Until recently, most of the work that covered the relationship between Panama and the United States focused on the diplomatic negotiations between teams of diplomats, and the political realities that informed these relations. Most Panamanian historians, meanwhile, struggled to defend the nationalist narrative, showing that a Panamanian national consciousness existed since the nineteenth century, and depicting the twentieth-century struggle of a nation against an empire. Histories of particular ethnic groups like the Afro-Antilleans (Michael L. Conniff), the Kuna (James Howe) and the Chinese (Lok C. D. Siu), went some way to undermine the image of two stable polities locked in a struggle. But only recently did writers like Julie Greene and Ashley Carse attack the older scholarship head on. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone will solidify this break by forcing us to come to terms with the impermeability of the borders of the Canal Zone. In this excellent work, Michael Donoghue depicts the ‘super enclave’ from the post-war era until its dismantling following the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977, showing the numerous ways in which, despite its relative immutability, it lived in perpetual crisis, its boundaries subject to continuous challenge from below.
Donoghue borrows from a variety of scholarly fields (the literature on borderlands, on enclave societies and on modern empires) arguing that the areas surrounding the canal, which included Panama City and Colón, formed a borderland. The evidence that Donoghue brings to support this characterisation is vast. Thousands of Panamanians and US soldiers and civilians crossed the border every day, for work or pleasure; thousands developed sexual and romantic relations; and many more social and economic networks tied people on each side of the border. Scholars of Panama and the Canal Zone will of course be familiar with these facts, but no one has discussed them in such breadth, depth and nuance before.
Following an introductory chapter that lays out the argument, Donoghue devotes a chapter to describe and analyse the world of the white ‘Zonians’, and another to the Afro-Antilleans of the Canal Zone. Beyond the extensive archival research that supports his nuanced descriptions in these two chapters, Donoghue's massive oral history work allowed him to enliven his depiction and give it a ring-true feel. It also allows him to go beyond the now well-established characteristics of the zone as a Jim Crow society, which segregated its Afro-Antillean ‘silver role’ employees and their families from its white ‘gold role’ employees. A separate chapter on gender, sex and sexuality in the imperial context of the zone elaborates on the enormous temptations that lay behind these social boundaries, and the great fears that the forbidden desires elicited. Another chapter explores the special role that the military had in the borderland and the tension that surrounded the civilian-military divide within the Canal Zone. The US military, which held the majority of lands and men in the zone, also had its own judicial and police system, and its own set of interests. Donoghue argues that while soldiers were sometimes responsible for horrendous violence that outraged the Panamanian public, overall, Panamanians held less animosity towards US soldiers because they were more transitory and less committed to the idea of the zone. A full third of the US military in the zone at any given point was Puerto Rican, and many others were Black and Latino. Donoghue unpacks some of the tensions between these groups and white soldiers. A final chapter is devoted to the illicit economy and to the role of crime in the borderland. Donoghue's emphasis on crime throughout the book is developed further here, and while he shies away from viewing all crime in the Canal Zone as a form of resistance, he insists on reading crime within its socio-political context, a context the historical actors were themselves aware of.
Borderland on the Isthmus is the most thorough and best depiction of day-to-day reality in the post-war Canal Zone to date. While the book does not deal with the Panamanian side of the border in great detail, Donoghue is well versed in Panamanian historiography, and has more than enough Spanish sources to give his reader an idea of how Panamanians experienced life along the border.
The book falls a little short on its engagement with borderland theory, however. As Donoghue points out, the majority of the studies in this field have been developed on the United States-Mexico border and other areas along state boundaries. Far from the reach of the state and the centres of hegemony, these frontier zones develop their own patterns of commerce, social interaction and culture. Donoghue's empirical work shows that the Canal Zone and the Panamanian cities bordering it indeed had many of the characteristics of a borderland, but also a profusion of state agencies and agents. Indeed, it is possible that what created spaces for subaltern infrapolitics along the Canal Zone boundaries was the opposition between authorities, social institutions, legal and normative codes, and the contradictory reality this opposition engendered. Perhaps then, what is needed is a novel theoretical development, which will take into account not only subaltern resistance to the system of domination along the imperial boundaries, but also the penetration of state agents from one side to the other, as well as the dissemination of disciplinary practices, language, habits and culture more broadly.
This is a criticism that is only possible in light of Donoghue's fantastic empirical work, in any case. The theoretical questions that linger here, moreover, make this anthro-historical study all the more important to read for historians interested in Latin America and the US empire.
