Decades of Panama research by SRU professor to be turned over for nation’s access
After speaking hardly a word of Spanish for his first visit to Panama in the 1980s, Thomas Pearcy, a professor in the history department at Slippery Rock University, has gained an understanding of the country that will soon allow him to provide thousands of digitized documents to the nation’s government and people.
Pearcy has spent the past four decades traveling back and forth to Panama, mainly Panama City, the nation’s capital, which is near the center of the Central American country. He has conducted Census-style surveys of households in the nation, compiling data about the Panamanian people.
But Pearcy’s main achievement has been scanning documents from Panama’s history into a cloud-based system, organizing them to help make them accessible to anyone with internet access. He will “turn over” the information and control of the online cloud to the University of Panama and the Panamanian government on June 22, during a formal presentation with Universidad de Panamá colleagues and Panama’s Minister of the Interior.
He calls this project, dubbed Historians Without Borders, his life’s work and he came upon it almost completely by chance.
“In the 1990s, a Panamanian contact and I were in a basement at the University of Panama, in a library basement,” Pearcy said. “There were dozens of filing cabinets filled with papers and it was filled with Panama's founding declarations.”
Latin American scholar Fernando Aparicio was with Pearcy when they came across the documents and he was also involved in the project over the years.
Pearcy, who is originally from Indiana, attended Purdue University in 1980, but took time off school to help refugees in El Salvador. It was there that he “fell in love with the people of Central America.” He would go on to specialize in Latin American history with a focus on political violence, Pearcy said.
Pearcy started teaching at Brigham Young University in 1991, where he was director for the Center of Latin American Studies. It was during his tenure at BYU that he found the documents in the Panama library, which led Pearcy to assemble a research team of colleagues from the university to start converting the physical documents into digital. This could only be done through photocopying at the time.
“It took some time and I had it all shipped back to Utah and my lead research assistant there, who is the head of Microsoft's artificial intelligence program, we scanned over 100,000 pages of documents and put them in PDF form,” Pearcy said. “That was all we could do technologically at that time.”
Pearcy said he also involved professors from the University of Panama, who according to Pearcy, were integral to the research he also conducted in the nation.
Those surveys took place in the 1990s, according to Pearcy.
“We conducted three expansive heads of household stories,” Pearcy said. “We asked about fears, income, leisure time if it exists and made some shocking discoveries. Most importantly, we assembled enough data and researched and wrote books about this.”
Pearcy began teaching at Slippery Rock University in 1998, where he continued specializing in Latin American studies.
Pearcy spent significant time in the 1980s and 1990s speaking with and advocating for the property rights of citizens of Viejo Veranillo, a impoverished community in Panama known as “barriadas brujas” or squatter settlement.
Pearcy told SRU he and his research teams conducted interviews with people living in these squatters’ communities. These individuals “weren’t counted by the Census Bureau who lived on 10-by-12-foot houses with dirt floors and thatch roofs with no windows or doors.”
“They could have been kicked off of their land at any time,” Pearcy said. “Finally in 2023, the government of Panama buckled, because we were writing articles about this in Spanish and English. Those families got their land.”
From 2016 to 2018, Pearcy had help compiling the data from these surveys in the form of a research assistant at SRU, Abbi Smithmyer.
Smithmyer was studying the U.S. Civil War at SRU, but switched her focus to earn a history degree after working with Pearcy on some of his Panama research, who was also Smithmyer’s academic adviser at the time.
Smithmyer said she used information from two years of surveys — which were conducted in 1996 and again in 2015 — to create spreadsheets of information about people in the squatter settlement.
“I was able to compare the findings from those two years and see what families were still remaining there in 2015 that were there in 1996,” Smithmyer said, “how conditions changed in the community over those years and... seeing how different things were in the community after the change with the Panama Canal.
Smithmyer said these surveys also documented how many people were victims of violence in each year, which was a focus for Pearcy and became a topic of interest to her as well through her studies at SRU. She said the surveys also aimed to find out how access to utilities changed over the decades.
“I put them into pie graphs and line graphs to see the growth of the families and who suffered from crime in 1996 vs 2015,” Smithmyer said. “About 25% of people had a septic tank or sewer in 1996 where it grew to 75% in 2015.
“Hundreds-worth of interviews over the two years (put) into these graphs so the data was easily digestible.”
Pearcy said this project is putting swaths of Panama’s history onto the internet for the first time. But he emphasized the task was all done in the name of preserving the experience of Panama’s residents — not the experience of people from the U.S. or other nations.
“You have several military dictatorships in Panama, but literally right across the highway you have the Panama Canal Zone. Those things complicated significantly getting access to materials,” he said.
“When I started working in Panama in the 1980s, Panamanian history was written by people sitting in air conditioning in Washington, D.C., or in the Panama Canal Zone,” Pearcy said. “I decided very early in my career that that was wrong. People who look and sound like me should not be flying to another part of the world and telling them their history.”
The website featuring the digitized documents and information compiled by Pearcy and his team will go live June 22.
