An Interview With Leon Headley

My name is Leon. Had they? And I am from gumbo, uh, in Canal Zone. Born and raised, born in Panama City and raising between gumbo and Parisot. I went to school, Paris of high school. Graduated. I went to school at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls, Wisconsin.

Onda. Presently, I am an inspector surveyor for an accrediting agency called Cola C O L. A. I've been with them this month for 21 years on. I worked at Georgetown University Hospital for for 25. Divide divided. Yeah, well, you know, you have been reading a lot of articles here lately, and it seems that they refer tow us as the employees off the Panama Canal and it doesn't tell our story, and sometimes it hurts to do that.

I think our parents had the wherewithal to send us some of us off to the United States toe accomplish our careers, etcetera. But all in all, divided How? How in this representation, I really feel that our forefathers play a magnificent part in the building of the canal, and I don't think they emphasize that enough.

The workers, you know. And we have a legacy that we have to continue as far as we're concerned. Um ah. Lot of us moved to the United States. But, you know, I used to live in Gamboa on, you know, people go back to your hometown for for memories, and we don't have that anymore.

They destroyed the whole place, my most vivid memory. It was like a village with, like, a village. I think every everyone in Gumbo knew everybody else, and everybody has looked out for everybody else. That's my most vivid memories. The values that I learned there has carried me all the way through life or parents were strict, but it was for our own good on.

That's the memories that I really do have just read the article of a lady that she went back and did a blogger and how fantastic our parents were. Her parents are the most memorable things that happened to us, and they came through a lot for us to be here sometimes after I went to the United States.

Sometimes I think I was a man without a country, even though I lived on the kind of his own, because they didn't like us in Panama City either. So It was a kind of a kind of a mixed feelings about about how that waas we lived.

We lived in a city, Gamboa, which was also called Santa Cruz. Okay, And Santa Claus really was decided. All of all, the West Indians that live that we used to have. Ah, we used to have where I lived at the end of the end of gum board.

They used to have a big friends across the top of the hill where some of our mothers worked as made for the American American citizens. And we used to call it the 38th parallel because they wanted to make sure that it was separated on. They knew that Santa Cruz was not Gamboa, but some of some of our some of our parents and some of our colleagues lived in an area they call old Gamboa, which was where most of the West Indians lived until they started moving.

Uh, you know, the houses that was provided? We're we're houses that we lived in, and it was taken care of by the kind of by the canal zone going. Uh uh. If I could tell this story when I was in college. I had a social science teacher who was he was African America was one of the only ones on campus.

But he was giving a lesson one day and he was talking about socialism and capitalism and de facto segregation, etcetera. And it was something that went up. And I told him I lived that and he couldn't believe what I was saying. I said, Well, you know, we worked for the company store.

My parents, I should say it worked for the company store because everything that we did rotate it back to us. In other words, we got paid payroll deduction, anything that we wanted to buy in the commissaries. The commissaries were segregated, had two sides to the commissary.

One side Santa Cruz on the other side, got more. Ah, lot of us came out of high school. We could have gone to the Baba, uh, college. They never let any anybody that came out of Paris or what La Boca High School or wherever it waas there.

Never a lot of us to go to the college there. This was until after I left I left in 61 or 62 then they started. You know, uh, the Governor Cebull was one of the first governors that allowed allowed some some thoughts from the community. And he was one that kind of tried to get everybody together and treated the same way, or commissaries were segregated.

Uh, it was almost like an apartheid state. You learn all those things I told? I told, like I told my professor socialism, we had it. I said, I said to him the facto segregation we had it all you did for me was put a name on it.

You know, when I came to the United States, segregation was in new to me. But my upbringing on life, on how I should live, as's faras as faras uh, being being kind and respected and do all the things that human beings would do. Even though when I came up here, it was a different kind of racism than we had in Panama because it was Well, I came here in 1960 and that was the height of the civil rights movement.

60. 61. And I went down to Mississippi with a friend of mine and we got rejected out of ah restaurant in Tennessee and, uh, on way saw we saw the Selma, Alabama deal. I mean, I was here in the civil rights movement, so it was a more violent situation than it was in the kind of racism we had in Panama.

One of the memories is that I'm glad I came here and raised two kids. Have a family. Next year is gonna be 50 years married. That's the memory that I brought from Panama on. My wife is from Louisiana and my two kids are older. Now. My son is a nurse.

That's a memory that I have. And my daughter owns their own business in New Mexico. So those are great memories. Ast faras The future was concerned. Yeah, I think I think that the transition destroyed some of the some of the thoughts that some of the people in Panama had because they, their thoughts were The United States has gone so all of our dreams are done.

Everything is done because the United States has gone and we depended so much on the United States to the point where we fail toe go for ourselves and a za West Indians in Panama. It's even the same way that it was in the canal zone. I would like to tell them that it's a great country to be in.

I would like to tell them that Gumbo was my favorite place. And right now we're trying to show the legacy of Gamboa, even though it's destroyed. We try to let them understand that Aziz West Indians living in Gamboa. That's a great, great memory. Well, I'm glad that you guys recognize that we needed toe tell a story, and I think that you're getting the best of it.

If you interviewed any of us at all because we're prepared, we're trying to get prepared to do that on our website.