Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone
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Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/23/2014 |
| Series: | American Encounters/Global Interactions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Michael E. Donoghue is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University.
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Borderland on the Isthmus
Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone
By Michael E. Donoghue
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7667-5
CHAPTER 1
BORDERLAND ON THE ISTHMUS
The Changing Boundaries and Frontiers of the Panama Canal Zone
A strange sight occurred during the warm January nights along Fourth of July Avenue, the border that divided the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone from the Republic of Panama. On January 12, 1964, the U.S. military officially closed down the border following four days of bloody anti-American riots over a disputed flag-raising at a U.S. high school in the Zone. A few nights after the lockdown, North American and Panamanian witnesses saw groups of local prostitutes gather clandestinely near the cyclone fence that ran along the borderline. Simultaneously small groups of U.S. soldiers began lining up along their side of the Zone's wire barrier. In the thick brush the prostitutes knelt and fellated the GIs through the chain-link apertures. Just days before, these same soldiers had shot down Panamanian snipers and protesters and had been fired upon themselves by Panamanian militants in the crowds.
These incidents of sex through a border fence, which occurred nightly until U.S. officials lifted the travel ban in March 1964, spoke volumes about the Canal Zone's sexual hunger for Panama. They are also a telling image of the U.S.-Panamanian relationship. From this graphic interaction we can better understand the indignation that many Panamanians felt about their country's relationship with the United States. We can also better appreciate what a complex site of conflict and accommodation an imperial borderland represents. Complicating this image is that a significant portion of the soldiers along the fence were probably Puerto Ricans, as in the 1960s this ethnic category made up nearly a third of the GIs in Panama. Most of the prostitutes along the fence were likely Colombians, Venezuelans, and Dominicans, as they composed a majority of the guest-worker prostitutes working in Panama City and Colón.
The geographical, economic, and cultural frontiers of the Canal Zone shifted throughout the U.S. century in Panama, 1903–99. This chapter examines how and why they changed over time and the effect such transformations had on the lives of ordinary U.S. and Panamanian citizens who lived within this borderland. It will focus especially on the importance of the borders and boundaries of the Zone. The Zone helped shape the economy, demographics, and social relations of transisthmian Panama, particularly after World War II. This borderland not only provided jobs and economic opportunities for Panamanians but also encouraged familial bonds, dependencies, and psychic fears. As one older Panamanian stated, "It still bothers me to walk across that street into the old Zone. I know the gringo police aren't there anymore, but I still hesitate a little when I walk across, you know." Such a revelation illustrates Foucault's notion of the dispersal of power that power resides not just in the state's official instruments of coercion but also in the consciousness of those subjected to that power.
The Canal Zone also encompassed a mass of internal boundaries and divisions besides its landed frontiers with the republic. These proved important for several reasons. At first glance in 1940, the Zone appeared monolithic and invulnerable. But like so many European colonies in Africa and Asia, the Zone comprised a mass of contradictions and complexities, a "house divided against itself." Its internal fissures help explain its demise in the postwar era, when external Panamanian pressures, sociopolitical changes in the U.S. metropolis, and internal complaints emanating from the Zone itself coalesced to delegitimize the enclave. Panamanian opponents of the Zone grew adept at playing off the various factions that lived on the U.S. side of the border to achieve their own nationalist ends.
The Zone Borderland's Contribution to Panama's Development
Many Panamanians reviled the Canal Zone as a kind of Frankenstein, born of the Mephistophelian deal with the United States in 1903. This powerful entity had to be constantly wrestled down and beaten back, as it displayed a remarkable resiliency and thirst for hegemony. According to this nationalist critique, Panamanians managed to drive the stake through this monster's heart only on December 31, 1999, as the Zone still lived on for more than twenty years after the 1977 Carter-Torrijos treaties, albeit as the Panama Canal Area.
