Wynter (spelling mistake included) is a common last name in the Anglophone Caribbean, almost as common as González in Latin America. And Melo, according to the biography of Manuel Eleuterio Melo Villar, came from a Venezuelan soldier of Spanish descent:
His paternal grandfather [...] Don Fernando Melo, from Parita, in the province of Herrera, arrived at Darién with his father. From what I hear, although Don Fernando was born in Caracas, Venezuela, he was of Spanish origin and came to the isthmus in 1831.
My father’s mother’s last name was Spencer. My Jamaican grandmother was quiet and radiated strength, contrasting our rowdy family gatherings. My father, on his part, spoke English with his siblings but rarely spoke it with us. My other grandparents—disciplined teachers—were firm but not silent.
On the maternal side of the family, we have Estrada, a last name that I dare to say is shared by many Central and South Americans, who are all Hispanic.
Like the Panama Canal, my family is a pure mix.
II. The United States but, most importantly, Jules Isidore Dingler
The United States is often thought of as the architectural engineer of the Canal, and rightfully so. It’s also fair to recognize the colossal technological jump that the project created. American culture is blazing: without its energy, the magnificent work would’ve never been completed. But the matter is more complex than it sounds.
French romanticism infused soul into the construction of the canal. Ferdinand de Lesseps threw himself into the void with the wings of a hero and flew: the project had to take shape despite being birthed by others. Lesseps’ fame, which he gained through the Suez Canal, gave him the credibility for an interoceanic route in our continent. Without the French temperament—French excess—the project today would be an architectural plan hanging in a museum, or it would’ve been born much later. Jules Verne’s oracular country was decisive in the shortening of the trip around the world.
These are the facts: on February 20th, 1534, King Charles I of Spain and V of Germany ordered the regional governor of Panama to draft the plans for a route that could reach the Pacific Ocean through the Chagres River. However, the monarch interrupted the project when he solemnly proclaimed: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” It’s unknown whether the King received a call from the ‘higher-ups’ or if wisdom straightened his judgment, but what we know is that the project was abandoned.
Centuries later, when the French took over the ship’s helm, there was no going back. Only the financial embezzlement and the monumental administrative errors (accompanied by the exclamation Quel Panama!, a sign that mess was impossible to resolve) decreased the project’s speed. Later on, the U.S. government came out in its defense.
Articles are still being written about Jules Isidore Dingler, the man who occupied the position of the General Director of The Universal Company of the Interoceanic Canal of Panama:
[Jules Isidore Dingler was] a man well into his 40s, small in size, bald, and who bore the fortitude of great determination to accomplish objectives that many had failed to achieve before him. His fearless determination brought him to declare, shortly after he arrived in Panama, that only drunks and people who lived dissipated lives contracted yellow fever and died because of it, words that, without a doubt, he’d soon regret saying. [...] A few months after his arrival, his daughter showed clear symptoms of yellow fever; a death sentence.
He later lost his son. And before the year was over, his dead daughter’s fiancé. Finally, his wife got sick and died too. Dingler came back to France accompanied by four coffins.
III. Test the temperature before jumping into the waters.
The Americans were more reasonable: with scientific thoroughness, they studied the errors that disgraced their colleagues from the old continent (over 22,000 lost souls), and they continued right where the others had left off.
Many people had died from tropical fevers, so they called William C. Gorgas. Gorgas had performed commendable efforts to eradicate yellow fever and malaria in Havana, Cuba. The French had offered various hypotheses: infections were due to microorganisms floating in the air or the libertine conduct of some of their most wayward compatriots.
Gorgas, however, tested the Cuban Carlos Juan Finlay’s theory, who realized that those who slept with bed nets rarely fell ill. The culprit of the infections, according to Finlay’s discovery, was a diminutive and insignificant mosquito. This was by no means the Americans’ most admirable feat (their genius reached colossal heights in other areas, too).
The terrible results of the French Canal publicized the implied risks of becoming a part of the workforce at the new company. Knowing that workers “fell like flies,” the scarce population of the Panamanian isthmus looked the other way when they saw the opportunity to join the ranks of employees. And although some people thought that Black people were better fitted for the task, they were already free men and women, so they had to be convinced through the offer of a stable job.
It’s tempting to imagine job applications carried by the breeze covered in dust, but the seductive message captured any immigrant’s dream: affluence. The goal was surpassed. By 1911, more than a quarter million British West Indians had emigrated to Panama. The republic would never be the same.
IV. Arms but also stories
In his biography, Guillermo Evers Airall writes the following:
Josiah and Rosetta Airall emigrated to the Republic of Panama in 1905 with their young daughter. Their eldest daughter, Olive, who remained in Antigua with her grandmother, found their departure devastating. West Indian workers intended to inhabit the same isthmus to return to their ancestor’s land, a dream that most did not accomplish.
The first West Indian legends about Panama started to form in the employee sheds of the Silver Roll, where caste shaped the fates of those who had dark skin and were not American. Among them, John Peter Williams stands out, a character who hangs on a tightrope between fact and fiction. While the historian and musician Mario Garcia Hudson professes to have seen Williams’ birth certificate, Dagoberto Chung described him with supernatural strokes in his short story Mistacaná:
Routine always accompanied Caná; that is, up until his life changed because of his friend, a famous thief called John Peter Williams. Caná’s friend was indeed a thief, but he was a special kind of thief. He never hurt anyone—his only weapon was a harmonica. He never touched anything from his neighbors. His art was to steal from the rich and distribute what he’d stolen amongst the poor. That was John Peter Williams. A handsome Black man of indefinite age who looked young when he spoke to women and like a child when he smiled. Oh and when he played his harmonica, he looked like a sad old man who’d lived many past lives.
