The Toro family faces obstacles whenever they try to visit their home country of Panamá. Iwas less than a year old when my parents brought my brother and me to the United States. Enrique was four. He used to tell me things about Panamá that I couldn’t possibly have remembered—like about the scorpions in our backyard and the cement utility sink where my mom used to give us baths. He reminisced about walking down the street with my mom to the Super 99, the dust blowing up everywhere, the heat pounding down, and about looking for crabs between the rocks along the bay. “It’s in you,” my dad assured me once. “You were born in Panamá. It’s in your bones.” I spent a lot of time trying to find it in me, but usually I couldn’t. I felt more American than anything, but even that was up for debate according to the kids at school who’d taunted me over the years, asking me if I was related to Noriega, telling me to go back through the canal. The truth was that I didn’t know which I was. I wasn’t allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn’t feel the thing I was supposed to claim. The first time I heard my parents tell the story about leaving Panamá, my mom said, “Our hearts kept breaking each time we walked out the door.” They tried to give it time. They assumed conditions would improve. But the country was so ravaged that their hearts never stopped breaking. Eventually they sold almost everything they owned and used the money to buy plane tickets to somewhere else, somewhere better, which to them had always meant the United States. A while after I was old enough to understand this story, I pointed out how backwards it was to have fled to the nation that had driven them out of theirs, but they never copped to the irony of it. They needed to believe they’d done the right thing and that it made sense. They were torn between wanting to look back and wanting to exist absolutely in the new life they’d created. At one point, they had planned to return. They’d thought that with enough time, Panamá would be rebuilt and that their