Midway through the nineteenth century, as the rivers filled with evangelists and explorers in anticipation of the rubber fever soon to come, the voices of dozens of false millennialist prophets began to be heard through the Amazon rainforest. Visions of the end, speeches of redemption and repentance that would not have been out of place in the mouth of a European swindler, but that in this case were spoken in Indigenous languages. Of those that Juan Gómez has heard, the story of Awacaipu is the most memorable. A former assistant to the naturalist Robert Schomburgk, whose intrepid British team forged its way over those tumultuous rivers just a few years before, Awacaipu had managed by the 1840s to congregate hundreds of Amerindians. The name he gave to his settlement, located in a clearing between two rivers, was Beckeranta: ‘land of the whites’. As a talisman of his divine power, he distributed pages from the Times of London to loyal members of the flock, pages that his former boss had used to wrap exotic flowers, but that now illustrated a millenarian promise: his devotees would someday have white skin, marry European women, and carry pistols rather than bows. In exchange, the false prophet asked for only one thing: those who wanted all of this first had to die. On the night of the full moon, they would drink and dance beyond the limits of their reason, after which they would have to end their lives by their own hands. The next day they would be reborn on Mount Roraima, transformed into white souls, their skin as pale as the moon.

Even though he is a historian, Gómez sometimes feels that history bores him. He gets tired of events threaded one after another like the beads of an old rosary, proposing causes and effects where initially there existed only the furor of the present. Maybe for that reason, leaving his coffee to one side to again confront the image staring at him from the pages of the newspaper, which shows hundreds of migrants crossing the Darién Gap, he thinks of Awacaipu’s Beckeranta and tells himself that it is prophecy, delirium and senselessness that interest him, not history itself. The echoes that history produces against its will. He looks at the newspaper and thinks of the migrants making their way through the tangled jungle of the Darién, and he remembers how his father, during the nights of a now distant childhood, told him stories of those lands, and the way they seemed to inhabit another world. His old man spent his entire life working for the ships that crossed the Panama Canal. The canal is only a few hours away from the Darién, but when he spoke of the territory, it was as if it were a magical world that would take months to reach.

This is how Gómez grew up, hearing tales of a supposedly impenetrable jungle so dense that not even the ants could cross it. More than once, at the end of a story, he asked his father to take him one day, only to hear him laugh as he explained that it was impossible, since the highways did not stretch that far. Later, at school, his geography teachers backed up this claim: the Darién Gap is the only point where the Pan-American Highway that runs across South America all the way to North America is interrupted. ‘That is the reason we are Panamanians and not Colombians,’ they would add with a hint of mischief, gesturing toward the map to emphasize the proximity of Panama to the United States, a sarcastic movement that seemed to suggest that they were closer to the gods.

Looking at the images of the migrants, who seemed to be crossing that gap so easily now, Gómez thought of his father. He had reached an age when he could look with tenderness at the older man’s errors. Not as flaws, but as relics of an earlier age. His old man was no longer there to look with him at the thousands of people launching themselves across that territory every month, rucksack in hand and child on their back, no longer there to call it a recreation of the feat that for his father bore a single name: Richard Oglesby Marsh.

Maybe that is the reason that Gómez has been dedicating his afternoons to rewriting, in secret and in the form of a novel, the story of Marsh, a story he first heard in the hoarse voice of his father. In his father’s telling, Marsh’s crossing seemed otherworldly, blameless and mythical, more of a dream than a reality. It was a fairy tale that as a young boy had made him think of the books of Julio Verne.

The truth is that Marsh never imagined he would end up a revolutionary in the Darién. How could he have imagined it? He didn’t know there were people there. He thought the jungle was virgin territory. Later, he would be called a traitor for siding with us, the Kuna, instead of the Panamanian state. But that was later. In the beginning, Marsh arrived with a simple mission, one that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with money: he came looking for fertile land where rubber could be planted, financed by none other than Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. Their factories needed rubber, simple as that. Marsh had previous experience visiting plantations in Ceylon and Malaya, so Ford asked him to explore new lands. The Darién at that time did not even appear on maps, though we had always been there, navigating its swollen rivers and jungle. Marsh had the luck, or perhaps it was a curse, to arrive and see the few of us among the tribe with fair skins. ‘White Indians’ he called us.

