The 1925 Tenants Strike in Panama: West Indians the Left and the Labor Movement (original) (raw)
Related papers
Black Caribbean Labor Radicalism in Panama, 1914-1921
Journal of Social History
While the role of Caribbean immigrants in the “New Negro” movement in the United States is now well established, the concurrent militancy of black Caribbean workers in Panama is much less understood. The present article examines the rise and fall of Afro-Antillano militancy in both the U.S.- controlled Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama from 1914-1921. The presence of black people in the Panamanian isthmus went back centuries, West Indian migrants were especially discriminated against because they were English-speaking and Protestant. The Canal Zone authorities instituted Jim Crow style segregation (under the “Gold” and “Silver” system) to divide the work force, leaving black Caribbean workers paid less, discriminated against, and oppressed. In the face of this, these workers were not so passive or pro-British as they are often depicted. Instead, there was an outpouring of labor militancy in this period, including two massive strikes. However, the defeat of these strikes undercut the development of a united-working-class movement in Panama, and caused many black Caribbean migrants to leave Panama and made many of those remaining wary of labor radicalism. The Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey-- the most prominent black Caribbean organization in Panama at the time--had originally sympathized with the labor militancy, but in the wake of working-class defeats, became increasingly anti-labor.
Nationalism and Immigrant Labor in a Tropical Enclave: the West Indians of Colon City, 1850-1936
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.
112 years ago, in the last months of 1907, a spirit of struggle and activism spread among the impoverished working-class tenants of several multicultural neighborhoods in New York and Buenos Aires. Although most of the participants were unaware of the events taking place more than 8,500 km away, both strikes had many things in common. Thousands of tenants, many of them migrants, with a strong prominence of women, acted together in order to put an end to the voracious and predatory rule of landlords. They all had to face attacks from the media and the state-they all had to build on their experiences of resistance in order to develop the necessary organizational resources to accomplish their goals. Both labor and social historiography paid some attention to tenants' strikes throughout history, but comparative studies are still very scarce. Case studies are extremely important to help us understand the peculiarities of past struggles, but broader and more comprehensive assessments are also critical to evaluate the general trends that shaped working-class resistance in different times and places. Moreover, as shown by recent developments in Global Labor History, it is important to include the so-called Global South into the picture to avoid a kind of labor history that all too often was exclusively focused on events in Europe and the United States. Drawing upon a variety of secondary and primary sources, this paper develops a study of the tenants' strikes that took place in 1907-1908, with a difference of some months, in Buenos Aires and New York. It focuses on the peculiarities of urban development and working-class formation in both cities in those early years of the 20th century, in the motley population that filled its tenement houses and conventillos, in the role played by socialist and anarchist organizers, in the reaction of the state and the ruling class towards the tenants' struggles. It will pay special attention to the prominent role played, in both cases, by migrant workers and women. Its goal is to highlight similarities and differences of these two cases of tenants' strikes in the North and the South, in order to enrich our understanding of the global historical roots of the ongoing struggle against landlords and capitalist market forces.
This essay expands the critical conversation on race, labor, and literature in the Panama Canal Zone by foregrounding the portrayal of white, U.S. workers in two popular texts, Harry A. Franck’s Zone Policeman (1913) and John Hall’s Panama Roughneck Ballads (1912). While existing scholarship has detailed the legal and economic policies that shaped the United States’ racialized form of labor management, the “gold and silver system,” in the Zone, it has largely ignored the literary discourse that emerged in response to the system’s incongruous values. This essay argues that literary depictions of white, American canal workers as hyper-masculine and hyper-productive “Panama roughnecks” rhetorically rationalized the gold and silver system’s privileging of white, US workers, while also producing narratives that destabilized its hierarchies of race, nationality, and skill set. These narratives also engendered new forms of identification that evaded or reimagined normative American understandings of race, genealogy, and national affiliation.
cidempanama.org
The article examines the conditions governing the interrelationship between Chinese and west Indians population with the Panamanians, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, the article presents the framework in which opportunities for integration and social and economic marginalization are provided, and how Panamanians actively discriminated, but so often differentiated, with respect to different groups of foreign immigrants. It remarks the relationship between merchants-economic sector in which foreigners were widely represented and the rest of the Panamanian community as well as among foreign traders between them, as belonging to one or another nationality. The political environment of Panamanian nationalist exaltation, which allows the intensification of discriminatory and even racist legal initiatives, is also examined in detail. It also illustrates forms of political participation of immigrants, and social and political alliances that generated.
