Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal

In the past two decades, Latin American and Caribbean scholars have placed the early twentieth-century construction of the Panama Canal at the center of histories of empire, labor, race, and migration. Best-known among the books that challenged fetishizations of US technological know-how was Julie Greene’s 2009 Canal Builders, which explored the lives of Caribbean migrants and other second-class “silver workers” in the segregated world of canal construction. More recent works by Marixa Lasso, Joan Flores-Villalobos, and others have excavated such histories further, showing the richness for continued research. With Box 25, Greene has reentered the conversation with a concise book that continues the project of placing ordinary laborers at the center of the history of the canal. It follows the lives of workers in the decades after construction while demonstrating how life stories, archival repositories, official histories, and public memory were constructed over the last century. Ultimately, this is a book about how history is written, commemorated, and remembered. Why do we tell the stories about the canal that we do, and how are the various archives created that shape historians’ ability to pursue our craft?The box 25 of the book’s title comes from an archival collection at the US Library of Congress containing life stories written by British Caribbean migrant workers fifty years after the canal’s 1914 completion. To commemorate the half-century milestone, progressive Canal Zone librarian Ruth Stuhl had the idea to offer a cash prize for the best autobiographical essay from a West Indian canal worker. The then-elderly workers originally hailing from the British Caribbean took pen to paper and described their experiences working in the canal zone. The accounts in box 25 are valuable, since they provide first-person accounts from people who were close to canal construction sites and distant from the typewriters that created the official archives. There was nothing secret about this box. Indeed, Greene explains that she and others have used these materials to understand the various worlds of the canal zone.While the contents are a gold mine for scholars writing the social history of canal construction, Greene explains that a lot happened in the fifty years after 1914—both for the elderly writers hoping to escape poverty and in Panamanian politics, with its swinging pendulum of racial exclusion and inclusion. In the decades following construction, Panamanian nationalism became increasingly xenophobic, culminating in a 1941 law that stripped British Caribbean migrants of citizenship. In the 1950s, however, activists in Panama participated in global movements for civil rights, Pan-Africanism, and against empire. Such protests contributed to the reinstatement of citizenship for Caribbean immigrants in 1960. All of this provides the context for Stuhl’s decision to solicit Caribbean workers’ stories, even as it framed the narratives themselves.The power of this book is Greene’s ability to share the life stories that the sources contain while demonstrating their blind spots in a way that eloquently reflects on the nature of historical research. In short, she uses the limitations of the sources to reflect on the relationship between written history and the archive. As Greene explains, the narratives in box 25 were written entirely by men. Most had escaped the manual trades of digging for semiskilled work, and all remained in Panama after construction was complete. The thousands of British Caribbean women or the overwhelming majority who migrated to Cuba or New York after 1914 do not appear in these sources.Greene supplements the stories in box 25 with other types of records; these fill empirical gaps and have their own limitations. For example, Greene views the lives of individual writers through US government employment records. These provide a sense of individuals’ jobs during and after canal construction—including a wealth of information about occupational mobility, accident claims, and so on. Unlike the narratives in box 25, these are limited in their bureaucratic gaze and reductive in their depictions of people even as they fill out some of the life stories omitted from Box 25. Another important example are the petitions that Caribbean workers made to British consuls during the decade of construction. These sources provide additional details about life in the construction zone as well as Caribbean migrants’ invocation of their British imperial citizenship to seek redress for abuses, low wages, or other labor conflicts. Such manifestations of Britishness do not appear in the box 25 narratives, which varied between nostalgic accolades for the US government and criticisms of racism and mistreatment. Placing these alongside one another accentuates Panama’s place at the intersection of early twentieth-century imperial shifts and shows how laborers’ self-identification may have changed with audience or time—not to mention revealing how the context of document creation can influence the kinds of information contained.Box 25 ends by exploring the memory of the Panama Canal within the US-controlled zone, among Panamanians, and the descendants of British Caribbean populations in the isthmus. Greene traces the competing narratives about US engineering feats, imperial domination of Panama, and the importance of British Caribbean immigrants as they appeared over a century of political discourse, historical society programs, and in written historical works. By the end of the book, it’s easy to understand the origin and context of various narratives about the canal. The secondary sources she engages with at the beginning of the book become the primary sources for a study of memory.At just over 130 highly accessible pages, Box 25 is well suited for history classes of all levels. Greene provides efficient historical background so that students in courses on methods, archives, or historical memory—not to mention labor or empire—can jump right in without additional materials. The reader comes away from the book with a deep appreciation of the significance of the Panama Canal in the twentieth century. It becomes impossible to ignore the world historical importance of the canal and the nameless immigrant laborers who built it.