This interpretation of colonialism as a demonic force offers insights, but it also distorts the totality of the relationship. For despite the Zone's obstruction to Panama's sovereignty, the republic derived considerable benefits from its bargain with the Devil, though never in the proportions that the republic's founders had hoped. The Canal Zone provided between one half and one fifth of Panama's gross domestic product from 1904 through 1979, and even as late as the 1990s U.S. military spending alone accounted for about 5 percent of GDP, some $255 million. Tens of thousands of Panamanians worked either directly or indirectly for the Canal Zone in every year of its existence. But the vast majority of these Latin and West Indian Panamanians, as we shall see, were never fairly compensated for their labor compared to the white U.S. workers. And the infamous (in Panama anyway) U.S. commissary system of the Zone prevented Panamanian merchants from sharing in the economic largesse of the enclave, as imported, duty-free goods from the United States cut locals out of a bonanza of potential sales.
As in other Latin American states, a fairly high percentage of Panamanian students attended U.S. colleges and universities, but tuition costs and discrimination on the isthmus prevented poorer Panamanian children from attending Canal Zone schools and its junior college for decades. Thousands of U.S. citizens and Panamanians intermarried over the past century, including GIs who lifted numerous Panamanian women out of poverty. But these same servicemen routinely abandoned their girlfriends and mixed-nationality children and were often abusive toward their common-law and official wives. While the United States built railroads, highways, roads, and bridges across the country, it did so primarily for its own economic and wartime needs, not Panama's. U.S. Canal Zone health officials virtually eliminated yellow fever and malaria from the transisthmian corridor, where these diseases had ravaged the locals for centuries. But this was done primarily to facilitate the excavation of the U.S. Canal and not to save the lives of Panamanians, many of whom continued to live in want and suffer from a variety of diseases in the interior regions of the country throughout and after construction.
In contrast, postwar foreign aid and U.S. military civic action built hospitals and clinics throughout the isthmus and distributed emergency food and medical services to victims of disasters. U.S. engineers from the Canal Zone installed the water and electrical systems that brought improved quality of life to hundreds of thousands of Panamanians. But Panamanians paid for their U.S.-supplied water, as stipulated in the original 1903 treaty. The republic also escaped the ravages of runaway inflation, so common in Latin America, through its use of the U.S. dollar as its national currency. The strong U.S. military presence may have spared this small nation the bloody, internal conflicts that wracked most of its Central American neighbors, but U.S. troops intervened numerous times in Panama, including in the violent and destructive 1989 invasion. Thanks in part to U.S. investment and the prosperity engendered by the Canal and its adjacent Free Zone in Colón, Panama ranks fifth in per capita income among all Latin American and Caribbean nations. Yet despite these U.S. contributions, Panama continues to suffer from the second worst maldistribution of income in the hemisphere and from substantial poverty. And regardless of the aforementioned benefits, Panamanians endured a century of foreign domination that included armed interventions, cultural denigration, and personal humiliations difficult to quantify.
This long colonial relationship also encompassed countless interactions between ordinary people who forged bonds and enmities along the borders of the Zone. As one Kennedy administration memo described the relationship, "The United States presence in the Zone is to Panamanians an overpowering factor ...which governs their daily lives in a hundred different ways." A 1958 Canal Zone U.S. employee handbook explained, "International relations are put on an individual basis on the Isthmus, for when you cross certain streets you find yourself within the boundaries of another nation." However, the sharply different power status between the citizens of the mightiest nation on earth and those of a small Latin American country inevitably affected the character of these interactions.
Defining the Borders
Political scientists and historians of borders have long noted that such physical intersections of states, peoples, and cultures are key sites and symbols of national power. Borders mark and delimit state sovereignty and the rights of individual citizenship. But more important, borders constitute processes, not static institutions. Peoples at the borders, on either side of a demarcated boundary, frequently shape, distort, or influence official policy through their own agency in conflicts and accommodations with those from the other side.
Neither the U.S. Canal Zone nor Panama ever effectively controlled contraband, political refugees, sexual relations, drug trafficking, identity politics, and crime along the border, despite their purported efforts to do so. James R. Prescott in his classic work, Political Frontiers and Boundaries, noted that boundaries are the actual lines that demarcate state territories. For the most part, boundaries follow the opening of frontiers, the vanguard of an expanding state that marks the fluid areas of contact between two peoples or between a settled and a less populated land. A border is the area immediately adjacent to a state's boundary. According to Prescott, a borderland denotes a transitional zone of varying depth on either side of a boundary, an area porous and open to a variety of social, cultural, and economic interplay. The U.S.-Mexican borderland from Tijuana in the west to Brownsville in the east is the one most studied by U.S. scholars.
