There is a vast body of literature about the Panama Canal and rightfully so. It stands as one of the most consequential construction projects in human history. This enormous undertaking, as well as the nearly century-long US presence in the Canal Zone, has been the subject of popular histories (for example, by David McCullough), diplomatic histories (Walter LaFeber), social histories (Michael Donoghue), and labor histories (Michael L. Conniff and Julie Greene). Scholars in recent years have directed a great deal more attention to the latter category. Joan Flores-Villalobos offers an insightful addition to this corpus with her examination of West Indian women’s experiences as the canal was being built.
The book’s title is an homage to Velma Newton’s The Silver Men. That study shed light on the West Indian men who risked life and limb to build the canal yet were paid considerably less than the skilled (mostly white) workers who were on the more lucrative Gold Roll. Flores-Villalobos addresses an even-less-studied and underappreciated group crucial to the canal project. She makes a compelling case that West Indian women’s stories and experiences are not just ancillary to the broader account of the Panama Canal but rather fundamental to the canal project itself.
Flores-Villalobos shows that West Indian women—perhaps some 15,000—who migrated to Panama at the turn of the twentieth century “built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for workers, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and its racial calculus” (2). These women served as cooks, cleaners, childcare providers, sex workers, and domestic partners. Without their work, she argues, the US imperial project in Panama would not have been possible.
Yet, because these women’s activities were largely outside the bounds of the administrative body overseeing the canal’s construction—the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC)—authorities remained anxious. Unlike West Indian men, who were needed for digging, West Indian women were not recruited or even welcomed. Consequently, they commonly faced harassment, especially single women who came to Panama in search of domestic work because it paid more than they could make in their homelands such as Jamaica or Barbados. Canal Zone officials often surveilled or investigated independent, unmarried women for prostitution and moral degeneracy. Those officials worried that “deviation from the goal of efficient construction rendered [West Indian women as] threats to the coherence of the American project” (80).
To get at West Indian women’s experiences and ICC administrators’ perceptions, Flores-Villalobos uses an impressive variety of bilingual sources, and her book is well-steeped in the relevant secondary literature about the canal project and early-twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean migrations. Although direct writings from her primary subjects are relatively sparse, she conducts clever readings of available materials to gain insight. This approach is most evident in Chapter 4, in which she analyzes white women’s memoirs to see how Black women’s labor was depicted. From these remembrances, she determines that “Black women emerge not as compliant servants and satisfied mammies, but as mediators and entrepreneurs, negotiating their relationship with their bosses to receive better pay, assert their sexual autonomy, and control the conditions of their labor” (113).
Flores-Villalobos provides an engaging and accessible framework for her analysis. Each chapter opens with a compelling grassroots anecdote that exemplifies a broader point and concludes with a helpful recapitulation of key ideas. In between, she clearly explains her arguments in direct, jargon-free prose. In sum, she effectively demonstrates how West Indian women were able to carve a space in the Panama Canal Zone for themselves and their families. In so doing, they simultaneously supported and challenged the broader US imperial project there. This book should find an audience among Latin American and Caribbean scholars as well as experts on the history of the Panama Canal.
