Juan Materno Vásquez de León (born September 14, 1927 in Nombre de Dios - died June 21, 1999) was a

Panama Panama, officially the Republic of Panama, is a country in Latin America at the southern end of Central America, bordering South America. It is bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north, and ...

nian public speaker, lawyer and professor. His intellectual work was centered on defining the Nature of Being Panamanian.Investigations of the Nature of Being Panamanian (A Theory of the Panamanian Nationality)
published in 1981 In more than 20 books, television and radio interviews throughout 30 years of public life Juan Materno Vásquez de León's closest definition of a Panamanian was given in the terms of "the Panamanian is that being that is neither black, neither white, neither

cholo ''Cholo'' () was a racial category used in 18th-century Spanish America to refer to people who were three-quarters Amerindians, Amerindian by descent and one-quarter Spanish people, Spanish. Its origin is a somewhat derogatory term for Multi ...

, neither indio; to the contrary, he is black, white, cholo and Indian."

References

1927 births 1999 deaths People from Santa Isabel District 20th-century Panamanian lawyers {{Panama-bio-stub