These terms—borders, boundaries, and frontiers —are not only geographical but also psychological constructs. The common expression "beyond the pale" was originally a military term, referring to the moat and palisade built around twelfth-century Dublin by its Norman conquerors to fortify the town from the "barbarous Irish." Much later the term took on a metaphorical meaning, referring to behavior outside accepted norms. Similarly "crossing borders," in addition to the physical act of traversing a state-sanctioned boundary, connotes entering into a different milieu, culture, or mind-set, with all the attendant fears, attractions, and possibilities.
A History of the Zone Borderland's Changing Boundaries and Frontiers
The original zone of U.S. influence in Panama evolved along the site of the Panama Railroad, constructed from 1850 to 1855 and often known as "the Yankee Strip." Built as a shorter route to the U.S. Pacific Coast following the 1849 California gold rush, the railway first brought Panamanians into large-scale contact with Americans. The later French and U.S. canal construction projects followed the route of the rails for practical reasons as its tracks provided transportation for heavy equipment, workers, and supplies.
During negotiations with Colombia in 1902 prior to the November 1903 Panamanian Revolution, U.S. diplomats envisioned a smaller, less expansive canal zone. The January 1903 Hay-Herrán Treaty, initialed by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and Colombian Foreign Minister Tomás Herrán, called for a ten-kilometer-wide rather than a ten-mile-wide enclave. This U.S.-Colombian canal zone would have been only around 340 rather than 558 square miles and had a finite life span of one hundred years, not the perpetuity of U.S. rights in the later Zone. The treaty also called for mixed U.S.-Colombian courts. But the Colombian legislature rejected the treaty, hoping to gain greater monetary concessions from Washington. Frustrated U.S. leaders then opted for a "Panama solution" to their canal problem: they backed a Panamanian secessionist revolt against Bogotá.
Days after the successful revolution, Secretary Hay opened negotiations with Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla, chief engineer under Ferdinand de Lesseps's failed canal project and envoy of the new Panamanian government. Bunau-Varilla altered both the territorial and the temporal dimensions of the Zone in favor of Washington to ensure rapid congressional passage of the treaty. Therefore from its earliest inception as a territory of the imagination rather than a geographical reality, the Canal Zone was open to negotiation, interpretation, and manipulation—all classic characteristics of a borderland.
In the early years of the construction and protectorate era (1903–39), the U.S. Zone held the entire Panamanian nation in thrall as a virtual colony of the United States. In 1912, at the height of the construction effort, the total number of U.S. workers, troops, and tourists, plus foreign laborers and their families, over 100,000, equaled a third of Panama's population of 336,000. At this juncture Panama often appeared as much a North American as a Latin American state. Nine times between 1904 and 1925 U.S. troops exercised their right of unilateral intervention in Panama, suppressing disturbances and expanding the Zone's frontiers of influence across the entire country. During World War I U.S. forces took possession of various tracts of land and islands for defense bases under Article II of the treaty, giving only the barest notification of their actions to the republic.
The 1936 Hull-Alfaro Treaty ended this unilateral right of U.S. intervention and eminent domain. In addition the treaty returned control of Panama City and Colón's port and water facilities to the republic and restricted purchases from U.S. commissaries to Panama Canal and Railroad employees. The Acción Comunal movement, a nationalist regeneration party led by the middle-class Arias brothers, Harmodio and Arnulfo, spearheaded this populist effort to end the U.S. protectorate. Acción Comunal had broad support from younger, educated Panamanians angered over the flouting of Panamanian sovereignty and arrogant U.S. troop behavior throughout the isthmus.
The frontiers of the Zone's influence shrank briefly under pressure from the nationalist firebrand Arnulfo Arias and his Panameñismo movement. Inaugurated as president in 1940, Arias enacted a Spanish-only program, aimed at the West Indian and commercial neighborhoods that bordered the Zone. Under his orders, local officials and telephone operators refused to speak English to North Americans. Arias insisted that all street and store signs also be in Spanish, irritating U.S. shoppers in the terminal cities. The popular president attempted, in effect, to take back the borderland, that region of mixed U.S.-Panamanian influences, at least on the Panamanian side of the line. He viewed Americanization that emanated from the Zone as a threat to sovereignty and the Panamanian way of life. Arias's "culture war," as well as his fascist sympathies and racist policies toward ethnic and religious minorities, alarmed both Washington and the liberal-minded Panamanian oligarchy (who also feared Arias's populism). In October 1941 both helped engineer his overthrow.
