Written by: Ariana Peguero
Artwork by: Rachel Chan
Clara González (she/her/hers) was a leader in the women's rights movement in Panama during the early 20th Century. She was born in the province of Chiriqui in Panama on September 11, 1898. Her father was a Spaniard while her mother had indigenous Ngobe roots and came from Remedios, a district of Chiriqui populated by Hispanic settlers and mestizos. When González was around a year old, her family had to escape to Costa Rica during the Thousand Days War, and they did not return until after the birth of the Republic of Panama in 1903.
Upon her family’s return to Panama after the war, González’s parents separated. González and her younger brother lived with her father, who was educated and, as a Spaniard, had a higher social standing than their mother. Due to her father's work, the family frequently relocated, and González became aware of the social inequalities that existed in Panama between rich and poor people across the country. She would later recall how disgusted she felt towards these injustices, particularly for the mistreatment indigenous women endured. Although she realized that she herself fell somewhere in between the middle and lowest classes, González also acknowledged there was a certain privilege she experienced by having a Spanish father. These early experiences inspired González to eventually build a career to fight for those without power.
González initially pursued a career in teaching, but capitalized on the opportunity to study law after Panama passed a standardized co-education decree in 1919 that allowed women to attend Instituto Nacional (National Institute). Her experiences in law school provided the foundation for her political and social beliefs. She was guided by some of the most influential Latin American thinkers of the time, including several female faculty members and social reformers, who were already changing stereotypes and redefining the meaning of being a woman in Panama.
In 1922, González became Panama’s first female lawyer after she received her law degree from Escuela Nacional de Derecho, Panama’s national school of law at the Instituto Nacional. González then played an outsized roll in founding the National Feminist Party in Panama at the country’s First National Feminist Congress in 1923. A few years later, in 1927, Gonazález was awarded a full scholarship to New York University Law School, where she earned a second law degree in 1930. However, she was prohibited from practicing as a lawyer in Panama because of her gender. González responded to this exclusion by organizing a petition to the president of Panama asking to make it legal for women to practice the careers they studied for. This same year, El Grupo Feminista Renovación (The Feminist Renewal Group), was created with González as the president. In her thesis, La mujer ante el derecho panameño (The woman before Panamanian law), she criticized the state’s prejudice against women’s rights.
Gonazáles’ organizational and intellectual drive not only led her to defend women's suffrage, but also to support the causes of other social groups. She worked as a professor of sociology, political economics and political science at the Instituto Nacional (National Institute of Panama), from 1930 to 1937. Later, she taught courses on Youth Criminology, Juvenile Courts. and Family Law at University of Panama and served as the organizer of the Popular Cultural Centres. As Panama’s first Judge of the Juvenile Guardianship, from 1951-1962, González also laid the groundwork for the development of policies to reform the treatment of juvenile delinquency.
González’s story can serve as inspiration for current womxn activists, and her experiences hold important lessons still relevant today for many groups of people. Currently, many people in the Latine community are focused on understanding how race shapes their identities and their experiences within and outside of their community, as well as how to responsibly claim or identify with their ancestral roots. It is extremely important that, in her lifetime, González recognized the privilege she had having a white Spanish father. She acknowledged that although she was poor, her conditions were much better than those of the indigenous women around her, including her own mother. González’s lack of identification with her own indigenous roots evolved out of the inequities inherent in Panama’s society, which still exist today. She was faced with challenges because of her gender and economic status, yet her race gave her the privilege to achieve a career that otherwise would have not been possible. Many mixed race Latines today now face the challenge of how to proudly embrace their multicultural and/or multiracial backgrounds without erasing the identities and experiences of certain communities in doing so. When reclaiming and identifying with Black and/or Indigenous ancestry, Latines must also actively support and work to understand the experiences and needs of Black and Indigenous people, within and outside of the Latine community.
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