Bethany Aram’s book is part of two important waves of scholarship. Alongside scholars like David Wheat, her work repositions marginal spaces of the Spanish empire within early Atlantic networks. In a narrower one, it is part of newer work on Panama’s colonial history that takes Panama seriously as a hub of transit, commerce, and exchange. Much of this new interest has developed from the superlative work of the Patronato Panama Viejo archaeological excavations guided by scholars like Juan Guillermo Martín and Tomás Mendizábal, among many others—work that Aram interprets and augments here. This archaeological research has revolutionized understandings that dismiss colonial Panama as an underpopulated backwater. Instead, as Aram shows by combining archaeological insights with archival finds, “old Panama” was a crossroads of gendered negotiation and inter-ethnic contact.
This crossroads, Aram argues, was sustained by people, but especially women, of diverse ancestries, who “met and exploited” the isthmus’ heightened demand for hospitality, food, housing, transportation. The mobility that characterized colonial Panama was facilitated not by imperial mandate nor geographic happenstance, but by the everyday work of provision and social reproduction of its mixed residents. This is then a “bottom-up” history of colonial Panama, where “attention to lived realities” (204) helps Aram supersede explanations of imperial desires as the main ordering force of colonial isthmian society.
In the first chapter, Aram reconsiders the sexual asymmetry of the conquest to argue that, rather than violence and exploitation, the prevalence of Eurafrican men and native women made these women indispensable to the survival of new arrivals. Though we know little about the internal motivations of Indigenous women, their interactions with Europeans reveal them as key provisioners, guides, and diplomats. The second chapter deals with the aftermath of the official prohibition on Indigenous slavery in 1542, which shaped the entangled experiences of Indigenous, African, and creole residents across the spectrum of enslavement and freedom. The third chapter contends with the hospitality sector, where female entrepreneurs of mostly mixed Afro heritage provided intimate services of food, care, sex, and lodging along the Camino Real from Nombre de Dios in the Caribbean to Panama Viejo in the Pacific. This chapter might have benefitted from some methodological conversation with work in African Diaspora history, such as Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives, where Fuentes explores the life of 18th century Bridgetown hotelier and procuress Rachael Pringle Polgreen. Aram looks at similar women such as brothel keeper Antonia Briceño (100), but she might have considered Briceño not only as an enterprising woman navigating a complex, gendered world of profit and sexuality, but also as an enslaver whose success and legacy depended on the exploitation of enslaved Black women. Of course, Polgreen lived almost two hundred years after Briceño, so I do not wish to draw too fine a comparison, but historians of Black women’s labor and hospitality in many time periods have considered this delicate balance.
The fourth chapter most deftly shows the separation between colonial desires and realities on the ground. While Spanish authorities sought to promote legal marriage as a form of social control, informal unions proliferated in this unstable environment and created further challenges to easy categorizations of race and gender. The last two chapters deal with religion, showing how different actors used confraternities and the Convent of the Immaculate Conception respectively as “anchors” to navigate their public standing and claim community affiliations. As the book’s title suggests, gender and ethnicity serve as Aram’s central organizing analytics. However, these receive somewhat inconsistent attention across the chapters. In chapter 5, records of confraternities show “plural, dynamic” organizations where participants created affiliation across ethnic categories. In chapter six, however, gender alone is the preeminent category of analysis. Aram considers how nuns in Panama’s Convent of the Immaculate Conception weathered lack of funding, attacks from political opponents, and plague. Aram concludes that the Convent “seemed to defy exclusion based on ancestry” (202) and developed a tight knight community of solidarity. Yet this neglects the hierarchical position of enslaved women vis-à-vis the nuns who bought and sold these captives to manage the convent’s wealth.
A pirate attack in 1671 heralded the destruction of Panama City and marks the end of Aram’s story. In the early centuries before this, Aram argues, colonial Panama was already an unruly crossroads dependent on the everyday labor provided by Indigenous, Black, and mixed women. Aram’s book is crucial reading for historians of the early Spanish empire and the Atlantic world.
