User:BAYANO10

I AM A ZONIAN I was born and raised in the Panama Canal Zone of West Indian/Caribbean ancestry. I grew-up in Gamboa and, notwithstanding the Apartheid conditions that I encountered when we first moved there (separate schools, a divided wall in the commissary, separate clubs houses and even an invisible line of segregation in the Our Lady of Good Council Catholic church, Gamboa, and by extension, the Canal Zone was a great place to grow-up.

We had a great play ground in the Rainforest behind my house and, the Canal and the Chagres was also a great place to play. We could not use the swimming pool because it was for whites only, and after my neighbor Kenneth Sealey drowned at a place we called culvert in the Canal—my father petitioned the Governor of the Canal Zone to give us (blacks) at least two-days a week in the pool.

After that, no one else drowned in the Canal. I learned to be a lifeguard in that pool, the white kids and the black kids got along. We use to sneak out of Sunday school and go down to the Canal and fool around.

Gamboa and the Canal Zone was a clean and safe place to grow-up. Everybody was your parents and, we had almost a zero crime rate in the Canal Zone.

The Panamanian oligarchy monarchy did not like the facts that BLACKS got to live in the Zone. The corrupt politicians in Panama were often able to get the Canal Zone government to erode some of the benefits of the BLACK Zonians, after the 1955 treaty, Black Zonians could no longer enlist in the United States military from within the Canal Zone. The Panamanian oligarchy monarchy prevented us from obtaining US CITIZENSHIP even when we were born in a United States Territory.

The 1964 riots were sparked partly because the Panamanian students were being encouraged to raise the Panamanian flag on the Canal Zone by elements within the Panamanian government, all the while they were pushing to have their children attend schools in the Zone.

My grandfather and great uncles and other family members built the Panama Canal and today, their effort are being eradicated by revisionist historians in Panama.