'Like an alien in we own land': International tourism, gender and identity in Afro-Antillean Panama

This dissertation explores the discursive and material practices that Afro-Antilleans in the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro (Panama) employ to craft and assert their identity for tourist consumption. In participating in the transnational circuits of tourism, Panamanian Afro-Antilleans stage a complex and subtle cultural politics vis-à-vis the state and Panama's multicultural society. The transnational process that is tourism produces rather than reduces difference. This production must be understood historically and with respect to national racial policies.; Lying within a region historically identified as the Caribbean, the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro has been populated by wave after wave of ‘migrants’—Afro-Antilleans, Chinese-Panamanians, Panamanian Latinos, and resident expatriates from Europe and North America—resulting in complex cultural amalgams. Beginning in the 1990s, the Archipelago has become the site of escalating tourism. Part of a province historically neglected by Panama, the Archipelago is now the popular place for an ‘eco-vacation’ for Panamanian tourists, as well as tourists from countries around the world. In this dissertation, I offer a qualitative anthropological approach toward understanding the ways in which members of an historically marginalized group construct their identities within a nation-state in the context of globalization. These identities are developed as a result of Afro-Antilleans' interactions and encounters with tourists, producing the maintenance, rejection, replacement, marginalization, and reinvention of certain images.; To illuminate this process, I discuss touristic encounters within ‘contact zones’ (bars, hotels, restaurants, tours, and businesses). Ethnographic case material focused on Afro-Antillean music and cuisine in the context of tourism leads to the conclusion that Afro-Antilleans reposition themselves nationally through participation in transnational circuits.; Since their arrival in Bocas del Toro in the 1820s, Afro-Antilleans have been struggling to assert a distinctive cultural identity, and at the same time to establish their right to a national identity as Panamanians. Afro-Antilleans have operated within a borderzone for centuries; tourism is the most recent stage of this historical process. Identity representation for Afro-Antilleans has been driven by internal and local concerns as much as by a persistent awareness of a colonial past. Through participation in transnational processes, Afro-Antilleans are exploiting their political/ethnic/racial ambiguity to relocate themselves nationally and regionally.