The Great Divide

by Cristina Henríquez

Three million years earlier, Marian had read, underwater volcanoes had erupted and sent great reservoirs of sediment up through the surface, connecting two continents and forming the bridge of land upon which they all stood. Now, evidently, the task was to divide it again, to open the land from sea to sea. What nature had accomplished, men wanted to undo.

To be independent and to be sovereign were two different things. Panamá, detaching itself from Colombia, had merely done an about-face and attached itself to the United States instead.

“Sadly it seems the North Americans do not understand that. To them, we know nothing and have nothing—nothing worth knowing or having, as far as they are concerned.

I have heard them say that the work they are planning will bring things like progress and civilization and modernity to this place—I am sure you have heard those words as well—as if the tools we have already created, the buildings we have already constructed, the land we have already cultivated, the society we have already organized is not, somehow, progress or civilization or modernity, but outside of those things. As if we are nothing more than primitive people with a few primitive huts that can be so easily moved.

West 13th Street! No Panamanian would have given this street that name. It was so . . . bland.

Ada thought as she gazed at it now, was not how big or how small her mother’s world was, but that her mother had managed to keep it at all. It must have been no trifling thing to carve out a space of her own, to protect it and hold within it the people she loved.