Marsh did not find what he was looking for. The jungle in the Darién is resistant to crops. Our land is incorruptible, our rivers furious. Marsh found no arable land, but he did find a myth – a fantasy, a chimera. White Indians. Sometimes one can move the world this way, chasing dreams. The rumor of our existence spread through the jungle and beyond, and sometimes we laughed at the fascination we exerted. But it was only later, when I came to know Marsh better, that I understood how deep the enchantment truly went.

For me it was different. This was how I was born. Ever since they watched me enter this life, the tribe called me Chepu, which for us Kuna people means ‘white’. They separated me from the others and forbade me from marrying. They put me in a shack with those who were like me. For me, whiteness was damnation. But for Marsh it meant purity and elegance.

There were evenings in Washington when he would become nostalgic and reminisce about his adventures in the Darién. I laughed when I heard him tell his gathered associates, always with passion, the story of how he came to discover our existence. He would light a Havana cigar and say that instead of rubber, he’d found something far more valuable: thousands of white Indians, never before described by science. A lost tribe of Europeans.

Now that he is no longer here, I sometimes sit down with the book he wrote about us: White Indians of the Darién. He published it in 1934, more than a decade after the events it describes. I settle into the rocking chair and pursue his fascination like someone stalking a delirium not his own, watch him mounted in the canoe with his team of Black guides and explorers, heading up the Chucunaque until he reaches the village of Yaviza. For Marsh, it was all strange: he had been sure that the Darién was a virgin land, innocent of the sins of history, but wherever he looked there were ruins. Vestiges of an old Scottish colony, abandoned huts of a German radio station, works of the Sinclair Oil Company, debris produced by the United Fruit Company. He had traveled to the Darién trying to escape history, and all he found was its rubble.

In Yaviza he saw a handful of dilapidated bamboo cabins. Muddy land crowded with flies and Black babies, dogs and trash. Marsh detested anyone who was not white, it must be said, for all it pains me to do so. Maybe it was for that reason he looked away, toward a clearing that extended into the jungle. This is when he witnessed the scene that would change his life. In the clearing, he glimpsed the silhouettes of three white Indigenous women, all of them adolescents. Long, blonde hair falling in perfect cascades over semi-naked bodies. Scandinavian bodies, as he describes them in the book. White bodies that disappeared into the jungle, giving way to the obsession that Marsh would pursue for years to come. He knew that we existed, that we were not just a myth. And if today I am here in Washington, it is because Marsh knew that nobody would believe him if he didn’t put a white Indian like me in front of his compatriots, an Indian as pale as those girls he saw vanish into the tropical forest, a sight that left him with the sensation he was losing hold of the threads of a dream. It was a twisted dream, that became clear to us rather quickly. His dream turned us into souvenirs brought from afar, objects of science rather than men.

In the afternoons, while writing, Gómez often remembers with perplexity the way his father, who was even darker than himself, used to narrate the story from the perspective of Marsh. The triumph of crossing the Darién, the vindication of finding his ‘white Indians’, the stand he made in the end on behalf of the Kuna, fighting alongside them against the state. The irony of it all seemed lost to him. Did he not see that Marsh had been mistaken? That there had been no lost tribe of Europe? That might be why Gómez has decided to narrate the story from the perspective of Chepu, the Kuna boy that Marsh brought to Washington in the name of science when he was only ten.

Gómez had landed three hours late. The old man was already gone. Later that day, with the funeral preparations under way, he had distracted himself by inspecting the fifteen or so books on his father’s shelves. Lost among fishing manuals he found an old copy of Richard O. Marsh’s White Indians of the Darién and, within it, a magazine clipping with a photograph of Marsh in Washington, accompanied by a Kuna boy. The caption read: ‘Marsh alongside “Chepu”, a ten-year-old White Indian boy from San Blas.’ Looking at the young, pale boy, his face expressing discomfort and confusion, Gómez smiled briefly, thinking how obvious it was that this was a simple case of albinism. In his father’s telling of the story everything had been so mysterious. So much larger than life.

