Depopulating la Zona: Landscaping Urban Development at the Panama Canal, 1911–14

Utterly transforming a complex human space, the creation of the Panama Canal Zone erased an old commercial route dotted with towns and traversed by roads that had connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since the sixteenth century. Between 1911 and 1914, canal authorities dismantled and torched entire Panamanian towns located in the ten miles of American territory, forcing 40,000 people to abandon their houses, shops, and lands. This paper examines the urban structure of Panamanian towns in the Canal Zone during the construction era and asks how and why Canal Zone authorities shifted from the goal of governing Panamanians to the goal of expelling them.  It argues that idea of an American Zone without Panamanians developed slowly and was not a preordained outcome. Indeed, during most of the canal construction, the appearance and economy of the Zone's larger towns was very similar to that of other Panamanian cities and many Panamanians continued to own businesses and real estate in the Zone. Moreover, Canal authorities continued to included some Panamanians in the Canal Zone government, which shows the initial assumption that Panamanians would continue to live in the Zone. Within a few years that would change, as the very possibility of Panamanian judges or mayors in the Canal Zone became inconceivable—and, hence, vanished from historical memory. This paper is part of a book project on the urban history of the Zone, which argues that the Panamanian towns of the Zone were subjected to a spatial stripping of their long-achieved Pre-U.S. modernity. Divested of their commercial and municipal traditions and literally and symbolically transformed into a primitive jungle, they were part of a larger hemispheric construction of new differences between the U.S. and Latin America, during which Latin American nations were recast from emerging republics to backward tropical, underdeveloped spaces.