The Good Neighbor Returns?

Thomas C. Mann ◽

10.5810/kentucky/9780813176154.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 90-130

Author(s):

Thomas Tunstall Allcock

Keyword(s):

National Security ◽

Latin American ◽

Panama Canal ◽

International Crisis ◽

Canal Zone ◽

Panama Canal Zone ◽

Alliance For Progress ◽

The Us ◽

Development Goals ◽

Good Neighbor

Chapter 3 studies Johnson’s and Mann’s handling of Latin American policy in the first full year of the new administration. Beginning with a major international crisis in the Panama Canal Zone in January, the year 1964 was a challenging one that would also see military coups in Brazil and Bolivia, Mann’s attempts to reshape Alliance bureaucracy, and former Kennedy aides continually challenging the legitimacy of Johnson’s leadership and Mann’s liberal credentials. Particular attention is given to the skillful manner in which the Panamanian crisis was resolved and the improvements in the performance of the Alliance for Progress, challenging standard interpretations of Johnson’s diplomatic abilities. The controversy of the Brazilian coup is not overlooked, with the complex relationship between the Brazilian military, the US ambassador in Brasilia, and State Department and National Security Council officials in Washington representative of the increasingly problematic and intertwined nature of security and development goals.

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The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547919000176 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 96 ◽

pp. 79-102

Author(s):

Benjamin D. Weber

Keyword(s):

Prison System ◽

Panama Canal ◽

Gendered Violence ◽

Canal Zone ◽

Panama Canal Zone ◽

The Us ◽

Black Bodies ◽

Chain Gangs ◽

The Face ◽

Involuntary Servitude

AbstractThis article follows the “convict clause” in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution – the exception for slavery and involuntary servitude to continue as punishment for crime – to the Panamá Canal Zone. It argues that US officials used the prison system not only to extract labor, but to structure racial hierarchy and justify expansionist claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty. It reveals how despite the purported “usefulness” of the Black bodies conscripted in this brutal labor regime, the prison system's operational modality was racial and gendered violence which exceeded the registers of political economy, penology, and state-building in which that usefulness was framed. The Canal Zone convict road building scheme then became a cornerstone from which Good Roads Movement boosters, who claimed the convict was a slave of the state, could push for the Pan-American Highway across the hemisphere. Afro-Panamanian and Caribbean workers, who were the majority of those forced into Canal Zone chain gangs, protested the racism and imperialism of the prison system by blending anti-colonial and anti-racist strategies and deploying a positive notion of blackness as solidarity and race pride. Their efforts and insight offer an understanding of the US carceral state's imperial dimensions as well as enduring lessons for movements struggling to broaden the meaning and experience of freedom in the face of slavery's recurrent afterlives.

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Spaniards on the Silver Roll: Labor Troubles and Liminality in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1914

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547904000183 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 66 ◽

pp. 78-98 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Julie Greene

Keyword(s):

Racial Identity ◽

The United States ◽

Panama Canal ◽

The Political ◽

Canal Zone ◽

Racial Identities ◽

Panama Canal Zone ◽

Food Riots ◽

Wide Range ◽

The Us

This article examines the experiences of Spanish workers during the construction of the Panama Canal by the United States from 1904 to 1914. Spaniards engaged in a wide range of protest actions during the construction years, from strikes to food riots to anarchist politics. Employing Victor Turner's concept of liminality, the article highlights the mutability of the Spaniards' position and identity and examines several factors that shaped their experiences: the US government's policies of racial segregation and the injustices Spaniards experienced; the political and racial identities they brought with them from Spain; and their complex racial and imperial status in the Canal Zone. Spaniards possessed a remarkably fluid racial identity, considered white or nonwhite depending on circumstances, and that shifting status fueled their racial animosities as well as their protests.

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Heroines of the Panama Canal: U.S. nurses in the Panama Canal Zone 1880-1914

Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación ◽

10.18682/cdc.vi117.4286 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Heather McCrea

Keyword(s):

Gender Roles ◽

Central America ◽

Gender Norms ◽

Panama Canal ◽

Tropical Region ◽

Canal Zone ◽

Limited Access ◽

Medical Supplies ◽

Panama Canal Zone ◽

The Us

This essay highlights the critical contributions of the Sisters of Charity throughout the French construction of the Panama Canal between 1880 and 1904 and American-trained nurses during the US canal-building until 1914. The Sisters of Charity mended hundreds of thousands of injured and ill immigrant laborers in the Zone. Still, when American-trained nurses arrived in 1904, the nurses found themselves in conflict with the Daughters of Charity, who refused to vacate the hospital they helped found. I argue, self-aggrandizing stories of male accomplishments in the Panama Canal Zone subordinated female participation in one of the largest engineering feats undertaken in modern history. On the front-lines, female caretakers in the Zone understood the risks they faced with a population of transient engineers, scientists, tourists, and entrepreneurs. Even with a limited amount of power, the Sisters of Charity and US nurses made demands of their superiors based on dangers associated with living and working in a “tropical” region. Aware of their power –albeit limited– US nurses developed strategies for survival in the isthmus to protect themselves with limited access to medical supplies and funds. No matter how small the power nuns and nurses exercised in the Zone, many of their male superiors worried. They worried; what if nurses wanted more pay? What if they refused to work or left? US nurses also fell victim to prevailing stereotypes centered on what “type” of a woman left her home and family to live in the “wilds” of Central America? In US print media, popularized perceptions about nurses abroad came steeped in eugenic-inspired views of gender roles and “fitness.” Did nurses in the Canal Zone push gender norms in ways not possible in the US? Furthermore, how did US Canal Zone employees and administrators view nurses? With respect? Ridicule? Have only contemporaries recognized nuns and nurses women for their hard work? Were US Zone nurses valued as heroines throughout the construction of the canal? Or were they only heralded as heroines well after canal construction ended?

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A Canal Treaty out of the Dark Ages

Worldview ◽

10.1017/s0084255900030084 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 19 (10) ◽

pp. 4-8

Author(s):

Martha Bennett Stiles

Keyword(s):

Strong Support ◽

Panama Canal ◽

Ford Administration ◽

Canal Zone ◽

Dark Ages ◽

Panama Canal Zone ◽

The Republic ◽

The U.S

Seventy-three years ago the U.S. connived in the secession of the Republic of Panama from Colombia in return for the privilege of building a canal across the Panamanian Isthmus "on a strip of land leased in perpetuity." Within this 533-square-mile zone the U.S. was to exercise, forever, all those rights that it "would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory..." Today the significance of that "if" is much debated.Although Ronald Reagan's campaign position—that the Panama Canal Zone is as much a part of the U.S. as is Alaska—has been deplored by the Ford Administration, it maintains strong support in the Senate.

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