“To Develop a Deserved Sympathy”: Disability, Feeling, and Futurity on the Panama Canal

This presentation examines competing knowledges of injury, debility, and disease during the United States’ occupation of the Panama Canal Zone (1903-1979). Specifically, it focuses on two spaces: the Corozal Cripple Farm, a worksite for disabled Canal workers and people institutionalized at Corozal Mental Hospital, and Palo Seco Leper Colony. These facilities were part of an American health infrastructure that was meant to signal modern imperial control and ostensible humanitarianism. Yet within these facilities, administrators and residents had competing frameworks for making sense of disability. Drawing on the records of the Canal administration as well as key conceptual work by scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler and Alison Kafer, this presentation contends that disability’s emotional and temporal politics formed the hidden underside of the Canal project’s shimmering public triumphs. Even as US authorities tried to rationalize their management of injury and illness, residents at these facilities recognized and leveraged the central role of emotion in the process of imperial governance. The founding documents of the Corozal Colored Cripples’ Association even specified that members should cooperate with the farm’s administrators “in order to develop a deserved sympathy from such superiors.” While the Corozal administrators’ understandings of disability were supposed to focus on gauging workers’ possible productivity, the residents were more concerned with nurturing futures that affirmed their unique desires, continually troubling the Farm’s veneer of rational management. Similarly, at Palo Seco, Americans steeped in the “right” feelings of fear and pity encouraged the residents’ labor and looked to the possibility of remission, while those living with Hansen’s disease rejected some of this proffered care and tried to use observers’ emotions to achieve their own defiant visions of escape or companionship. Competing knowledges of disability feelings and futures were ephemeral but nonetheless real sites for contesting the ruling subjectivities that undergirded imperialism’s infrastructure.