ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the process through which Spanish chroniclers created a unitary narrative of the slave rebellions in Panama, shaping a standard description through which a set of succinct chapters was meant to describe neatly to the reader a process that was long, messy, and complex. The bundle represented rebel slaves as figures rather than as individuals, and authors examine how English writers and ideologues domesticated the cimarrones for an English reading public, describing the rebel slaves in their accounts as symerons. Several chroniclers writing in the period between 1580 and 1620 embedded a narrative of the War of Vallano in their extensive and wide-ranging histories of the Indies. The historian of the rebel slaves of colonial Panama must begin by confronting several difficulties.
