The
construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of
American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the
project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The
Silver Women shifts the
focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who
travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate
lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and
geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama
Canal and U.S. imperial expansion.
Joan Flores-Villalobos argues
that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by
providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction.
West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and
cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect
subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that
separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white
Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and
segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of
U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little
access to official services and wages, and received pay in both
silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at
times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial
authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian
women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship,
community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate
the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime,
these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian
migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de
Cuba.
The Silver Women
is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as
integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean
diaspora, and women’s own survival.
