Borderland On The Isthmus By Michael E. Donoghue 4k123g

race, culture, and the struggle for the

Borderland

canal zone

on the Isthmus

mic h a el e . d ono g hue

Borderland on the Isthmus

american encounters/global interactions A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical research. At the same time, it s a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and reshaped.

race, culture, and the

Borderland on the Isthmus

struggle for the canal zone

Michael E. Donoghue

duke university press Durham and London 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat and Quadraat Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia

Library of Congress Catagin-Publication Data Donoghue, Michael E. Borderland on the isthmus : race, culture, and the struggle for the canal zone / Michael E. Donoghue. pages cm — (American encounters/ global interactions) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-0-8223-5666-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5678-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Panama Canal (Panama)—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Panama Canal (Panama)—Race relations— 20th century. I. Title. II. Series: American encounters/global interactions. F1569.C2D66

2014

972.87⬘5—dc23 2013045007

this book is dedicated with love to my father, charles donoghue, and to my brother, joseph. we will see you both on the other side, dad and joey.

Contents

acknowledgments ix introduction 1

1.

Borderland on the Isthmus The Changing Boundaries and Frontiers of the Panama Canal Zone 8

2.

Race and Identity in the Zone-Panama Borderland Zonians Uber Alles 50

3.

Race and Identity in the Zone-Panama Borderland West Indians Contra Todos 93

4.

Desire, Sexuality, and Gender in the Zone-Panama Borderland 128

5.

The U.S. Military Armed Guardians of the Borderland 168

6.

“Injuring the Power System” Crime and Resistance in the Borderland 203

epilogue: The Zone-Panama Borderland and

the Complexity of U.S. Empire 245 notes 255 bibliography 307 index 333

Acknowledgments

A work of this scope required from numerous institutions, grants, and individuals, all of whom distinguished themselves with their generosity. The University of Connecticut at Storrs supplied summer grants, predoctoral fellowships, and a doctoral research grant from the university’s research foundation that proved crucial to the early stages of this project. The William F. Fulbright Overseas Research Grant program enabled me to spend a year plumbing the archives of Panama and interviewing scores of Panamanians, West Indians, and Zonians, without which this study would have been impossible. Five presidential libraries awarded me research and travel grants: the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, and the Gerald R. Ford Library Foundation. The Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations generously awarded me the Bernath Research Travel Grant and the W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship. Marquette University, my new home, continued to fund this project generously with summer fellowships and research grants. Numerous scholars in the United States offered advice and counsel during this project, including David Sheinin, Stephen Rabe, Mark Gilderhus, Gilbert Joseph, Emily Rosenberg, Blanca Silvestrini, Eileen Suárez Findlay, Darlene Rivas, Michael L. Conniff, Stephen Streeter, Doug Little, Mark Overmyer-Velasquez, James Howe, Gloria Rudolf, Luis Figueroa, Robert McMahon, Kyle Longley, Jana Lipman, John Lindsay-Poland, Marixa Llasso, Cornelia Dayton, Mark Lawrence, Alan Mherson, and Peter Szok. Elizabeth Mahan made all the facilities and talents of University of Connecticut’s Latin American Studies Program available to me as well as her own sage and humane advice. I am also indebted to Laurietz Seda, MacGregor O’Brien, Steve Wille, and Augustana College and cedei’s Summer in the Andes program for greatly improving my Spanish prior to research in Panama. In Panama I