The international crisis of World War II temporarily upended Panamanian nationalist gains and led to the greatest expansion of the Canal Zone's frontiers. U.S. troop levels in Panama rose from thirteen thousand to sixty-seven thousand by January 1943 to protect the Canal from the threat of Nazi submarines and Japanese bombers. Besides more troops, the Zone imported twenty-two thousand Central American and West Indian laborers to work on the Third Locks Project, designed to provide a wider set of locks for larger ships. These laborers also worked on the numerous U.S.-funded road projects that included the Transistmica Highway and sections of what later became the Pan-American Highway. Additional tens of thousands of U.S. service personnel flooded World War II Panama when they disembarked from the thousands of war vessels that transited the canal in support of Allied campaigns in Europe and the Pacific.
On furlough these U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines thronged the streets of Colón and Panama City until they resembled American base towns. In their wild, legendary carousing on Bottle Alley, Cash Street, Río Abajo, and J Street, U.S. servicemen ran roughshod over taxi drivers, bar furniture, Panamanian police, and Panamanian women, to the point that they threatened civil order. Panamanian officials received so many complaints of U.S. assaults on women that they established a special protective system. Panamanian and Latina prostitutes wore distinctive gold-plated ankle bracelets so that U.S. servicemen could discern more easily who was a prostitute and who was simply a local woman out shopping on the Avenida Central.
Far more threatening to Panama's sovereignty in the eyes of nationalists was the widespread wartime base expansion. In all, Washington established 134 military installations, from small radar sites to large training grounds like the nineteen-thousand-acre Río Hato airbase. Patriotic Panamanians began to see these sites as "little Canal Zones" sprouting up all over the countryside with U.S. flags, military checkpoints, and adjacent red-light districts. On two occasions when President Ricardo Adolfo de la Guardia happened upon these defense sites in his limousine, U.S. Army sentries halted him at gunpoint. According to one widely told story, de la Guardia tried to explain to the guard that he was the president of Panama, but the corporal replied that he "didn't care if he was the 'King of Spickland,' if he didn't know the password he couldn't drive onto the base."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Borderland on the Isthmus by Michael E. Donoghue. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. Borderland on the Isthmus: The Changing Boundaries and Frontiers of the Panama Canal Zone 8
2. Race and Identity in the Zone-Panama Borderland: Zonians Uber Alles 50
3. Race and Identity in the Zone-Panama Borderland: West Indians Contra Todos 93
4. Desire, Sexuality, and Gender in the Zone-Panama Borderland 128
5. The U.S. Military: Armed Guardians of the Borderland 168
6. "Injuring the Power System": Crime and Resistance in the Borderland 203
Epilogue: The Zone-Panama Borderland and the Complexity of U.S. Empire 245
Notes 255
Bibliography 307
Index 333
What People are Saying About This
"In this fascinating social history, Michael E. Donoghue breaks new ground by exploring not just a single group in the Panama Canal Zone, but all of the diverse and conflicted resident populations and the relationships between them, particularly in the years after World War II. He shows how societies in conflict also collaborated, and he locates these interactions in relation to the broader U.S. imperial project in the Canal Zone."
"As the newly expanded Panama Canal opens to pose historic challenges to U.S. trade and diplomacy, Michael E. Donoghue's timely, superbly written, and remarkably researched book is unsurpassed in giving us a social history of the century-long American empire in Panama—with welcome emphases on the post-1945 years, the multiethnic Panamanian perspectives, the long-lasting U.S. imperial experiences, and their legacies for the twenty-first century."
"In this fascinating social history, Michael E. Donoghue breaks new ground by exploring not just a single group in the Panama Canal Zone, but all of the diverse and conflicted resident populations and the relationships between them, particularly in the years after World War II. He shows how societies in conflict also collaborated, and he locates these interactions in relation to the broader U.S. imperial project in the Canal Zone."—John Lindsay-Poland, author of Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama