The Panamanian in Me

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

The real meditation is . . . the meditation on one’s identity. Ah, voila une chose! You try it. You try finding out why you’re you and not somebody else. And who the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!
Ezra Pound


Every Sunday, while growing up, my father, his three brothers, and their families congregated at my grandmother’s house in South Central Los Angeles, filling it with laughter and the whirlwind of cousins as we ran around, playing. Coming together for Sunday brunch was a Sirias family tradition. And during these gatherings, although the older generations of Sirias’ hailed from Nicaragua, I’d notice that their gazes would cloud over in nostalgic fondness whenever their conversation turned to the years they spent in Panamá.

At mealtime, I’d listen to my father and his brothers argue over who’d get the “concolón”—the crispy, burned rice at the bottom of the pot. And they referred to beans as porotos, when every other Spanish-speaking family I knew in Los Angeles called them frijoles. What’s more, for the first eleven years of my life I thought that lentils were a Nicaraguan staple; and it wasn’t until I moved to Nicaragua, at age eleven, that I discovered that no one there had a clue what lentils were.

And almost every Sunday my grandmother—a true artist in the kitchen—prepared tangy ground beef turnovers that my cousins and I greedily devoured. Not once did I ask about the place of origin of these, but I somehow knew they were not from Nicaragua, and I assumed that my grandmother had gotten the recipe from her Mexican neighbors. But in the ensuing decades after her death, the turnovers became a distant, seemingly irretrievable memory. However, when I moved to Panamá—in July of 2002—after buying my first empanada de carne from a street vendor, I was thrilled when my taste buds told me that these were the turnovers my grandmother had been making those Sundays, many years ago, in Los Angeles. It was merely one of a countless number of things that my father’s family picked up during the eight years they lived here.

My paternal grandparents separated shortly after my father, the youngest of four boys, was born. At the time, the United States Marines occupied Nicaragua, and María Brunilda Burgos de Sirias (being a devout Catholic my grandmother never divorced), earned a decent living, cooking for the American soldiers stationed in Granada, her hometown. But in 1933, after the Marines withdrew, she was left without the means to support her four sons. An iron-willed person, my grandmother went to El Salvador to try her luck, starting a clothing business. But after six months without much success, a friend told her that Panamá was a land of opportunities, and that someone with her drive would do well there. And she came to this country, in 1939, leaving her boys in Nicaragua, in the care of relatives.

Within six months, my grandmother had saved up enough money—preparing meals for Nicaraguan students that attended the Universidad de Panamá and yearned for the flavor, el sabor, of their homeland—to send for her sons.

Although my father was only twelve at the time, in his later years he could still recall, and vividly, the day when the boat bringing him and his brothers docked at the pier in San Felipe. At once he fell in love with the city, and he would remain here until the age of twenty, living in a third story apartment near the church of La Merced. While growing up in Panamá, my father swam competitively, practicing every afternoon at the pool that today is named after Adán Gordon, his coach. He also graduated from the Escuela de Artes y Oficios.

Throughout the eight years the Sirias’ lived here, they applied for Panamanian citizenship, several times. Their requests, however, were never granted. During Arnulfo Arias’s presidency, Panamá adopted xenophobic and racist immigration policies—to the extreme that people born in this country were threatened with having their citizenship revoked, simply because they were of African or Asian heritage.

Ironically, when my grandmother applied for residency in the United States, her request was granted. No longer a cook, she had been working for a U.S. Army Colonel stationed in Clayton. He and his wife liked my grandmother so much—she was the nanny of their autistic son—that when the officer was transferred to Virginia, the couple sponsored her so she could continue working for them. She went along, her sons now able to fend for themselves, and nearly two years later, now a legal resident of the United States and living in Los Angeles, she sponsored her boys in a deal that included my father having to join the Army and serve in the Korean War.

In July of 2003, my father, José Joaquín Sirias, came to visit me. He had been away from his beloved Panamá for more than fifty-five years. We toured his old haunts, in San Felipe. In pursuit of his long-cherished memories we climbed up several flights of rickety wood stairs to the third floor apartment just off Avenida B where he and his family had lived. The deplorable state of the building, which through the distorted lenses of nostalgia had been a palace, brought tears to his eyes. Along with Sandy, the youngest of my sisters, we stood for a long time in what used to be my grandmother’s kitchen, where my father and I spent time reminiscing about her remarkable culinary talents.

We also visited other places that had meant a lot to him, especially the pool where he swam every afternoon. But the entire time my father was here, he kept asking me about the Casa Miller. He wanted to see what in his memory had become the city’s most important landmark. Being fairly new to Panamá at the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. But during one of our outings we asked a veteran taxi driver who then drove us to the plaza Cinco de Mayo and pointed to the spot where the Casa Miller used to stand.

My father returned to Nicaragua, his country of residence, happy to have set foot again in the land of his youth, and we talked about another visit for the following year in which he’d bring his surviving brother, Guillermo.

Shortly after my father left, I came across a postcard of the Miller House that I intended to give to him in person. Sadly, within six months of his visit to Panamá he fell gravely ill. I went to Nicaragua—as did my two sisters—to be alongside him, and I took the postcard along.

Although we had the chance to say our goodbyes, he was so ill and in so much pain—before lapsing into a coma—that the postcard of the Casa Miller became inconsequential. Because of professional obligations I had to return to Panamá, and my father died a week later, blessedly in my sisters’ loving care.

Certain that my father was close to his death, before leaving Nicaragua I handed the postcard of the Casa Miller to Sandy, my sister, and said, “Please place this inside of dad’s coffin. It’s something from Panamá that meant a lot to him.”