Carla Guerrón Montero

Being prejudiced is usually taken to mean having hasty and poorly founded feelings and opinions, usually negative, that are based on too little real knowledge and careful consideration. Definitions, however, are not explanations. The Origins of Prejudice is a short and unconventional book that shows you step-by-step both how and why all of us who are human often rely uncritically on what we believe to be true about the people, things, and events shaping our lives outside the hidden world of our bony skull. This book aims to show how we can learn from our possibly unintentional acts and self-serving misdeeds to live together in supportive, less conflicted ways.

A new reading of Panama's nation-building process, interpreted through a lens of transnational tourism. Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla GuerrÓn Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic. The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, ColÓn, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama's narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. GuerrÓn Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.