certification

Saturday, 4.6.2016

I’ve never written for any consistent amount of time, and although I truly do love to write, there is anxiety in my hands thinking about the task I’ve set for myself over these next two months.  As part of the University of South Florida Honors College’s thesis requirement, I’ve decided to spend two months backpacking across Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru with my partner Molly and record our observations.  The thesis is about the language of political liberty in these countries; I want to compare how these Latin American cities show government power, defend civil interest, and repress dissent.  Do people in these countries have freedom?  How do I measure that freedom?  What are the signs that a “free people” would even show to a 21-year-old American?

So I’m trying to figure out how to ask these kinds of questions without knowing how to speak Spanish, days after rushing from Colorado to Nebraska to Florida (sharing a few familial stressors and many relationship milestones with Molly) and showing up at the Orlando airport with about five minutes of sleep under my hat.  Security was insane and they confiscated an heirloom from my departed Uncle Stuart, which was up until the checkpoint just a quirky fork-and-spoon camping tool but turned out to have a blade rusted inside.  But we make it on to the plane and are informed that if the flight attendant doesn’t think we can comprehend enough Spanish she might move us away from our two seats next to the emergency exit, to which I wanted to respond that if we needed to use an emergency exit on a passenger airline then understanding Spanish would probably be the last thing on anyone’s mind.  Copa Airlines played a Spanish-language version of The Suffragette, which was cosmically fitting in a way, and we ate a marvelous chicken-and-cheese sandwich while dozing in and out over the Gulf of Mexico’s ethereally low cloud coverage.

I share these details because it’s important to understand my mindset before landing in Panama City.  I was a customer, with an understanding of what was expected on my end and what was expected on the company’s end of our transaction.  For an activity that places a hundred strangers within sneezing distance for three hours, flying in a commercial airliner is a uniquely impersonal experience.  There is an understanding of privacy and an expectation that whispering is about as loud a noise as anyone can make.

There is nothing private about Panama City.  I’m still digesting all of the experiences we walked through in our first day here, but here are a few notable observations:

• Panama City has traffic lanes, but you wouldn’t know it.  Each space between cars on the freeway was occupied by a motorcyclist – oftentimes a courier, but more frequently one of the police department’s tandem bike teams, with two men dressed in “camouflage black” and one carrying an assault rifle pointed towards the sky – or a salesman peddling corn or water.  Our taxi driver was kind to us aliens, but three cars butted up against the cement walls of an exit because he cut them off, and he didn’t quite seem to care.
• Later in the afternoon, I understood why wearing pants was a bad idea.  The humidity was unbelievable.  I’ve lived in Florida my entire life but it was orders of magnitude more humid here than Jacksonville or Tampa.  With the humidity came the smell of sweat.  It might sound disgusting, but honestly, the cocktail of body odor, Pacific sea salt, and street food stands every ten feet made me reconsider what it means “to smell.”  Nothing here smells like, well, nothing; everything has a marker, a scent, and whole blocks seem to share a familiar smell.
• In the evening we ate at the Mercado de Mariscos (the fish market for my mom), which was nestled between a Miami-esque overdeveloped strip of high rise apartments and the Panamanian old town of San Felipe.  Sitting down for dinner was a challenge, not because of availability but because every table was right next to every other table.  The hostess stepped on to a chair at one point to show us to our seat, and merchants weaved between the sea of plastic chairs hard-selling roses to women seated with their boyfriends or light-up toy guns to children in front of their scorned parents.

I leaned over to Molly at one point during dinner and asked her if she thought the Mercado was a public or a private space.  It’s owned by someone, clearly, but to call it private would seem absurd.  Right away we are able to see a public usage of space that contradicts our American binaries, and that challenges our understandings of how space is supposed to be utilized.

I will be writing one of these blog posts a day, attempting to make sense of my experiences and trying to develop a plan of attack for this thesis.  Did I mention that my advisors have jointly recommended close to 25 books for me to read by the time I graduate next May?  If they’re reading this, I may have left them in Tampa.  Don’t want to spend my time in Panama burying my nose in a book when I could be doing field research with Molly.