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Gender, Race, and Migrant Labor in the “Domestic Frontier” of the Panama Canal Zone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2021

Joan Flores-Villalobos
Joan Flores-Villalobos*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, History, Los Angeles, California
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: jfloresv@usc.edu
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Extract

The cover of Maid in Panama depicts a West Indian higgler as a “mammy.” Her skin is an exaggerated ink-black, her body is large, her face round, and she wears a servant's uniform, including headscarf and apron. The higgler walks across an open field carrying a tray of tropical fruits on her head, with a background of palm trees, a placid river, and fluffy clouds.

Type
Main Article
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 99: Pandemic Roundtable; The Labor Movement As an Educational Movement; Gender, Race, and Migrant Labor in the “Domestic Frontier” of the Panama Canal Zone , Spring 2021 , pp. 96 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2021

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References

NOTES

1. For a discussion of this dynamic in the British imperial context, see McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London, 1994)Google Scholar, and Delap, Lucy, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. McElya, Micki, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Deborah Gray, Ar'n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor, MI, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4. Though the exact number is unclear, this estimate comes from Conniff, Michael, Black Labor on a White Canal (Pittsburgh, 1985), 29Google Scholar. He suggests there could have been as many as two hundred thousand West Indian migrants to Panama during the period.

5. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal; Greene, Julie, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Lewis, Lancelot, The West Indian in Panama: Black Labor in Panama, 1850-1914 (Washington, DC, 1980)Google Scholar; Newton, Velma, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2004)Google Scholar; Westerman, George, “Historical Notes on West Indians on the Isthmus of Panama,” Phylon 22 (4th Quarter, 1961): 340–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Only three previous works have addressed West Indian women's role in Panama during the construction at any length: Greene, The Canal Builders; Eyra Marcela Reyes Rivas, El trabajo de las mujeres en la historia de la construcción del Canal de Panama, 1881-1914 (Panama, 2000); Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal (Kingston, 2014).

7. Putnam, Lara, “Borderlands and Border-Crossers: Migrants and Boundaries in the Greater Caribbean, 1840-1940,” Small Axe 18, no 1 (March 2014): 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Frederick, Rhonda D., Colón Man A Come: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Lanham, MD, 2005)Google Scholar.

9. Glymph, Thavolia, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT, 2019); Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70 (Sep. 1998): 581–606; Rosemary Marangoly George, “Homes in the Empire, Empire in the Home,” Cultural Critique 26 (Winter 1993-1994): 95–127; Vicente Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines,” American Literature 67 (Dec. 1995): 639–666; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992).

10. Greene, The Canal Builders, 228.

11. Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage.

12. On Panama as a “contact zone,” see Greene, The Canal Builders. On Panama as a “black contact zone,” see Winston James, “Harlem's Difference,” in Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol, ed. Andrew Fearnely and Daniel Matlin (New York, 2019). The phrase comes originally from Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.

13. Though the phrase “freedom dreams” comes from Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, 2002), many historians of the Americas have explored the different ways previously enslaved Black people enacted their freedom, among them Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage; Natasha Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham, NC, 2015); Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 (Kingston, 2004); Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Durham, NC, 2012).

14. F.U. Adams, Conquest of the Tropics: The Story of the Creative Enterprises Conducted by the United Fruit Co. (New York, 1914). See the Introduction to Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Cambridge, 2019) for more on creating Panama as “the tropics.”

15. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia's Industrial Experiment (Durham, NC, 2000); John D. French and Daniel James, eds., The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box (Durham, NC, 1997); Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 (Tucson, AZ, 2003); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham, NC, 2002); Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC, 2001); Barbara Weinstein, “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America,” International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 161–176.

16. Marie Eileen Francois, “The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures,” History Compass 6 (2008): 207–242; Jocelyn Olcott, “Introduction: Researching and Rethinking the Labors of Love,” HAHR 91 (2011). See the recent and forthcoming work of Anasa Hicks, “Hierarchies at Home: A History of Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution” (PhD diss., New York University, 2017).

17. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).

18. Isthmian Canal Commission, Quartermaster's Department, Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912 (Mount Hope, Canal Zone, 1912), 16.

19. The Canal Zone census shows a vastly disparate sex ratio between Black men and Black women that does not hold up when compared to the parallel national Panama censuses. This suggests, along with other evidence, that many more West Indian women migrated to the region than the US administration accounted for. See my forthcoming work and Lara Putnam, “Borderlands and Border-Crossers.”

