Not my First Coup

Note:
This reflection was written during a time of profound retriggering, when the collapse of justice structures in the United States reawakened the trauma of my childhood exile from Panama. Years earlier, after being diagnosed with an aggressive illness, I returned to Panama seeking not only physical recovery but also deep healing. Through the hands of Indigenous curanderas and the slow stitching of memory, identity, and survival, I began to reclaim a new life.

NIDO was born from this weaving: survival made visible, belonging made real.

I was 13 years old when I first lived the direct results of opposing an autocratic military coup. Too young to understand what was happening, yet old enough to feel the stress and chaos of the rupture.

In the summer of 1976, we left Panama quite suddenly, my father flying us as was customary for what I thought was a spontaneous few weeks’ vacation in Florida. We never went back.

I didn’t understand the details then, but I heard the word in the rooms: exile. And I knew that exile wasn’t just moving. It was something heavier, something irreversible.

People sent us hundreds of letters, not just in support of a dozen men violently scooped up in the streets on their way home from work or an errand, but a dozen families ousted out of their countries by force and irreparably displaced.

We represented the tragic sudden loss of democracy, and the men who led us were the hope to fight back.

My father, along with his exile colleagues, fought passionately for democracy from abroad. They joined forces and built banking and tech industries in Miami. Cutting-edge men of influence, intellectuals, Panamanian businessmen who had shaped the country they could no longer return to. Some had secured money abroad; others had not. Some had homes in the U.S.; others arrived with nothing. Exile reshuffled everything.

These were men who had once traveled freely, held autonomy, made decisions that moved industries and politics. Suddenly, they were meeting in each other’s living rooms, pooling resources, helping each other stay afloat. Some would eventually return to Panama. My father, a Panamanian educated and at home in the U.S., stayed there and held the fort.

For years, he remained in Miami, working, watching. Then, in 1984, he went back—returning to run as Vice President alongside Arnulfo Arias Madrid.

The Fight for Democracy

Arias was more than a politician—he was a symbol of Panama’s ongoing battle for democracy. Elected three times by the Panamanian people and overthrown by the military three times, he embodied the fragility of hope in a country ruled by autocratic might.

In 1984, when he and my father ran, they won. And then it was stolen, by 1,731 votes.

Manuel Noriega’s regime manipulated the vote count and declared Ardito Barletta the winner. The opposition protested, but power had already been seized. Arias went into exile, and my father returned to Miami.

Later, when the next opportunity came for a free election and the presidency was supposed to be his, he turned it down. Instead, he supported Mireya Moscoso, Arnulfo Arias’ widow, in her historic 1999 campaign to become Panama’s first female president. He served in her cabinet alongside other members of the original exiled group.

And now, coming up on the 50th anniversary of my political exile under autocratic rule, I watch events unfolding in the United States and think to myself:

This is not my first coup.

The Women Who Raised Me

My American mother left when I was four.

After that, it was mestizo indigenous women who stepped in—who fed me, clothed me, and carried me through childhood. My nanny made all of my clothes, nurtured me, and fiercely protected me.

I grew up in her community, in her creative and colorful world, playing with buttons, threading needles, sewing by hand, and watching as my nanny worked her magic on her sewing machine. I learned the language of making by simply being with her and the women surrounding her.

Where the men in my life strategized over democracy, the women around me embodied endurance.They created with what little they had, repurposing and reimagining, refusing to let scarcity diminish beauty. Where others fought to reclaim power, they fought to commune with nature and retain their culture.

This was not an intellectual exercise for me. Unbeknownst to me, I wore the revolution on my skin.

Reclaiming What Was Lost

In my forties, after a serious health scare, I went back to Panama—on my own terms. I returned not as a child torn from my home, but as a woman determined to reclaim what I had lost. I was coming full circle.

I founded Nido as part of that reclamation.

Molas, with their intricate layers and bold colors, always reminded me of a time when my father seemed free and happy. He would return from fishing trips in San Blas with piles of them, bright and alive in his hands. That was before the exile, before the weight of politics and loss.

Somehow, fabrics and textures became my strongest association with my original home, and it was through them and the ancient protective symbols of my caretakers’ people that I would weave my way HOME.

In founding Nido, I was stitching together my own return—a way to reclaim Panama through craft, through heritage, through the hands that make.

Craft as Resistance

I think about this every day as I work with fabric, cutting, shaping, stitching pieces together. Textiles, like history, tell a story. Some are torn apart, unraveled, frayed at the edges. Others are woven with intention, bound by strong hands, held together by invisible seams.

The world I was born into taught me how power moves—how it can be seized, corrupted, and stolen. But it also taught me that power can be reclaimed, and that Art has the power to repair and heal.

Sometimes, that reclamation is quiet. It happens not in war rooms or government halls, but in the hands of a seamstress, in the stitch of a dress, in the preservation of a pattern that was never meant to survive.

Nido is not just a shop—it is a reclamation. A place where things are made deliberately, thoughtfully, by hand. A reminder that we are not merely witnesses to history, but participants in its shaping.

This is not my first coup. But I refuse to let the story end in collapse.

Not in my work, in my life or in the world I want to see.