received generous aid from Professors Francisco Herrera, Alfredo Castillero Calvo, Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, Rubén Darío Carles, Miguel Antonio Bernal, and Marco Gandásegui. I am forever indebted to my personal guides to Panamanian history, culture, and geography: Osvaldo Jordan Romeros, Joyce Isveth Mendoza, Daira Arias, Belsi de Medina, Maria Carazo, and “Hans” Etienne Parisis. I wish to express my deep appreciation and thanks to the following library and archival staffs in the United States: the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Washington National Records Center, the Homer Babbidge Library at the University of Connecticut, the John Hay and John D. Rockefeller Jr. Libraries at Brown University, the Georgetown University Library, the Yale University Library, The Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette, and the U.S. Army Military History Institute. Archivists who made important contributions to this work include Liz Safly and Dennis Bilger at the Truman Library, David Haight at the Eisenhower Library, Megan Desnoyers at the Kennedy Library, Regina Greenwell and Michael Parrish at the Johnson Library, Helmi Raaska and Geir Gundersen at the Ford Library, Michael Wasche at the Washington National Records Center, and John Taylor, Fred Romanski, and Milton Gustafson at the U.S. National Archives. For help with the book’s images from the Panama and Canal Zone Collection at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries, I want to thank Laurie Taylor. For his superb work in creating the maps of the Zone-Panama borderland, kudos to Bill Nelson. I also wish to express my appreciation to the talented staffs and archivists in the Republic of Panama. These include Griselda Añino de Valdes, Apolinar Guerrero, Darixa Ruiz, and especially Ida Cecilia Mitre at the Biblioteca Nacional; Xiomara de Robleta at the Archivos del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores; Carlos Arrellano Rodríquez, Gilberto Marulanda, Elvia Williams, and Rosario Carrera at the Instituto del Canal y Estudios Internacionales at the Universidad de Panamá; Rolando Cochez, Adolfo Vallarino, Lorena Riba, Miguel Montague, and Gisela Lammerts van Bueren at the Centro de Recursos Tecnícos (Biblioteca del Autoridad del Canal de Panamá); and Albert Brown, Lee Amberths, Earl Barber, Sam Edwards, and Pablo Prieto at the Archivos y Recuerdos del Autoridad del Canal de Panamá in Corozal. The warmth and generosity of the people of Panama proved indispensable to this study that rested so much on understanding the culture and rhythms of the republic. The scores of Panamanians whom I interviewed greatly enriched this study. All their names are too numerous to record here and are in the notes but I would like to especially acknowledge Frank Azcarraga, x

acknowledgments

Helen Escobar, José Espino, Enrique Cantera, Rodrigo Mendoza, Miguel J. Moreno, Porfirio Sánchez, Antonio Stanziola, Rolando Sterling Arango, and Rimksy and Fulvia Sucre. The West Indian community in Panama especially welcomed my work. I want to thank Cecil Haynes, George Barnabas, Lester Leon Greaves, Vincente Williams, Lindolph Leon Ashby III, and Gilberto Alls for their help and their memories and critiques of the old Zone. I also received great guidance, hospitality, and aid from the Zonian community in both Panama and Florida. The Elks Club in Balboa served for a time as my unofficial residence, as did Niko’s Café in Balboa, haunt of the diehard Zonies. The retired U.S. military society in Panama also proved welcoming at the vfw in Curundu and later at Albrook as well as at the Balboa Yacht Club. I would like to single out Captain Joseph “Jody” Chamberlain, Luke Palumbo, Tom Carey, Edgardo Tirado, Carl “Tortuga” Tuttle, Tony and Anne Tiblier, Dave Sherman, Don Philips, Doug Philips, James Reid, Nina Kosik, Angela (Lee) Azcarraga, George Gershow, John Coffey, Mary Coffey, Rolando Linares, John McTaggart, Jason and Leo Critides, Bob Thrush, Robin and Peter Moreland, Tom McLean, Skip Berger, the entire Homa family, Larry Liberty, Wayne Bryant, Daniel Cooper, Art Mokray, John and Lucy Haines, Trina Clark, Pablo Eastman, Marvin Wainwright, and Vic Malent for their and friendship. My advisory committee at Storrs proved invaluable with their expert counsel, organizational ideas, and superb editing advice. Thomas G. Paterson’s enduring inspiration as a writer, scholar, teacher, and mentor permeates this entire work. J. Garry Clifford’s encyclopedic knowledge of sources, his sharp editing of my prose, his encouragement, and his good humor provided the bedrock of this study. Finally, Frank Costigliola’s immeasurable intellectual curiosity, collegial generosity, and pluralistic approach to foreign relations history infused every page of this study. My new colleagues at Marquette University, including my chair, James Marten, and my colleagues Steve Avella, Irene Guenther, Laura Matthew, Tim MacMahon, Daniel Meissner, Michael Wert, Alison Efford, and Kristen Foster, were also a great source of inspiration. The editing and art staff at Duke University Press, especially Valerie Millholland, Miriam Angress, and Christine Choi, helped me immeasurably with their patience and expertise. The anonymous readers of the manuscript offered superb advice on improving the structure and content of this study. Family and friends supplied vital sustenance throughout this long but fruitful process. Deborah Kisatsky and Shane Maddock were the two best friends a historian could ever have—kind, giving, and full of enthusiasm for my work. Ted Kryla and John and Karen St. Lawrence sustained my spirits acknowledgments

