What Panamanian Fruit Cake Taught Me About Indigenous Heritage

As I gather ingredients for a traditional Panamanian fruit cake this holiday season, Chef Yadira Stamp's Panama On A Plate cookbook sits open on my counter—not just as a recipe guide, but as a bridge to understanding my parent’s birthplace and my own heritage in ways my parents never explicitly shared.

Panama's story is one rarely told in full: a nation positioned on the narrow isthmus 

connecting North and South America, home to the Guaymí, Kuna, and Chocó peoples long before Spanish colonization. What strikes me most is how Panama's role as a strategic crossroads brought waves of migration—all converging during the Canal construction that would reshape global commerce.

But here's what history books often omit: the human and cultural costs of that convergence. My parents never explained why Spanish felt foreign in our home, why certain stories went untold. Now I understand—language, culture, and identity were complicated by systems that sought to erase, assimilate, and stratify people along arbitrary lines.

Chef Yadira faced criticism for her recipes, told they weren't authentically Panamanian. Yet when communities are bartering ingredients across cultural lines—Indigenous farmers trading with Chinese merchants, Jamaican laborers sharing meals with Jewish families, all attempting to maintain nourishment for the journey called life—new traditions are born. This is what acculturation looks like in real life: the blending of artifacts, customs, and beliefs that result from contact between cultures. These aren't corruptions of authenticity; they are survival, resilience, and ultimately, belonging. This is imagination. This is creativity. Let us not forget.

This Native American, American Indian, and Alaskan Native Heritage Month, I'm reflecting on what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood when he wrote in Why We Can't Wait: that imperialism's legacy connects all communities of color. 

The Kuna people who fish Panama's Caribbean waters, the Guaymí working banana plantations in western provinces, the Chocó maintaining their languages in Darién province despite centuries of pressure to assimilate—their experiences mirror Indigenous struggles across Turtle Island. As King observed, "We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population." We are more similar than different in our fights for sovereignty, land rights, cultural preservation, and the simple dignity of naming ourselves.

When we Other each other—arguing, dare I say, over what's traditional, who belongs, whose food is authentic—we replicate the very systems that sought to divide our ancestors. What if we recognized that a Panamanian fruit cake made with techniques borrowed from Chinese neighbors and sweetened with Caribbean molasses is exactly what tradition looks like when people choose community over division? 

This holiday season, as I bake my mother's fruit cake, I'm not just preparing dessert. I'm honoring the Indigenous Kuna, Guaymí, and Chocó peoples whose land became a crossroads. I'm celebrating the resilience of every individual spirit who contributed to Panama's magnificent cultural tapestry. And, I'm committing to continually seek the threads that bind our similar lived experiences as I guide business leaders in cultivating dynamic People-Powered, Purpose-Driven, Profitable workplaces. 

Are you ready to transform your workplace into one where everyone's heritage is honored and everyone can thrive? Schedule a discovery call with AllProfit HR today, and let's build a future where authentic belonging leads the way for all.