20. There is not an exact overlap between women categorized as “black” and those categorized as foreign-born from specific islands. The census also accounts for “mixed” race men and women, some of whom could have been from the West Indies. The racial category of “black” could have also included Panamanians. However, for the most part, the US racial system understood West Indian immigrants as “black” (and on the Silver roll) and Panamanians as “mixed” (and sometimes admitted to the Gold roll). According to the 1912 Census of the Canal Zone, only 705 Panamanian women resided there, whereas there were 1,739 Barbadian women and 3,493 Jamaican women, along with several thousand from other islands. Some US-born African Americans migrated to the Canal Zone, but the numbers were negligible compared to the number of West Indians. I have seen no evidence of African American women's migration to the Zone. Thus, while I critically asses the different racial categories of the census, I do assume a substantial overlap between the census’ understanding of “black” women and “West Indian” women. Residents of the Canal Zone would have “read” a Black woman (especially in domestic service or higglering) as West Indian.

21. Census of the Canal Zone, 1912, 52.

22. Ibid., 55.

23. For more information on West Indian teachers and Commission employees, see Reyes Rivas, El Trabajo de las mujeres.

24. The 1912 census counted 1,739 Barbadian and 3,493 Jamaican women.

25. Greene, The Canal Builders, 230–232.

26. Willis John Abbott, Panama and the Canal: The Story of its Achievement, its Problems, and its Prospects (New York, 1914), 323.

27. US Senate, “Papers concerning women from Martinique,” in Investigation of Panama Canal Matters: Hearings before the United States Senate on Interoceanic Canals, 59th Congress, 2nd Session, (Washington, DC, 1907), 951.

28. Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of enslaved black women in Barbados (New Brunswick, 1989), 72; Rashauna Johnson, Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (New York, 2016); Natasha Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham, NC, 2015); Shauna Sweeney, “Market Marronage: Fugitive Women and the Internal Marketing System in Jamaica, 1781-1834,” The William and Mary Quarterly 76 (April 2019): 197–222.

29. Beckles, Natural Rebels, 75–76. In Barbados, there were several efforts to link huckstering to criminality in 1668, 1708, and 1733. The practice did not become officially legal until 1794.

30. Ibid., 177–78.

31. Herbert G. de Lisser, Susan Proudleigh (London, 1915), 57. [Accessed September 30, 2019, Digital Library of the Caribbean, https://dloc.com/UF00081174/00001.]

32. Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 242.

33. Greene, The Canal Builders, 129.

34. J. Wynne, “Housekeeping in 1906,” Yearbook, Society of the Chagres (Balboa Heights, Canal Zone, 1914), 87 [http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00013083/00004].

35. Reyes Rivas, El Trabajo de las mujeres, 129-30.

36. See Bonham Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900-1920 (Knoxville, TN, 1985) and my forthcoming book.

37. Along with the volume edited by Mrs. Ernest von Muenchow, The American Woman on the Panama Canal: From 1904 to 1916 (Panama, 1916), which includes further excerpts from Rose van Hardeveld's life, these are the only three memoirs published about the construction era by “regular” white American women (that is, not married to the top authorities of the Canal Commission) and continue to receive attention from ex-patriates and historians as representative accounts of life during construction.

38. See, for a similar situation, Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity.”

39. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 1.

40. Carla Burnett, “Unity is Strength: Labor, Race, Garveyism, and the 1920s Panama Canal Strike,” The Global South 6 (Fall 2012): 39–64; Jeffrey Parker, “Sex at a Crossroads: The Gender Politics of Racial Uplift and Afro-Caribbean Activism in Panama, 1918-32,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4 (Fall 2016): 196–221.

41. Marixa Lasso, “Race and Ethnicity in the Formation of Panamanian National Identity: Panamanian Discrimination Against Chinese and West Indians in the Thirties,” Revista Panameña de Política 4 (Julio-Diciembre 2007).

42. Michael Thomas Carroll, Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory (Albany, 2000), 22.

43. On the frontier as a foundational American myth of exclusion, see Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York, 2019). Also see William Appleman Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 24 (November 1955): 379–395.

44. Parker, Panama Canal Bride, 33.

45. Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to A Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln, 2009); Peggy Pascoe, “Race, Gender, and the Privileges of Property: On the Significance of Miscegenation Law in the U.S. West,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley, CA, 1999).

46. Jan later received the Roosevelt Medal of Honor for serving the longest time at the construction of the Canal. They eventually moved back to the United States, and Rose died in San Antonio, TX, in 1969 at the age of ninety-two. “Mrs. Van Hardeveld, 92, Ex-Tucsonian, is Dead,” Tucson Daily Citizen, June 19, 1969, 40.

47. Rose Van Hardeveld, Make the dirt Fly! (Hollywood, 1956), 26.

48. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, 25–6.