xi

back home in Providence, my hometown. Historians at Storrs always treated me more like a colleague than a student, and I want to thank Richard D. Brown, Kent Newmeyer, Bill Hoglund, Bruce Stave, Ed Wherle, and Marvin and Diane Cox for their encouragement and ideas as I worked my way through this project. My sister, Eileen, and my brothers, Kevin and Stephen, provided spiritual reservoirs that I could always draw upon. My parents, Charles and Jane Donoghue, inspired me with a love of learning, reading, and laughter that all found redemption in this work. This book is dedicated to my recently deceased father, Charles, and to my younger brother, Joseph, whom we lost while I was away conducting research in Panama. Joey’s spirit lives on in the harsh beauty at the heart of this study of human frailty and wounded aspirations.

xii acknowledgments

Introduction

For the first half of the twentieth century, the Panama Canal Zone was arguably the most important overseas possession of the United States. In addition to its geostrategic and economic value, the Canal held a symbolic primacy in the minds of many Americans as a mark of their technological and national superiority. But the establishment of the territorial enclave around the Canal under the 1903 Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty had other consequences. It forged an imperial borderland across the isthmus of Panama that would have profound ramifications for all of its inhabitants, from a wide variety of backgrounds and walks of life. The interactions, conflicts, and accommodations among the various peoples who strove for survival and ascendance within the vortex of this borderland, from World War II until the CarterTorrijos treaties, form the subject of this study. The American inhabitants of the enclave, the Zonians, established their dominance early in the century, as did their coequal partners in the Canal project, the U.S. military. But throughout this process, these groups experienced friction, resistance, and troubles from the host nation of Panama and the various subaltern peoples drawn to the excavation. The gargantuan size of the project attracted workers from all over the world, especially a large contingent of West Indian laborers who formed the backbone of the workforce. The racial discrimination that these workers endured, combined with the national chauvinism that Panamanians and other Latinos experienced from American borderlanders, quickly ignited conflicts over race and identity along the Zone boundaries that would intensify in the decades after World War II. In July 1939, two months before the war, the U.S. Senate finally ratified the 1936 Hull-Alfaro Treaty that ended the official U.S. protectorate over Panama, which included the right to eminent domain and unilateral intervention practiced by Washington for thirty-six years. This accord proved a