Eighth Latin American Labor History Conference
International Labor and Working-Class History, 1992
Proletarianization, and the Myth of the Nicaraguan Ladina (1880-1960)," Jeffrey Gould (Indiana University) challenged the ideological assumption-shared across the political spectrumthat "the development of agrarian capitalism in Nicaragua led to the elimination of Indian communal land, the loss of cultural signs, and the creation of a non-Indian rural proletariat." In a sensitive use of oral history, he also demonstrated the persistence of a notion of being "indigenas" or "nativos" versus the outsiders in their midst among a group of ladino peasants in Yucul who had apparently totally lost their Indian identities. Commenting on Gould, Peter Winn (Tufts University) emphasized the plasticity of ethnicity as a social construct, and criticized the anthropologists' checklist approach to defining Indian identity. There are many ways of answering the question of who is Indian. In some cases, the construction of identity focuses on Indian land holding, even among those who no longer speak an indigenous language. In other cases, the key is found in the preservation of language despite loss of land. And in still other cases, Indian identity may persist without land or language. Moreover, the fluidity of definition also depends on who is asking the question and why. There are times, Winn reminded the audience, when one can choose to be or not to be an Indian-and other times when it is unavoidable. Mary Roldan (Amherst College) presented a provocative paper titled "Purifying the Factory, Demonizing the Public Service Sector: The Role of Ethnic and Cultural Differences in Determining Perceptions of Working-Class Militancy in Antioquia, Colombia." The paper demonstrated the dichotomization of elite discourse between loyal industrial workers in Medellin itself and the demonized work forces that labored in the railroads, mines, oil fields, and transportation on the periphery of the region, who were viewed as "pathologically rebellious and violent peoples who endangered Antioqueno culture, morals, 'race' (raza), and stability." Roldan's crisply written "tale of elite obsessions and insecurities writ onto the small and large details of Colombia's laboring folk," Michael Jimenez (Princeton
The Global South, 2012
This article focuses on the communities created by West Indian Panamanians in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone from the 1930s to the 1950s. Neither nationalist nor diplomatic initiatives could supplant the rights of West Indian Panamanian Zone residents to forge livelihoods on the Isthmus. Such initiatives also clashed with communal efforts to create alternative understandings of citizenship and home. Policies of population removal and re-education in the Canal Zone, particularly connected to treaty negotiations between Panama and the United States (1953–1955), serve as the backdrop for the analysis. These policies increasingly sought to push out or silence West Indian Panamanian Zone residents. This study traces the history of West Indian Panamanian community formation in the Zone, engaging with the memories of former Canal Zone residents. Speeches and letters by community leaders are carefully deconstructed to provide a counter-narrative to government reports and commentary by the Panamanian media on the “problem” of West Indian Panamanians. So doing, the piece touches on the evolution of the practice of citizenship and living “active lives” among West Indian Panamanians by the end of the 1950s.
The Global South, 2012
This article provides a comparative analysis of Olmedo Alfaro’s El peligro antillano en la América Central: La defensa de la raza (1925) that situates the work within a transnational discursive and literary tradition. Examining the rhetorical and narrative strategies Alfaro employs to demonize West Indian immigrants in Central America, the study uncovers the location of white knowledge and the manifestations of an epistemology of disavowal within the work. Whereas Alfaro places racism outside of Panamanian borders and history, this essay illustrates the author’s commitment to global politics of racial domination. It shows that El peligro antillano is a testimony to the historical presence and endurance of a transnational white supremacist discourse linking Latin America, the United States, and Europe; the pan-white economic, political, and symbolic interests that shape it; and a long history of enforcing colorblindness in white supremacist literature.