Paper short abstract:

This paper is an attempt to show how the oral history of the Ngäbe is reconfigured and re-adjusted to fit the historical narrative of the Panamanian state in such a way that the continuity of the latter with the (pre-Columbian) past is underlined and its legitimacy re-asserted.

Paper long abstract:

Twelve years after their struggle for their own semi-autonomous reservation ended, the Ngäbe people are still negotiating their identity as an indigenous group with respect to the wider Panamanian society. In order to elucidate this process of negotiation two Ngäbe myths will be analyzed.

The first myth which is very popular in mainstream Panama, recounts a love story between a Ngäbe princess (the daughter of the chief Urraca, in the historical narrative) and a Spanish conquistador. The Ngäbe in what appears to be an act of subaltern resistance modify this (already) corrupted Ngäbe myth, whose original version no one knows, in an effort to retain and define their distinctiveness as an indigenous group within multicultural Panama. The second myth which is circulated almost exclusively amongst the Ngäbe, is set in an unspecific past and recounts the story of legendary Ngäbe chief Mironomo-Kronomo. In the version collected and recently printed by the local Catholic Church the main character is presented as manifesting Christ like qualities, clearly deviating from oral versions of the same myth that I collected during my fieldwork.

The ambivalent relationship between the Ngäbe and the rest of the Panamanian society is further exemplified by other popular mytho-historical narratives and in material culture where the Ngäbe chief Urracas' portrait decorates the one cent coin of the dollar currency, which is officially called the Balboa, named after the founder of Panama City and who was ironically the enemy of Urraca.