The concept of race is a strange thing. It has long been debunked as a pseudoscience, but has proven to have a long afterlife, with “racial identity” being a hot topic even in countries that don’t classify their citizens by “race” (the UK census notes people’s “ethnicity”, not “race”). Half of this is because the idea of race as a social concept is deeply ingrained in the Americas, where countries grew out of colonial societies that were ruled by hierarchies that distinguished between European settlers, enslaved Africans, and dispossessed or exploited natives. The other half of the reason for the concept becoming so widespread is the overwhelming cultural supremacy of the USA, which has resulted in its identity politics being exported to other countries. With no scientific basis, however, race has an extremely ambiguous definition. Still, on the train from the airport in Panama, I wondered what proponents of racial identity would make of the passengers. Almost everyone on the train appeared to be on a three-way spectrum of European, African, and Native American. But Panama also has a colonial origin, so it’s also presumably been subject to the same forces of racialisation. So how does such an idea function in a country where everyone is so mixed?
When the casta system was in force in the Spanish colonies between the 16th and 19th centuries, there were up to 15 different categories of race, depending on the level of admixture between Spanish, African, or native. The system assigned each category its place in the social hierarchy, regulating what opportunities, rights, and privileges were available to each group of people. But by the early 19th century, as the Latin American nations became independent, the system had collapsed, having become increasingly unreliable as the population became more and more racially ambiguous. In the early 20th century, these nations embraced their mixed heritage, or mestizaje, as a symbol of unity, and stopped collecting census data on race, which was soon discredited as pseudoscience in any case. Instead, cultural differences – ethnicity, essentially – were documented. This recognised the many native groups of Latin America, but ignored how many of the population had African ancestry. By the end of the century, pressure grew to collect data on race again, in order to acknowledge the level of poverty and discrimination suffered by the people who were still, despite the official ideal of all the peoples mixing to create a homogenous whole, socially considered black.
Panama started including native identity in the census in the 1990s, but did not collect census data on people who considered themselves black or mulatto* (of mixed European and African ancestry) until 2010. In the lead-up to the census that year, activists encouraged people of African descent not to be ashamed of their racial background and proudly claim their identity. Almost a century previously in 1920, the official guidance in Panama was to classify anyone who with mixed ancestry as mestiza, which is a term that is usually used to describe people of specifically European and Native American descent. Now, Panama has five official categories for classifying its citizens: Mestizo (in the sense of mixed European and native descent – 65% of the population), Indigenous (12.3%), Black or African descent (9.2%), Mulatto (6.8%), and White (6.7%). The Indigenous category is further split into separate ethnic groups, such as the Kuna and the Embera. The inclusion of ethnicity in what are otherwise racial categories further complicates matters, as in Latin America, if a person of completely native ancestry assimilates into the mainstream Hispanic culture, they are sometimes considered mestizo.
The 20th century ideal of all the constituent peoples of countries like Panama merging into one still has currency, but governments have had to acknowledge they aren’t there yet. The Latin American concept of race is a combination of class and colourism, caused by the long shadow of the casta system. Judging by a picture of President José Raúl Mulino’s quite European-looking collection of cabinet ministers, Panama still has some way to go.
Sources: National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America by Mara Loveman, 2014, CIA World Factbook, Newsroom Panama
*Although this term has official status in Panama, I would recommend against using it, as I strongly suspect it is related to the word “mule”. A mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey.
Wandering/Wondering 