Sixteenth-century efforts to abolish indigenous slavery informed precedents for Africans and their descendants seeking freedom on the isthmus. The monarchy’s efforts to combat maroonage by establishing free indigenous and African settlements highlight plural and shifting affiliations. At the same time, migrants from Nicaragua and Peru joined others from the Rivers of Guinea (many described as Zape, Biafara, or Bran) and a growing population of “Angola”, between slavery and freedom. Bureaucratic efforts to differentiate groups revealed cultural and biological mixture among them. Although some Spaniards made provisions for their children with Indigenous and African women to travel to Castile, many marriageable offspring of mixed unions chose to remain in Panama, where they could to draw upon maternal as well as paternal kinship networks. Some of these women entered a first-generation colonial elite that did not present itself as mixed. In this sense, “disappearance” of the area’s indigenous population belied the incorporation of some of its members and their descendants into the local oligarchy.