turning point in the greater development of competing Panamanian institutions and projects in relation to the United States, with the eventual goal to eject the colossus from the isthmus.1 The international conflict of World War II launched even more important global and local shifts, which put the entire rationale behind the Zone’s existence under attack. These included decolonization, a resurgence in local nationalism and demography, and the rejection of racism inspired by the U.S. and global civil rights movements.2 Besides the central issues of cultural identity, always at odds in this and other borderlands, additional points of contention arose over smuggling, crime, sex and drug trafficking, and jurisdictional authority. Panamanians, and a host of other non-U.S. citizens, showed a propensity early on to ignore the boundaries of the Zone, and in so doing to challenge the social, political, and economic status quo established by the enclave’s powerful founders. The Canal Zone formed four distinct landed borders, two fifty-mile-long boundaries that ran east and west of the Canal across rural regions, and two urban frontiers, one to the north that faced the transit city of Colón, the other to the south that abutted the capital, Panama City. But the zones of these boundaries extended far into the urban sectors of these cities and deep into the interior regions of Panama and the Zone. This peculiar Zone-Panama borderland held sway across the entire transisthmian corridor, bringing divergent peoples, economies, and cultures into alliances, dependencies, and confrontations typical of oppositional border regions long studied by anthropologists, political scientists, and historians.3 The Panama Canal Zone was unique in that it encomed a noncontiguous imperial borderland, unlike those more famous imperial frontiers that stretched across North America during the colonial and early national periods, toward the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley with French Canada, or astride the Spanish borderlands in northern Florida and the current Southwest.4 Most imperial borderlands throughout history have been contiguous, ed territorially to a larger imperial heartland, such as the Russian borderlands of the tsarist era that stretched into Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia, or the Roman borderlands along the Rhine and the Danube.5 But history provides us with numerous examples of noncontiguous imperial borderlands: Hadrian’s Wall across northern England, Gibraltar at the southernmost tip of Iberia, the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt, Singapore at the end of the Malaysian peninsula, and the present-day U.S.-Cuban borderland at Guantánamo.6 What made the Zone-Panama borderland especially unique was that it operated in such a rich, cosmopolitan milieu among the Panamanian, 2 introduction

American, Barbadian, Jamaican, Kuna, Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, Arab, and Latin American populations that peopled the Zone, Colón, Panama City, and their environs. This complex mix of peoples living astride an international transportation hub complicated the reactions and contestations that emanated throughout the region in response to U.S. belligerence, Panamanian resistance, and t and competing projects for political, cultural, and economic aggrandizement. All the aforementioned groups constantly engaged in “crossing borders” throughout this process, entering into relationships of mutual interest, hostility, and ambivalence with those from the “other side.” The intersection of different cultures, hierarchies, and mores at the borders brought these conflicts into sharp relief, forged new syntheses, and provided fruitful case studies for analyzing the day-to-day operation of the American Empire in Panama.7 Several distinguished historians of U.S. foreign relations—Walter LaFeber, Michael L. Conniff, and John Major—have ably analyzed the larger strategic, political, and economic structure of U.S. dominance on the isthmus. Their work has emphasized high-status actors and events, as well as key economic indices and political developments. But less scholarly research has focused on the Zone as a borderland, with its unique social and cultural impacts on U.S.-Panamanian relations.8 Historians have not sufficiently studied the complex interplay between the various peoples at the margins who lived within and along the enclave’s frontiers. Borderland on the Isthmus seeks to address these encounters and provide both a social history of the American Empire in Panama and an analysis of the Zone and its frontiers as sites of contestation over race, identity, gender, and power. A borderlands approach to analyzing the Zone-Panama corridor provides a revealing lens for exploring such conflicts and what they tell us about the players, their beliefs, illusions, and goals, as well as issues of gender and power, all of which could change at a moment’s notice, simply by stepping across an artificial line. Panamanians expressed their opposition and accommodation to the Zone not just in official policies, protests, and demonstrations but in everyday forms of resistance and acquiescence. They often embraced aspects of American culture and the economic opportunities that the Zone offered, even as they rejected U.S. colonialism. Likewise U.S. military personnel and canal workers stigmatized Panamanians as inferiors during the week, then sought pleasure on weekends in the nightclubs, festivals, and brothels of Colón and Panama City. The Zone borderland became a microcosm of the strains of postwar America and Panama, as well as a mirror for the projection of U.S. power, culture, and ideology abroad. introduction

