In January 2014, at the annual meeting of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG) held in Panama, one of the field trips offered was a transcontinental train ride from Panama City to Colon. As the train wound its way through the Canal Zone, one could not help but marvel at the natural landscape passing by, with lush vegetation, shimmering lakes, and slow-moving rivers serving as a backdrop and a reminder of the pristine landscape first observed by the Spanish in the 1500s. The passing landscape was largely devoid of human settlement, reminding the traveler of what those earliest Europeans had encountered.
Only that is not what they had encountered. In making this trip, it is easily forgotten that this had been a transportation corridor in pre-Columbian America. Moreover, with the coming of the Spanish, this became an even more firmly established corridor, serving as a key connection between the Atlantic Spanish empire and its Pacific possessions. Along this route, which used rivers like the Rio Chagres and Rio Grande, as well as an extensive mule train system, a series of towns developed to support the trans-Isthmian trade. These towns, with names like Empire, Gatun, Gorgona, and Culebra, included homes, shops, warehouses, corrals, cantinas, and the other assorted uses necessary to support such a vital corridor. With the construction of the Panama Canal and the creation of the Canal Zone under U.S. control, this centuries-old urban infrastructure would disappear.
It is this settlement geography that Marixa Lasso seeks to reclaim in her highly readable and engaging account Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal. Taking as her organizing theme that modernity and “western civilization” sought to extinguish the history and geography of those not considered modern, Lasso chronicles the successful effort by U.S. engineers and managers to control and depopulate the Canal Zone. Although this had, in fact, been the most populous part of Panama, it would become a zone largely devoid of people, with the traces of settlement erased from the landscape. The effects on the landscape and the people that were displaced in these efforts are nicely chronicled in her book.
Lasso spends little time discussing the precontact world of the trans-Isthmian corridor, or on the creation of the settlement landscape during the Spanish colonial period. The provenance of towns is not her primary focus. Her interest instead lies in the efforts by U.S. officials to expunge the corridor of “natives” so it could more easily be controlled. Using Progressive Era tropes of hygiene and urban design, the many towns that dotted the corridor were to be either “cleaned up” or erased, and erasure seemed the easiest alternative.
Lasso begins her story with a description of the Port of Panama and Panama City, both integral to the Panamanian economy, although they were separate entities. She also includes a brief discussion of the U.S.-supported effort to successfully separate Panama from Colombia. Lasso frames this discussion within the context of the contradictions of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it was contended that the people of Middle and South America were largely incapable of enjoying the fruits of modernity, despite their European heritage. According to these principles, the perceived “backwardness” of the people of Middle and South America required that enlightened countries such as the United States bring modern institutions and ways of life to the benighted residents of places like Panama. The rejection by the leadership of the United States of the idea that the people of Panama, who had enjoyed a vital connection to the global social and economic systems since the 1500s, were capable of progress would frame the discourse over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone for nearly a century.
The author places the beginning of the story in 1904, with the signing of the Hay–Bunau–Varilla Treaty, which created the Canal Zone as a U.S. territory. The treaty, however, was open to interpretation, in terms of what had been agreed by the parties involved. According to the U.S. negotiators, the Canal Zone was sovereign territory of the United States. The Panamanians saw it differently, claiming that Panama had simply given the United States control over what was necessary to build, maintain, and defend the canal. Any other functions within the zone remained under Panama’s control. The U.S. position would prevail, and the Canal Zone would become U.S. territory.
The result of this interpretation was that the United States was given control over who could live and work in the zone, and what could be done within its borders. One of the features of this shift in control involved race, in which the U.S. planners and engineers, who were generally white, looked on the Panamanians now under their control, who tended toward a mixed European-African heritage, as inferiors as well as carriers of disease, a common perception of white reformers during the Progressive Era. Lasso maintains that this perception served to justify, in the eyes of the Americans, the depopulation of the Canal Zone and the erasure of its settlements to prevent contact between “natives” and white Americans who controlled the Canal and the Canal Zone.
