Showing posts with label Cry for Independence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cry for Independence. Show all posts

November 10 – First Cry of Independence in Panama

Posted on November 10, 2017

This poster says "November: Month of
the Homeland."
This month is full of patriotic holidays for the Central American country of Panama. November 3 is Separation
Day (celebrating its separation from Colombia), November 4 is Patriotic Symbols' Day, November 5 is Colón Day (celebrating the decision that Colombian forces not fight against the separation), and November 28 is Independence Day (celebrating its independence from Spain). Did Panama really need another big patriotic holiday? 


Apparently the answer to that question is "yes!" Today's patriotic holiday is a remembrance of what is said to be the first call for independence from Spain, in 1821.

Specifically, it is a remembrance of a march in the town of Los Santos - a march led by a beautiful peasant woman named Rufina Alfaro. She is said to have shouted "Viva la Libertad" - which means "long live liberty" - and to have inspired citizens to seize the barracks housing Spanish soldiers, along with seizing their weapons. 

Supposedly, by the dawning of this date in 1821, the townspeople had achieved independence without spilling a single drop of blood.

Did you notice how carefully I wrote this holiday description? I used phrases like "said to have" and words like "supposedly." Why was I so careful?

There are many who doubt whether or not Rufina Alfaro ever existed!

Wikipedia calls Alfaro "possibly legendary." This doesn't mean that Alfaro could have been awesome - but rather that she could have been a myth! Even in Panama's parliament, arguments over was she or wasn't she real sometime break out. 

King Arthur, right.
Robin Hood, left.
Of course, there are many figures from the long ago past whose reality is disputed. Was there really a King Arthur? It's hard to say for sure - historians think that the stories may have been originally based on a king who lived in the years between 500 and 600, or maybe in the early 1000s - but we ARE sure that a lot of the details of the stories (Round Table, Camelot, Guinevere, knights like Lancelot and Galahad) are fictional. Was there really a Robin Hood (who maybe lived in the 1100s or 1200s)?

But how is it we don't know for sure about a woman who is supposed to have been leading marches in 1821?

At any rate, there really was an uprising in the town of La Villa de los Santos on November 10, 1821, and it did help lead to independence 18 days later. And whether or not Rufina Alfaro existed and helped with that uprising, there is a monument depicting her in los Santos, and she is a part of Panama's national story.

Also on this date:

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November 5 – The Cry for Independence in El Salvador

Posted on November 5, 2014

This sounds a lot like Mexican history:

On this date in 1811, Salvadoran priest Jose Matias Delgado rang the bells of a church to signal the beginning of a revolution – the movement towards independence from Spain.



And El Salvador finally won its independence on September 15, 1821.

(In Mexico, the war of independence against Spain was marked by a priest ringing church bells on September 16, 1810, and ended in September, 1821.)

Where is El Salvador?

El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated nation in Central America. It hugs the Pacific coast. I always think of the Pacific Ocean as being to the west of the Americas (because it is), but because of the curve of Central America, the Pacific actually makes El Salvador's southern border.

When El Salvador was a Spanish colony, its most important crop was the indigo plant (or anil), which was used to make a beautiful blue dye. During the late 1800s and the early 1900s, it became known as the Coffee Republic because coffee was almost all it exported.

San Salvador is the capital and the largest city.

What is special about El Salvador?

Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Destruction.

This is not the happiest thing that could be said about a country, but El Salvador has some pretty gnarly volcanoes. Even though the nation is only about the size of Massachusetts, it has twenty volcanoes, two of which are active. San Salvador was destroyed by earthquakes in 1756 and in 1854, and it was heavily damaged by three quakes in the 1900s! One of the Salvadoran volcanoes, Izalco, erupted so regularly for 150 years that it became known as the “Lighthouse of the Pacific,” because its flares and lava flows were visible from far out at sea.













This Googie-style car wash was
located in San Bernardino,
California. I live between
San Bernardino and Los Angeles.
Because of all that destruction, San Salvador today has few Spanish colonial buildings. Many of the city's most famous buildings are, instead, in the Modernist or Googie style. I read that San Salvador's architecture has been influenced by Los Angeles, California (for some strange reason)!

(I had to look up Googie—what the heck is Googie architecture? It turns out that this Southern California architecture from the 1940s to the 1960s was a sort of futurist architecture that was influenced by car culture, jets, the atomic model, and the Space Age. Think Disneyland's Tomorrowland!)







Okay, here are some other things that make El Salvador special:

  • Surfing is big-time in El Salvador.
    It has one of the highest cell phone densities in the world, with 124 cell phones for every 100 people!
  • Four species of sea turtles call Salvadoran coasts their home.
  • The Salvadoran national soccer team has gone to the World Cup two times, and one of the best soccer players in the history of the world, Magico Gonzales, is Salvadoran.


Also on this date:

























Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:


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