Reseña

San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina belong to Colombia although they are much closer to the Central American isthmus, off the coasts of Panama and Nicaragua. Besides undeniably being part of the Colombian nation, they also belong to a particular culturescape of English-speaking West Indian populations that are under the sovereignty of Spanish speaking nations in the western Caribbean, such as Panama, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, where they constitute subaltern minorities.

It is not difficult to come up with a reliable bibliography offering data, statistics, analyses, and presumably objective records about these insular territories of Colombia. But what is largely missing from the official bibliography is the voice of the islanders, their own interpretation of their collective experience, their feelings about their whole situation. The eloquent and riveting testimony in the following pages written by Martin Pomare, a native of Providencia and long-time resident of San Andrés, provides just that. He offers us a vernacular history that rises above the cold records of academic historiography in order to bring the collective clamor of a people.