Nationalism and immigrant labor in a tropical enclave: the West Indians of Colón City, 1850–1936

Abstract

Focusing on Colón City, Panama, this article illustrates how early twentieth-century narratives about Central American enclaves as backward and isolated places contributed to the exclusion of West Indian immigrants from imaginings of the national citizenry. In showing how enclave narratives distanced tropical workers and places from the global economies and modern technologies they helped create, the article contributes to our understanding of the history of modern disconnections between the global realities of immigrant labor and the nationalist ideologies that exclude them.

Keywords::

• Colón City
• enclave
• nationalism
• West Indian
• immigrant labor
• citizen

Notes

^1. For Panamanian nationalist focus on rural and mestizo archetypes, see Ritter (2010) and Szock (2012).

^2. For similar nationalist attacks on West Indian immigrant workers in Central America, see Chomsky (1994), Euraque (1998), Soluri (2005, pp. 128–160), and Putnam (2010).

^3. For the history of the literary use of the term banana republic, see Pérez-Brignoli (2006).

^4. For analyses of American travelers ideas about race and tropics in Central America, see Putnam (2006, 2010) and Pratt (1992).

^5. Although Colón included a diversity of immigrants (South Asian, Chinese, European, etc.), this piece focuses exclusively on its West Indian residents, who were Colón's largest immigrant group and the only one that remained an important part of the Panama Canal permanent labor force, after the end of canal construction 1914.

^6. For general histories of the canal construction see McCullough (1977), Major (1993), and Maurer and Yu (2011).

^7. Two examples of recent scholarship on company towns in the Americas are: Dinius and Vergara (2011) and Crawford (1995).

^8. For a description of how the canal works helped develop the mosquito habitats that caused malaria and yellow fever epidemic, see Sutter (2007).

^9. See, for example, ‘Mano fuerte en Colón’ (El Panamá América1935b, 1935c) and ‘Los Antillanos del Panama Contract’ (Acción Comunal1931).

^10. I have analyzed this event in further detail in Lasso (2007). For the circumstances of the dead, the autopsies and the riot of 5 October, see the news coverage on 6–9 October 1934 and 11 October 1934 in La Estrella de Panamá, El Panamá América, and The Panama Tribune.

^11.http://www.lonelyplanet.com/panama/colon-province.