The United States took control of the Canal Zone in 1904, and construction on the canal commenced. Lasso touches on the processes of canal construction and the transformative nature of the work, although she does not go into detail concerning the pace or scope of construction. The author details the small towns that dotted the landscape of the Isthmus, which had served as vital supply links in the transportation corridor that used the Rio Chagres and Rio Grande to link the Atlantic to the Pacific. Lasso goes on to describe the process of Americanization of the Canal Zone, as the towns became subject to U.S. control. The towns of the newly minted Canal Zone witnessed early attempts at the hygienic reforms of the Progressive Era, which would begin in earnest in the United States just a few years later. The perception of the Panamanian towns as places of dirt, disease, crime, infestation, and corruption pervaded the discourse as Americans took control. This control set the stage for the depopulation of the zone, as residents who had lived in the Isthmus for generations were forced from their homes. New towns were created for some, usually in locales away from the corridors of history and economy that had characterized their previous lives. Land that had been farmed for generations was now fenced off, and the zone was largely emptied of people. Permanent towns of Balboa and La Boca were created for canal workers, particularly U.S. workers, to prevent contact with Panamanians. This culminated in the depopulation of the zone, an unprecedented effort to create a continental corridor dedicated to the movement of ships and cargo without residents in the vicinity. Thus, nature reclaimed the corridor, and the appearance of a “natural” landscape seemingly untouched by humans was created.
Lasso relates her story of depopulation and landscape transformation in a clear and uncluttered style. Divided into seven chapters, with an introduction and an epilogue, the text incorporates maps, city plans, and numerous period photographs to relate her story. She spends only a brief time recounting the actual construction of the canal, emphasizing instead the effects of the creation of the U.S.-controlled zone on the Panamanians who had lived there for generations. As construction on the canal proceeded, U.S. engineers and planners began to alter the existing towns to meet the perceived needs of the Americans. Lasso focuses on towns like Gorgona, which had existed for decades, as new sections were built for canal workers and managers, creating a “native side” and a canal worker side. Gorgona would eventually be abandoned, after construction was completed, and replaced by New Gorgona, designed on the principles of modern town planning of the day, including wide boulevards, gardens, parks, public squares, and other hallmarks of Progressive Era town planning. That few of these amenities were constructed is not a surprise, as the creation of more “new towns” became critical as the depopulation of the zone accelerated.
Lasso’s story, and that of the depopulation of the Canal Zone, can be seen as an example of Progressive Era policies written on a landscape in Middle America, in which the “natural world” takes back a region from the vagaries of culture, now controlled and restricted. The return to nature from the “primitive” people who inhabited the Isthmian corridor prior to its designation as U.S. territory is emblematic of the drive to control and “improve” the world, whether of towns or of nature itself. The depopulation of the zone carries traces of both streams of thought. The lives of the “natives” of the zone would be improved through relocation to clean, modern towns, and nature would be improved by allowing it to reclaim its former grip on the landscape.
Lasso concludes her narrative by debunking the “flooding myth,” which held that the old towns of the zone had to be cleared of population due to filling Lake Gatun, which flooded much of the corridor. By examining old maps, the author largely refutes the claim that clearing these towns was a necessity, and that in fact most of the towns were not flooded by the lake at all. Thus, the depopulation of the Canal Zone was a choice, not a necessity, and a choice made by Americans in the face of protests by the Panamanians as the Americans sought to control the corridor in perpetuity. That Panama’s densest concentration of population was erased was unimportant; that some of Panama’s best farmland was now excluded from agriculture was irrelevant. What mattered was that the Canal and the Canal Zone were thoroughly Americanized.
In the epilogue, Lasso recounts a visit in 2013 to the Spanish fortress of San Lorenzo, overlooking the Chagres River as it empties into the Caribbean. On the CLAG field trip in 2014, we also visited San Lorenzo. It is a beautiful site, a Spanish fort completed in 1601 that allows the visitor to imagine the struggles of Spanish soldiers at this far outpost of empire. In her visit, Lasso searched for evidence of the town of Chagres, which had been a small port town that had grown up in the shadow of the fort. Chagres, though, had been erased after canal construction was complete. Finding no evidence of the town, the author drove to Nuevo Chagres, one of the new towns built to make way for the Canal Zone. According to Lasso, Nuevo Chagres is a quiet place, neglected and largely forgotten, a Caribbean town without a port and far from the streams of global society and economy that Chagres had once enjoyed. It is a place excluded from its own past. Here are found the long-term effects of the erasure of the people and settlement geography of the Canal Zone, as recounted in this fascinating and well-told story.
British Academy;
Department of Criminal Justice, History, and Social Science, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA.
[email protected]