Erased is a quietly revolutionary book. Marixa Lasso shows how the construction of the Panama Canal, among the world's most iconic modern projects, depended, paradoxically, on the erasure of Panamanian and Latin American modernities. From the transportation of precious metals extracted from South America by mule and boat during the Spanish colonial era to the construction of the Panama Railroad and failed French canal project in the nineteenth century, central Panama has long been a key site of global connection. It is anything but a historical backwater. And yet, many of the historians who wrote the stories of the epochal engineering projects built to move cargo and people between the seas presented them as modern anomalies distinct from what they saw as natural landscapes and backward cultures. These narratives never matched reality, but, regardless, they made a difference in how people rationalised their roles in those stories and arrived at decisions.
In clear, compelling writing, Lasso upends ‘Just So’ stories about Panama's history by making a subtle yet profound move: she displaces the Panama Canal and its best-known protagonists from the centre of the story to its margins. For the past century, the standard Canal history – typically written by a white male from the United States – has taken the 1904–14 construction effort as its subject. Epitomised by David McCullough's definitive The Path between the Seas (1977), these books narrate the history of the Chagres River region as a prelude to the (seemingly) inevitable triumph of US canal builders: engineers, scientists and planners.
Erased, by contrast, focuses on administrative debates and community dramas unfolding during the construction era. Its focal points – land disputes, sanitation protocols, resettlement processes – may appear minor compared to earth-moving, but they actually illuminate something larger (and deeper) than the Canal. The book is an examination of the everyday operations, priorities, blind spots and contradictions of US imperial modernity. It is also an account of how cosmopolitan peoples encountered and negotiated it. Here, Panama Canal administrators are less agents of destiny than vexed bureaucrats, often unsure about what they are doing and why; they construct post-hoc rationalisations to justify policies that displace communities and turn lives upside down. Crucially, this is not simply an account of what and who has been erased from Canal histories, but a reflection on how the brackets that frame historical knowledge are made and maintained. It is also a personal meditation on repositioning those brackets and writing history for the present.
As this suggests, Erased makes an important and novel contribution to our understanding of Panama, the US Canal Zone, and the liminal spaces in between. The book is part of an emerging body of scholarship that has complicated and changed our historical understanding of the Panama Canal and its relation to the peoples and places of the Isthmus. Histories written during the first decades of the twenty-first century emphasise questions of labour, race, sanitation, borderlands, theatre, tourism, science and ecology, highlighting new stories and actors. And yet, nothing published in English or Spanish substantively examines the overlooked peoples, places and controversies presented here.
But how do you write the story of an absence? Telling the untold stories of marginalised people can present thorny methodological challenges. I'm not a historian, but I have worked in some of the archives that Erased draws upon. While the volume of material is expansive, the experiences and perspectives of the peoples at the centre of this book are poorly documented. Lasso's strategy is to work with what is available in the historical record in order to recreate what is not. She identifies letters and claims written by the residents of displaced communities to tell their stories; she reads against the grain of Panama Canal policies and bureaucratic correspondence; she scrutinises the Canal's official photographic record with an eye to what is located within the frame and what (or who) is excluded; she analyses popular Panamanian songs, treating them as windows on contemporary views of issues. Through her work, the reader can imagine a lost world.
The book begins and ends with Lasso's personal story. Growing up in the Panama of the 1970s, she saw the Canal Zone ‘as a place of desire and denial’ (p. 2) – a landscape of jungle and manicured towns. By introducing the reader to the Zone in this way, she reverses the direction of the anthropological gaze: it becomes the exotic, the other. The rest of the book explains how that strange landscape came to be, focusing on key transformations that took place during the construction of the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century. The opening chapters introduce an urban, sophisticated and historically cosmopolitan Panama City and Chagres River before construction began. The chapters that follow explain how things changed as the Canal Zone became an increasingly exclusionary space. First, Panamanian municipalities were eliminated and new sanitary regulations were enforced. Then, after much internal debate, the US government decided to depopulate the Zone, expelling communities through a process that was confused and contested. The book concludes with Lasso returning to Panama after decades of living in the United States and visiting communities displaced from the former Zone, where she listens to the stories of residents who continue to grapple with what was lost over a century ago.
Erased offers different lessons for different audiences. Humanists and social scientists interested in Latin America, US–Latin American relations, imperialism and modernity will find it illuminating. The book has much to teach us about Panama and the Canal Zone, but it is also an invitation to grapple with the broader intellectual and political project of writing untold histories. What are the stakes of recasting a particular community or nation as urban, modern, or cosmopolitan? How can this be done in one time and place without reifying narratives of cultural progress that need to be challenged elsewhere? I deeply admire this book and hope it inspires a large body of work in Panama and beyond.