3

Within the Latin American context, the Zone stood as the ultimate symbol of Yankee hegemony and racism toward blacks and Latinos. Constituting a population of over fifty thousand s, technicians, canal workers, soldiers, and their dependents, plus nine thousand workers who lived on the other side of the line, the enclave constituted one of the largest U.S. overseas communities from World War II through 1979.9 No serious discussion of American imperialism (or arguments over whether it ever existed) can proceed without considering the Zone-Panama borderland, its inhabitants, its internal and external conflicts, and its significance to U.S.–Latin American relations and the formation of the American Empire. Debates over the Canal Zone abound. Was working for the Panama Canal Company similar to life in a company town, a huge plantation, a socialist state, a Jim Crow society, a military base, a tropical utopia, or a combination of all of these? Was the Zone-Panama borderland a colony, an enclave, or a state within a state? The different perspectives of the Zonian and U.S. military communities, of the West Indian labor force, and of neighboring Panama all brought varied responses to these questions at the borders. In Zone Policeman 88 (1913), a primary source memoir, Harry A. Franck portrayed the Zone as a turn-of-the-century Euro-American colony with a unique U.S. civilizing mission and strong cultural hostility toward the locals. John and Mavis Biesanz, in their sociological study, The People of Panama (1955), portrayed the Zonians as a highly regimented yet essentially middle-class, paternalistic community that kept its distance from Panamanians and discriminated against the West Indian workforce. Herbert and Mary Knapp, in Red, White, and Blue Paradise (1984), a personal with many journalistic and secondary sources, defended the Zone community against charges of extreme racism, jingoism, and privilege. The Knapps viewed the Zonians as hardworking, dedicated Americans concerned more with job security and enjoying a workers’ paradise than with the dictates of empire. Their study also took a critical view of Panamanian cultural, social, and political mores. Historical change and processes are not adequately tracked in these studies through the use of archival documents, personal papers, oral histories, and court, company, and military records that were employed in this volume. Julie Greene in The Canal Builders (2009) has expertly explored the formative years of the Canal Zone using many of these sources, with a particular emphasis on the Canal as a canvas for Progressive-era labor and reform struggles. But her study concentrates understandably on the construction years, as does David McCullough’s earlier, celebratory The Path between

4 introduction

the Seas (1977). In Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal (2008) Alexander Missal analyzes the influence of Progressive-era writers in creating a utopian discourse regarding the Canal and their hopes for a model, futuristic society. Because of their earlier focus, none of these works analyzed the post–World War II Zone when the enclave and the reasons for maintaining it came under such intense national and international pressure. Two pioneering works, Verna Newton’s The Silver Men (1984) and Michael L. Conniff ’s Black Labor on a White Canal (1985), brought much needed scholarly attention to the hitherto neglected role of West Indians in shaping the Canal project and subsequent Panamanian society. Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu’s The Big Ditch (2011) provides a superb economic history of the Panama Canal which argues that Washington decided to build and later transfer the Canal largely on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis. But much more than mere dollars and cents was at stake for Americans, West Indians, and Panamanians in the cultural borderland that developed between them. In contrast, viewing the Zone as an imperial borderland refocuses the often ignored centrality of local agency in the formation of identity politics on the isthmus that drove so many related processes. Borderland on the Isthmus investigates the colonial nature of the Zone and its frontiers by comparing and contrasting this imperial frontier with key features of other postwar colonies and borderlands in Africa and Asia. This work s the notion of the Zone-Panama corridor as a locus of intercultural and overlapping societies influenced by local traditions, colonial innovations, metropolitan authority, and “intercultural politics of race, identity, and gender.”10 While this study relies on many state archival sources, a wide variety of periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, novels, films, and other popular culture materials were also employed to provide a street-level or bottom-up history of the lived experience of the borderland. Central to this approach and to the thick description methodology used to decipher the many encounters among Panamanians, U.S. citizens, West Indians, and Kuna are scores of oral interviews I conducted.11 It is important to note that all those interviewed brought their own unique perspectives and discourses to the many controversial topics of this study. While oral histories provide a fascinating window into the social and cultural life of the Zone and its neighboring Panamanian barrios, these interviews also have their limitations and should be approached with care. White Zonians, for instance, were well aware that the racism so commonplace in the Canal Zone in the 1940s–1960s was no