Now, pausing in his writing, he wonders from what position someone like him, a Panamanian mixed-race man who has never been to the Darién, should narrate this history of dreams and wars. From what position should a Panamanian mixed-race man who has spent thirty years lost in the Anglo-Saxon academy narrate this history of borders and migrants? From what position should someone like him, a mixed-race man that Marsh himself would surely have looked upon with contempt, narrate this story of racial chimeras? The thing is, for all he knows it is not his place, sometimes he also sees himself as a kind of ‘white Indian’, a paradox forged by the strength of others’ dreams and by his own repression. He thinks of himself as a man who has learned to be white by living among white people, though all it takes is a look in the mirror to realize his error. Perhaps that is why he finds his way into the story alongside Chepu, now a man, taken from one place he didn’t belong, to another.

As soon as Marsh saw those pale adolescents disappear into the jungle, he set himself the task of finding them. It mattered little to him that neither Ford nor Firestone cared about our existence. Marsh pursued us with the force and ambition with which others seek riches. We were his delirium. He went back to the United States and looked for funding. It came easily. The Smithsonian, the Natural History Museum of New York, and the University of Rochester all took his side. The world of science wanted us to exist, they wanted a mirror that would show themselves reflected everywhere. A short time later Marsh was back, navigating the Chucunaque with a twelve-person team despite everyone in his path advising him against it, saying that the Kuna were fierce, and that no white man had survived the crossing. He didn’t listen. Accompanied by the crew of scientists and soldiers the Smithsonian had provided, he crossed the Darién heading south.

We all know the way fantasies work. To pursue them in reality is enough to see them disappear behind the veil from which they emerge. So it happened to Marsh. He did not find white Indians anywhere. All he found were the suspicious gazes of a crew that, tired of exploring, spent their hours measuring out the dangers that surrounded them. They were right to do so. I am sure the jungle would have devoured them had it not been that Marsh, always perceptive, knew how to strike up friendships with the peoples he did find. Marsh had long since perfected the knack of the gift: he carried a trunk with him everywhere, from which he took out small offerings brought from the Western world. Nobody dares say it, but I will: Marsh was the only one who could win over the Darién, uniting tribes in peace that until then had been fighting. He was blind to his true motives, to the force of his malady, larger than any conflict and any rivalry. But history is often made by people who blindly follow a vague intuition. It was this intuition that finally brought him to what he was looking for. The intuition that if what he was looking for were white Indians, he himself had to turn Indian, and that is what he did, in a manner of speaking. He deepened his friendships with our leaders, he began to understand our problems, he made our battle his own. The government wanted to us to speak their language, dress like them, go to their schools. But for Marsh, all this was pointless. We were pure and white already. Any association with Panama could only stain us. The chiefs heard him and understood they had found the man they needed to declare war on the state. Only then did they grant him the mirror he was looking for. That was when we were made to appear.

I will always remember my first impression of Marsh. He seemed to me an exhausted madman. In his eyes I read the fatigue of all he had seen and lost. But his exhaustion jolted into energy when we started to arrive by the dozens. In exchange for promising us the independence of the Kuna peoples, our leaders granted him the vision that had escaped him for so long. White Indians. I was only ten years old, but I remember looking at him from top to bottom, dressed with absurd formality in the mud. White like us, but infinitely distant.

Gómez likes to think he has preserved some of his father’s ways of narrating the story: the snapshot-like, episodic quality of narrative, the atmosphere of reverie that pervaded his storytelling. But his old man’s story was straightforward and epic, the tale of a white man saving a forgotten people, while his own is opaque. He has grown rather fond of Chepu, of his contradictions and his ambiguities. Often he thinks of the face he saw in the magazine clipping, the bewildered countenance that looked at him from the page. Chepu, a boy who must have felt foreign everywhere. Maybe for that reason, as the image of the Darién migrants silently interrogates him from the newspaper, he remembers his first months in the United States, and the sensation of foreignness that invaded him then. He never said anything to his parents. He never complained. He had fought hard to win the scholarship, and a return to Panama would have been a failure. But he felt nausea and anxiety, and his consciousness was focused on a foreign language that always eluded him. Even so, the pride of being there, in halls filled with portraits of distinguished academics, had helped keep his insomnia at bay. He had adapted, little by little, learning the forms and references, slowly forgetting his difference, learning to be one among many. A ‘white Indian’, he thinks, laughing to himself.

