Return to the Isthmus

My family and I have been funding this documentary project ourselves. There is no current studio, no distributor, no outside backing at this stage. The Substack community helps too — CZD Insider and Founder subscriptions cover small but essential things: hard drives, office supplies, books on the Canal Zone, the everyday costs of research. It is not full funding, but it matters, and I want to be honest about where things stand.

In January, I am returning to Panama.

I left right after my junior year at Balboa High School in 1988, when my family transferred off the Isthmus. I went back once, briefly, in 1995. I have not set foot there since. That is thirty years.

I want to walk the streets of Balboa, Ancon, and Curundu again. I want to stroll up to the house I lived in, the paths I walked to school, the places that made me who I am. I want to sit in a room full of Zonians who understand, without needing an explanation, what it meant to grow up there.

There are places I’ve never been that I want to walk too. Fort Randolph. Margarita. Rainbow City, or Arco Iris as it’s known now. The cemetery at Corozal, and the one being slowly consumed at Pedro Miguel. I’d like to take the ferry to Taboga again. Has anyone here checked out Palo Seco? I lived on Quarry Heights in the 1980s, as a kid and a carless teenager. My personal scope of the Zone was small. I saw the Atlantic side only a handful of times.

This is where I need you. I don’t know what I don’t know. If there’s a place, a story, a corner of the Zone you think I should see while I’m there, tell me. Leave a comment. Send a message. I’m building this itinerary with the people who actually know these places, not just from a map. You know your community better than any other. Where are the must places to experience?

If you’ll be in Panama in January too, I’d love to meet up in person. Send me a message. It would mean a great deal to connect with someone from this community while I’m there.

I’m planning to be in Panama roughly from January 17th through the 24th, 2027. My hope is to reach as many of these places as possible in that window, which means ground transportation across both sides of the Isthmus, camera and audio equipment to properly capture what I find, and the flexibility to follow leads as they come up. If anyone has recommendations for reliable ground help, guides, contacts, I would be grateful to hear about it.

I plan to capture images and footage along the way, some of which I’ll share here on Substack and across social media, so this community can see these places as they are now, thirty years later. Meetings with community members and institutional contacts are part of this trip as well, and that groundwork matters for where this project goes next.

If this trip matters to you, and you’d like to help make it possible:

Fund: Return to CZ (click link)

Every contribution, large or small, helps get me there with what this deserves.