A Review of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century

Kaysha Corinealdi’s new book awakened old memories for me, dating to when I first arrived in Panama in 1964. As I began working for the U.S. AID mission there and attended evening classes at the University of Panama, I rented a house in the West Indian district of Río Abajo. Work took me all around the capital city and much of the country, including the Canal Zone.

Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022, 266 pp.)

The Afro-Panamanians I met upended my preconceptions of Latin Americans—most spoke English, claimed British heritage, worshipped in Protestant churches, and had a decidedly Puritan work ethic. My college classes had not prepared me for this culture.

Some years later, I landed a Fulbright grant to return to Panama and delve into the West Indians’ history. By then Jamaican poet Olive Senior and lawyer Velma Newton had published accounts about emigration to Panama from their countries, and David McCullough had devoted a chapter of his Path Between the Seas to the construction era laborers. So, I spent a year reading Canal records and interviewing prominent community members to trace their roots back to the early 20th century. Trips to Washington D.C. and London expanded archival sources. My Black Labor on a White Canal came out several years later.

Since that time, academics have published many histories of the West Indians and their descendants, not only those in Panama but also in Costa Rica, and Senior and Newton expanded their earlier works. My bookshelf now has over a dozen monographs on the subject, not to mention dissertations.

Panama in Black demonstrates some of the reasons researchers, including myself, were drawn to these immigrants and their descendants. They helped build the famous Canal, still a major maritime passage. They migrated throughout the hemisphere and formed a significant diaspora community. They lobbied to make the Canal a more humane workplace in the mid-twentieth century and to press for the 1977 treaty than led to its turnover to Panama in 1999. Finally, they contributed to the rich multicultural societies that emerged in Central America.

Corinealdi’s book traces two generations of Afro-Panamanians, from the 1920s through the 1950s, charting their struggles and accomplishments. Relying largely on the West Indian press, she portrays the transition from immigrant leaders to the native-born during the years Panama adapted to the American presence. They faced bigotry, expulsion, discrimination and denial of citizenship. Canal administrators were happy to have a weak, subservient workforce, while Panamanians resented the immigrants’ preference for relatively good jobs.

World War II and the early Cold War produced a civil rights movement among the Afro-Panamanians, first for citizenship and the vote in Panama, then for better pay and benefits in the Zone. Corinealdi rightly features the union leaders and intellectuals who fought for their people’s interests, using politics and international pressure. The struggle had a David-and-Goliath flavor, however, as U.S. and Panamanian elites exercised their significant powers. Potential advances under the 1936 and 1955 treaties remained unfulfilled or ended up hurting community interests. A steady emigration stream brought a new phase of the diaspora.

Panama in Black ends with what the author regards as a betrayal of her subjects by the two governments, which used the 1955 treaty to displace non-U.S. Canal workers from Zone housing, deny them access to commissaries, and tax their Canal income. By this time male and female descendants of West Indians used their votes to elect candidates favorable to them. Ironically, the National Guard took power in 1968 and only occasionally called for elections.

In her introduction, Corinealdi presents a theoretical framework to house her story, combining labor migration, colonialism and African diaspora elements with latent racism in Latin American cultures. She sees Afro-Panamanians as participating in a pan-Caribbean world in which they exercise agency and solidarity against oppressive forces. She does not acknowledge that the more her people became integrated into national society, the less relevant the Afro-Caribbean world became. The designation of a quaint, construction-era church in downtown Panama City as a community museum in 1980 signaled the decline of a unique, vibrant and outwardly oriented culture. We historians must keep alive the memories of past generations but also recognize social evolution when it happens.

Duke University Press deserves our thanks for including a rich selection of photos from the era. I do wish its editors had encouraged the author to pursue coherence in her story. Digressions into activities of Panamanians living or meeting in New York do little to deepen our understanding of the core subject, Afro-Panamanians struggling to forge lives in the difficult world of Panama and its Canal in the mid-20th century.

It’s been gratifying to remain in touch with those who shared research interests with me since the 1980s and to see the field grow. Each of us brings our own passion and dedication to our work. I salute Kaysha Corinealdi for this latest addition to the bookshelf and look forward to more.

Michael Conniff is Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University. He is the author of Black Labor on a White Canal.