This sort of Panamanian Robin Hood was the kind of person who could make bullets bounce off his torso as he flew over rooftops like a bat, and he was even credited with the ability to transform into any animal of his choice. However, he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed such fantastic qualities. As Alejo Carpentier wrote in 1949 in The Kingdom of This World, West Indians thought that some people could transform into animals of their choosing, and that same belief spread through the streets of Panama in the early twentieth century. The following is a fragment in which Ariel Pérez Price depicts said belief. The scene corresponds to the year 1918 and, although it has a different setting—the banana plantations of Boca del Toro, in Northern Panama—it’s a clear echo of the Afro-Caribbean culture of that time:
The banana plantation workers had created a shadow society where a rich tradition founded upon its African legacy and its past with slavery used to flourish in true syncretism with Christianity. In this context, leaders of the labor movement arose who, like Bailey (a fake name given to one of the strike agitators against the United Fruit [Company] of 1918 and 1919), sustained their leadership in an intricate set of mystical practices. It’s said that Busher (Bailey) was also an obeah man, who was given the magical capability of camouflaging into a wild boar.
In the end, while the French were the heart of the project’s anatomy, and the Americans the rationality, the West Indians brought their bodies—but also their imagination.
V. Catarino Garza escaped from Mexico, crossed Central America, and died in Panama.
The nineteenth century saw a parade of endless unsuccessful rebellions. Panama, Bolivarian to the bone, wanted its independence—it had already exhausted the dream of La Gran Colombia. Which force impeded the fissure? Who suffocated the winds of freedom?
The answer: The United States.
The process that split Panama in half was the same one that spread throughout the entire continent. The so-called “Manifest Destiny,” a doctrine that kept Latin America for the American people, cast a shadow over the countries that were part of the Spanish Empire.
On December 12, 1846, the United States signed a treaty that granted it an advantageous transit through Panama and protected the bond that still united the isthmus with Colombia. The following fragment explains it succinctly:
The Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty of 1846, signed by the United States and Colombia, delegated the protection of the Panama isthmus to the Northern power, guaranteeing the sovereignty of Colombia “in exchange for the reciprocal guarantee that American citizens would have the right to transit under the same conditions as Colombians.”
A Mexican revolutionary arrived in Panama in this context of Northern powers. Catarino Garza had Pancho Villa’s style. Confronted with the Porfiriato, he found refuge south of the Mexican border under the wing of his liberal compatriots. In Costa Rica, he met with the Cuban hero José Martí, and when he arrived in Panama he was thrown into the clash between liberals and conservatives. This is how Perez Price describes it:
Catarino Erasmo Garza Rodriguez was a man faithful to his values. He had been living in a covert state since his youth, persecuted by authorities, a product of his political convictions. A few years ago, he had abandoned Texas, where he had led, at the front of the armed group Los Pronunciados, in a guerrilla war against the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz. After multiple military raids through the border and under the persecution of North American rangers, he came to Costa Rica to seek refuge, where, under the protection of then-President Jose Rodriguez Zeledon, he managed to forge a friendship with the radical wing of Colombian liberalism who was in exile. Amongst them: was Belisario Porras (one of the leaders of the liberal rebellion in Panama). [...] The military offense of Garza in Bocas del Toro (north of the isthmus) was, however, part of a national strategy plotted by Colombia that sought to capture President [Miguel Antonio] Caro and his ministers at the same time that military forces attacked the quarters in Bogota and its departments.
Catarino was shot down by a barrage of bullets and died while being caressed by the humid wind of Bocas del Toro. After his death, liberals and conservatives rushed the peace accords to give way for the new republic and the successful culmination of the interoceanic canal. Another guerilla fighter, Victoriano Lorenzo, was shot to prevent a diplomatic crisis. Following his Christian values, he’d been determined to end the poverty of the mountains in Veraguas. However, he did not put down his arms in time, so he was betrayed by his liberal wing.
What was Latin America to the body strewn like a cross in the Canal? An ideological paradox that persists today: the yearning for unity.
VI. The last stone
At one point, the Panama Canal existed in the imagination of a few, a dying light until the birth of earnest explorers who moved without a care in the world. With time, the stones and the stairs began to pile up one by one, and just like that, a step at a time, the path was made.
Physical and metaphysical organs gave it life just as if it were a human body. Every element played a role. There was no other way: could the beating of a heart replace the neural connections of the brain? Or do the arms, which use more strength, supplement the tasks of another organ? As with any other system, no single part could fail.
After the plot that characterized the failure of the French canal, wasn’t it logical that the colossal North completed the project in ways that benefited them? Geopolitics is a puzzle in which no piece is superfluous.
Some Wynter (spelling mistake included) left his essential mark, minuscule or colossal, in this ground. Some Melo marked indelibly the boundaries of the crossing.
All names were recorded.
That was the story.
