José Agustín Arango Ramírez y su legado traces the life of the Panamanian Arangos from the arrival of the first family member in the early nineteenth century to his descendant José Agustín Arango Remón, one of the protagonists of Panama's independence from Colombia in 1903. The book, commissioned by the Arango family to foremost Panamanian sociologist and historian Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, focuses on the details of the Arango family. However, given the role of this family in Panama's government and Figueroa Navarro's insightful approach to his task, this book goes beyond the story of one family and gives us a novel understanding of nineteenth-century Panama.
This insightful approach is particularly important because Panama's nineteenth century has been understudied. Contemporary Panamanians, whose understanding of the nineteenth century still carries the weight of that earlier era's nationalist descriptions, tend to merely portray this important century as an interregnum between Panama's independence from...
