholics. In Chiriquí I studied in a convent school and lived there as a boarder. Before coming to Panama City with my husband, we spoke to a nun and she helped us find a house. There are nuns living in this neighborhood just like those in Chiriquí and this is a big help. When they go to Chiriquí and I have some money to send to my mother, the nun takes it to her and it’s safe. We meet up with other Ngäbes at Mass on Sunday and we help each other. We also do things for children in the parish and go to sewing class. We also visit the sick.”
Far from getting lost in the urban sprawl, the Ngäbes share a common feeling through their religious affiliation that helps break down loneliness and isolation.
The greatest hopeSome of the strategies the young Ngäbe migrants use to meet the various cultural pressures confronting them include rejection of their own culture and passive acceptance of being negatively rated. But there’s also the ability to take on both cultures and to reclaim and affirm their identity.
As with other indigenous youth in Latin American cities, certain constants reoccur: they are catalogued and classified as eternal migrants; they are rejected in the urban environment and face many difficulties inserting themselves into the workplace and getting access to health, education, housing and justice. Added to this are problems with insecurity and violence in the neighborhoods where they live.
Despite the many problems they come up against, our research has provided great hope because many of the young Ngäbe men and women are opening spaces so they can advance in the construction of harmonious and inclusive coexistence. Moreover, the presence of Ngäbe young people in university life and in the cities has been enriching for both them and non-indigenous youths. The most important achievement for the Ngäbe youth would seem to be in recognizing themselves in the difference.
In every change something is gained and something lost; something new emerges and something old diminishes. On a steep and thorny path, all attempts at intercultural action involve risks. Strength and fragility go hand in hand in the human condition. The most important discovery from our research is the conviction that it’ll be the Ngäbe youth who will choose; they are the ones who, in the midst of Panamanian or Costa Rican society, will formulate the seal of their ethnic identity, the one that best fits the realization of their individual and collective projects.
José A. Idiáquez, SJ, is the author of En búsqueda de esperanza: Migración Ngäbe a Costa Rica y su impacto en la juventud (In search of hope: Ngäbe migration to Costa Rica and its impact on youth), Panama, 2012, which envío summarized and edited for this article.
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