The Silver Women: West Indian Migration, Gender, and Community Formation in Panama

During the Panama Canal construction decade (1904-1914), around 150,000 British West Indian migrants supplied the bulk of the labor on and off the Canal as part of the segregated “silver” workforce. Many of these black migrants stayed and settled neighborhoods in nearby Panamanian cities. This presentation uses police cases from a local municipality in the center of Panama City that feature black West Indian women defending their honor and respectability in the public court of opinion. Using these cases, I show how West Indian women actively materialized their own definitions and practices of morality, labor, and community. I argue that, through their intimate disputes about sexual honor, West Indian women demarcated and managed their relationship to urban space and national belonging in Panama during a complex juncture of heightened nationalism and anti-West Indian sentiment. Using local police cases from Panama City, this presentation shows how migrant West Indian women materialized their own definitions and practices of morality, labor, and community in the early years of the Canal construction. I argue that these women gained certain forms of powerful autonomy that shaped the socio-political landscape of the emerging Panamanian nation.