Mercado De Artesanias Balboa

This guide to the Mercado de Artesanias Balboa in Panama City opens with a strange law: after 1918, Panama's government banned the mola, the layered cotton panel Guna women stitched into their blouses, along with their language and jewelry. It follows Nele Kantule, the chief and healer from Ustupu island who turned that quiet defiance into an armed uprising during Carnival in 1925, driving police off the Guna islands. Dozens died before an American diplomat stepped in to broker peace. Stalls here now sell, openly, the same cloth Guna grandmothers once had to hide.