Isthmus

Culture drawn by people

It’s a tiny ribbon of land where borders were lines drawn by distant powers and the problems of modernity. Yet the cultures they supposedly divide are woven so tightly together that the distinctions feel almost arbitrary—until you sit with the people, taste their food, hear their stories, and realize the borders matter precisely because they've been forced to. From Panama's urban pulse to Costa Rica's verdant wilderness to Colombia's layered complexity, I moved through landscapes and cities that refused to be contained by colonial cartography. The jungle rainforest is indifferent to these lines, a reminder that nature operates on different logics than empire.