Defending our culture...

Every culture has a defense mechanism to protect their culture. Since I can remember Panamanians tend to protect their culture with festivities like dias Patrios, Carnavales and so on. I think that instead of thinking about how we protect our culture, we need to think about on how we protect who we are. Panama, as you may know is a pretty diverse country. Here you can find different cultures in a small space of land. I think that we as Panamanians protect our culture from outsiders with the different traditions that we celebrate on holidays and important national days.

Panama is known as a pacifist country. We don’t have a military to protect our country, but I think that we are very friendly to outsiders. I think that tribes and people from other provinces are more protective of our culture, than people who live in the urban area (Panama city). Since we are so costumed to the North American culture, sometimes we don’t even realize that we lose touch with our own culture. Besides that, Panama is a country where people from different cultures come to live and each and every of those cultures are seen around the city. We have learned how to deal or understand people from different cultures. Taking that in consideration, I think that it is easier for us to understand other cultures without feeling threatened about it, because we have always been influences by other cultures.

Throughout the years, I have learned that we protect our culture by celebrating the different traditions that has been passed down from generation to generation. When I was living in the US, we kind of did the same things in order to not forget who we are. The first thing was to keep speaking Spanish among other Panamanians. Besides that, we would celebrate the festivities there as well, not as big as we used to have it here but we tried to keep up the traditions. It is important for everyone to protect their culture, because its part of your identity and if you don’t protect it then a part of you will disappear.