No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Between 1913 and 1916, the US-run Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) expelled some 40,000 people from Panamanian towns in the Canal Zone. Marixa Lasso is the first to unpack this fascinating story, usually only mentioned alongside the greater epic of the construction of the Panama Canal. She debunks the myth that this depopulation was necessary to building the waterway; some towns were flooded, but many could have remained and were dismantled after the canal opened. “The story of the depopulation of the Zone,” she argues, “is the history of political—rather than technical—decisions” (p. 3).The politics of depopulation followed the larger politics of imperial erasure of modernizing but less powerful nonwhite peoples. US canal officials insisted on seeing Zone inhabitants—some Panamanians, but mostly West Indians and other immigrants such as Chinese, Spaniards, French, and Bengali—through the tropes of the premodern: indolence, ignorance, unfamiliarity with technology, and inability to self-govern. Yet those who inhabited the dozens of precanal towns—Empire, Gatún, Gorgona, Chagres, Cruces, and more—were integral to the transportation projects that for centuries connected the Atlantic to the Pacific. Especially by the nineteenth century, Panama's peoples served as shopkeepers, hoteliers, vendors, artisans, boatsmen, muleteers, engineers, lawyers, and farmers. The ports of Panama had “never been quaint or traditional” (p. 21). When the technology changed—for instance, when the railroad came—they learned new skills. Panamanians also lived from the import-export business, which brought them significant wealth and internationalized not only their population but their products, from alcohol to home decorations.Panamanians along these routes also practiced a republicanism in some ways more enlightened than the North American model. They enjoyed legal equality from 1821 on, regardless of skin color. Municipalities also largely self-governed, led usually by black mayors and town councils.Yet North Americans insisted in codifying Panamanians as primitive natives fatally marked by their tropical wilderness environment. Travelers ridiculed contrasts between the jungle and modern technology, judging them incompatible. Others denied that Panamanian farmers could be practitioners of agriculture because they did not work on plantations, even though they exported bananas and coffee. North Americans instead saw their lands as “largely unused” (p. 85). The idea of Western civilization thus excluded black West Indian workers who served a railroad while including white British workers who spun cotton. Such racism made it easier for US observers to “erase” Panamanians not only physically, by flooding or moving their towns, but also socially, by ignoring their contributions.Officials came to such conclusions only after debating—among each other but also with Panamanians such as Eusebio Morales and Carlos Mendoza—whether to recognize the modernity of Panamanians or to silence it. Panamanians, black and white, argued that the isthmus, as a hub of transportation and commerce, had long made of them a modern people. They struggled—unsuccessfully—to retain some Zone ports. The ICC's process leading to depopulation occurred in three stages. From 1904 to 1907, the ICC experimented with creating five largely self-regulating municipalities. Perhaps because mayors pushed back too hard against official demands, the ICC in 1907 transformed the municipalities into “administrative districts” whose inhabitants could learn the habits of modernity. Yet, as the canal neared completion, American sections were increasingly more sanitary, screened-in, orderly, comfortable, and, ironically, government-controlled than native ones.Only in 1912, eight years into canal construction, did President William Howard Taft's order to depopulate come, prompting the third and final stage. Zone officials now no longer referred to Panamanians as “residents” or “inhabitants” but rather as undesirable “occupants” (pp. 142–43). Never did officials speak of depopulation as a technical necessity for the construction of the canal. “The reasons were deeply racial,” concludes Lasso (p. 149).Few photographs, postcards, or even documents of the lost Panamanian towns exist, and so Lasso at times speculates or extrapolates from the few voices that have survived. A few gems, such as a letter of complaint, tax records, or a song, offer a welcome corrective to the dominant US documents. The author also reads well-known documents differently, finding, for instance, in travelers' accounts clues as to the modern characteristics of the Zone.Lasso's greatest contribution is to resurrect the history of these forgotten towns, and her book belongs on the same shelf as Julie Greene's masterwork, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (2009). Written in stirring and accessible prose, Erased should be read by all those interested not only in Panamanian history or US–Latin American relations but also in experiments in exhuming the human collateral damage of Western colonialism.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.