If his peers at the university found out about his novel, what would happen? Telling the story from Chepu’s position. Adopting the Indigenous voice. It was appropriation. He can’t see how they would understand that all of history intuitively leads him back to that same place, to that figure of the young boy turned middle-aged man, remembering his guardian with that contradictory mix of affection and reproach.

Perhaps my name is what allowed him to project his dream upon me. Chepu. They gave it to me as soon as they saw I was white as milk. I think it is the reason why, at the end of the trip, Marsh decided that out of all of us who had traveled to Washington, I would be the one to stay with him. Maybe he felt my name captured the essence of it all. We were twelve: nine with brown skin, there to represent the political interests of the Kuna tribes, and three of us who were white, brought as subjects of scientific investigation. Mimi, as beautiful as the moon, must have been fifteen or sixteen. Olonipiguina, with whom I had spent my childhood, was fourteen. I was the baby. A ten-year-old forced to stand in front of the eyes of science, as if he were a strange flower brought from afar. Marsh brought me to Washington, proudly presented me, and then left me behind. He kept his promise. It was his responsibility to return to the jungle, to lead the uprising.

I didn’t ask questions. I looked around, confirmed how different this new world was from the one I had left, and sat down to wait. Marsh gave me his home, but deprived me of mine. I remember thinking how huge the house felt, how empty and vast. Then it began to fill with the rumors and stories that arrived from the isthmus. It was said that Marsh had helped our leaders draw up a declaration of independence. It was whispered that he had helped supply our peoples with arms for the approaching battle. I heard all this and imagined Marsh amid the stormy, treacherous rivers of the Darién, fighting in our name. As winter arrived in Washington, we found out more. The Kuna, led by a Marsh who had begun wearing Indigenous attire, took Panamanian forts in Narganá and Sidra. We heard how after a tough battle they occupied the island of Parvenir. When Marsh returned, we learned that it was there, in Parvenir, that the meeting had been held. A meeting convened by the United States ambassador to which Marsh showed up late. The two representatives were already there and seated, the North American on one side, the Kuna on the other. I will never forget how Marsh sat on our side during that meeting.

Marsh returned to Washington a few months later, carrying the newspapers that announced his expulsion from Panama at the hands of President Chiari, the same dignitary who was promising to evangelize and civilize the Darién. Marsh held the pages as if they were jewels, proud of the news that they did not carry: the triumph of the Kuna peoples, the agreement the government had reached with our leaders. Marsh was transformed. It was as if something in him had broken while he fought in the Darién, or perhaps it had been lost in that clearing where he saw us for the first time, and where for the first time I saw him. More than once, in the years that followed, I saw him sitting in front of the trunk he brought back with him from Panama, that trunk he’d filled with the gifts that had gained him the friendship of our peoples. He sat there and reread those newspaper pages, and the letters he’d received from our leaders, poring over the strange story that he had lived. And I wondered, watching from a distance, if he had ever really seen us, or if we had never been more than a reflection of his self, and of his racial malady.

Sitting in the professors’ lounge, sensing that the hour has nearly come for his lecture, Juan Gómez confronts the photograph in the newspaper one last time. The Darién of his boyhood had turned into a migratory route. If only he could tell his father about it, say that the migrants were managing to do what the engineers who had conceived the Pan-American Highway could not. He wonders how his father would have received this new story, how he would have narrated it back to him. What voice would he have adopted, what perspective. Where would he position himself in this new epic? He tries to imagine the migrants on their arduous journey, heading toward their own delirious fantasy of an America that no longer exists, but at each step the silhouette of Richard Oglesby Marsh intrudes. With the bitter taste of coffee still in his mouth, he lays aside the newspaper and stands up, conscious for a moment of the dozens of portraits of white men looking down at him from the lounge’s walls.

Photograph © Library of Congress / Science Photo Library, US engineer and ethnologist Richard Oglesby Marsh with a group of the Kuna people that he had brought to Washington DC in 1924