49. Ibid., 34.

50. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 2007).

51. Charles Liebermann Parker, from Washington, DC, served in various roles in the Quartermaster's Department throughout construction, including as Superintendent of Labor, Quarters, and Subsistence in the Gorgona District.

52. Parker, Panama Canal Bride, 17.

53. Ibid., 27.

54. “Retirements in May,” The Panama Canal Review 2, 11 (June 6, 1952): 14. Although the Canal Commission required teachers in the Zone to stay single, Core had a long-term relationship with John “Doc” Odom, head of the quarantine station at Corozal at the time, and married him after retiring. During her tenure as teacher, Core published fifteen books on Panama, mostly children's books like Panama's Jungle Book (1936), Christmas on the Isthmus (1935), and the children's history book Panama's Trail of Progress, or the Story of Panama and its Canal (1925). She gained some renown as a local historian and in 1952 offered a one-semester no-credit course at the Canal Zone Junior College's Extension Division on Panamanian history, which focused on “the history of the Isthmus from the earliest known geologic period through the present and will combine actual history with some folklore and legends.” Her work was rewarded with Panama's Order of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, an award for civic commitment.

55. Canal Zone Brats, http://www.czbrats.com [accessed October 2, 2017]

56. Core, Maid in Panama, 44–45.

57. Ibid., 83.

58. See, for example, “Lines of Communication,” in Core, Maid in Panama, 20.

59. This quote comes from Parker, Panama Canal Bride, 33. Though she refers to maids and houseboys, the latter rarely, if ever, come up in these memoirs.

60. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).

61. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, 41.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 45.

64. McClintock, Imperial Leather; Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York, 1995); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 2003 [1966]).

65. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2.

66. Alice Childress, Like one of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life (Boston, 2017 [1956]); Patricia Hill Collins, “Like one of the family: race, ethnicity, and the paradox of US national identity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (2001): 3–28; Premilla Nadsen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement (Boston, 2015), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Migrant Domestic Workers as ‘One of the Family,” in Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy, and Politics, ed. Bridget Anderson and Isabel Shutes (London, 2014).

67. McClintock, Imperial Leather.

68. Ibid.

69. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly! 74.

70. Ibid.

71. Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage.

72. Putnam, The Company They Kept, 61.

73. Rose Van Hardeveld, “From 1906 to 1916,” in The American Woman on the Panama Canal: From 1904 to 1916, ed. Mrs. Ernest von Muenchow (Panama, 1916), 14.

74. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly! 39.

75. Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 192.

76. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly! 40.

77. Ibid., 90.

78. Greene, The Canal Builders, 150.

79. Ibid., 148.

80. Amos Clarke, Isthmian Historical Society competition for the best true stories of life and work on the Isthmus of Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal, University of Florida, Digital Library of the Caribbean, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00016037/00001 [accessed May 6, 2020].

81. Index to the Gorgas Hospital Mortuary Death Records, 1906–1991, Record Group 185: Records of the Panama Canal, National Archives and Records Administration.

82. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly! 41.

83. “Fruit Trees,” Docket 7: In re claim of Dunlop, Augusta, RG 185: Records of the Panama Canal, Records of the Joint Land Commission, Docket Files, 1913–1913, Box 2 (Dockets 5 thru 12), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

84. Core, “Philosophy of Life,” Maid in Panama, 1–5.

85. Ibid., 5.

86. Ibid., 33.

87. The Panama Canal: Hearings before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, April 4, 1912 (Washington, DC, 1912), 88.

88. John Owen Collins, The Panama Guide (Mount Hope, C.Z., 1912), 24.

89. Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, 35.

90. The Panama Canal: Hearings, House, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, 88.

91. J. Wynne, “Housekeeping in 1906,” 100.

92. Joan Flores-Villalobos, “Freak Letters”: Tracing Gender, Race, and Diaspora in the Panama Canal Archive,” Small Axe 23 (2019): 34–56; Jeffrey Parker, “Empire's Angst: The Politics of Race, Migration, and Sex Work in Panama, 1903–1945” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2013).

93. Core, Maid in Panama, 181.

94. Judge Thomas E. Brown Jr., Letter to M.H. Thatcher, September 18, 1912, Folder 62-B-8: Misc. Police Investigation and reports for which there is no subject file nor classification under Arrest or Crimes, Record Group 185, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

95. Hine, Darlene Clark, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 912–920CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See some discussion of rape and sexual vulnerability for Black domestic workers in Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage and Sharpless, Rebecca, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchen: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010)Google Scholar.

96. Van Hardeveld, “From 1906 to 1916,” 15.