Local Internationalists: Activist Women in 1940s Panama

By the late 1940s Leonor Jump and Linda Smart Chubb had both made history in Panama. In 1943 Jump became the first woman to serve as principal of the La Boca Normal Training School in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone. Five years later Smart Chubb was elected deputy mayor of Colón City, Colón, making her the first woman to hold this post in Panama’s history. In this paper I examine how both women had personal and professional experiences with diaspora and internationalism that provided them with the groundwork for their eventual ascent to leadership positions. Both women had parents born in the Anglophone Caribbean, were bilingual or trilingual, had made contributions to national newsweeklies, and found themselves in positions of power during a heightened period of anti-blackness and xenophobia. Both likewise had an investment in securing greater opportunities at national and international levels for women and Afro-descendants alike, and in positing these agendas directly connected Panama to ongoing discourses of diaspora and hemispheric opportunity. Through an examination of the work and leadership of Leonor Jump and Linda Smart Chubb, this paper adds to recent scholarship invested in highlighting the internationalist perspectives and goals of black women in the twentieth century world. By offering a specific focus on Panama and the circum-Caribbean world, it furthermore calls for greater attention to the intertwined and necessary connections between nationalism, transnationalism and internationalism in early to mid twentieth century Latin American and Caribbean national building. An engagement with the work of Jump and Smart Chubb likewise re-centers these ideologies and practices around the lives and goals of women who have largely gone unrecognized in national historiographies.