This comparative study of naturally occurring apologies in Cuernavaca and Panamanian Spanish investigates the apology strategies community members employ most often, and the types of positive- and negative-politeness strategies they use to perform this speech act. It calculates the frequency with which speakers use positive- and negative-politeness strategies in their apology acts and investigates whether members of these two speech communities demonstrate a preference for positive or negative politeness when apologizing. Instead of using a language-specific parameter such as “Spanish Language” and assuming that all native speakers of this language have and will use a closed set of linguistic strategies in the same way when they apologize, it is argued that speech acts, politeness and face are socio-culturally sensitive variables whose values and effects vary between communities of practice. To support this claim, they show how the communities of Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama differ from previous findings on apologizing within different communities of practice in the Spanish-speaking world.