introduction

5

longer socially acceptable when these interviews were conducted in 2001–8. Zonians frequently tended to look back on the enclave with nostalgia, exaggerating its sublimities and minimizing its injustices. Similarly Latin Panamanians who grew up in the shadow of the Zone and its humiliation of Panamanians sometimes hyperbolized its cruelties. Older service workers and Panamanian taxi drivers who benefited from the Zone expressed a certain longing for the good times of the enclave, and so amplified its benefits to Panama, partly in hopes of securing a better tip from the author. In contrast, retired West Indians expressed fear of condemning the racism of the old borderland too vociferously, as they worried it might affect their U.S. pensions and relations with Panamanian neighbors when this book was published. Romanticized memories, hurtful biases, and economic fears naturally influenced remembrances of this imperial frontier, as is the case with most historical memory.12 The structure of this study is based on identity groups and themes rather than chronology. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the work and to the central theoretical framework of the Zone and its frontiers as a borderland where various influences and interactions reached out and impacted everyday life on either side of the line. This chapter takes a longer historical view, back to 1903 and as far forward as 1999, as it traces the peaks and valleys of the Zone’s sway within the republic, as well as increases in Panamanian influence upon the enclave. Chapter 2 analyzes the central categories of race and national identity in conflict throughout the borderland in the post–World War II period, with special focus on the Zonians, the term used to describe U.S. civilian canal workers and their families. Changing notions of identity and race emerged from World War II that would profoundly question the enclave’s once comfortable ascendance. Chapter 3 examines various modes of West Indian identity that arose in response to U.S. discrimination and continued Panamanian hostility. West Indians found themselves in an especially perilous position within the postwar borderland as local nationalism surged and generational strife erupted within their own ranks. Eventually these challenges in identity politics, combined with the global decolonization struggle, led many West Indians to transfer their loyalty, however grudgingly, from the United States to Panama. Chapter 4 probes the highly charged gender relations within the ZonePanama borderland. Sexual interaction and the mutability of gender constructions both complicated and exacerbated U.S.-Panamanian everyday associations across borders. U.S. sexual violence repelled Panamanians, while intermarriage, concubinage, and a regulated sex industry that mushroomed 6 introduction

from the World War II troop buildup pulled Panamanians and U.S. citizens into mutual webs of intimacy. Chapter 5 examines the history of the U.S. military on the isthmus, its unique culture and relationship with the Panamanian people, National Guard, and elites. The central role of the U.S. military as armed guardians of the borderland put them in competition with technocratic, middle-class Zonians who felt that their operation of the Canal merited a loftier authority. Their rivalry constituted a hallmark of the borderland’s postwar history, as did changing local perceptions of the U.S. military from World War II antifascist heroes to the chief instrument of a resented occupation. Chapter 6 explores the often ignored role of crime throughout the borderland, which at least some Panamanians and West Indians viewed as a form of resistance. With its provocative presence beside the poorest slums of Panama, the U.S.-run enclave provided a tempting target for Panamanian criminals, who through theft, contraband, and drug trafficking fought their own private wars against the Zone. The postwar growth in population and poverty intensified this struggle, which included surprising alliances, dependencies, and cooperation that both united and divided communities on either side of the line. The contrast between the U.S. and Panamanian justice systems complicated these encounters. While the political nature of such crime is difficult to gauge, the popular perception that much of it embodied a patriotic defiance against the gringos can be established in several cases. Finally, an epilogue draws the larger conclusions of this study. The two conflicted societies—actually five or six, if one counts the principal divisions within them—formed an often antagonistic borderland culture at various intersections, an in-between land neither fully Panamanian, West Indian, nor Zonian. The question of U.S. empire is also addressed, with insights gleaned from a century of conflict and accommodation along the borders of the transisthmian corridor.

introduction

7

Notes

Introduction 1. Arosemena G., Historia Documental, 173–89; Beluche Mora, Acción Comunal; Escobar, Arnulfo Arias o el credo Panameñista. 2. Chamberlain, Decolonization; Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact; Kruse and Tuck, The Fog of War; Winant, The World Is a Ghetto; Griswold del Castillo, World War II and Mexican Civil Rights; Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. 3. Donnan and Wilson, Borders; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes. 4. Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders”; Taylor, The Divided Ground; Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier. 5. Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands; Okun, The Early Roman Frontier on the Upper Rhine Area. 6. Moffat, The Wall; Gold, Stone in Spain’s Shoe; Thornhill, The Road to Suez; Baker, Crossroads; Lipman, Guantánamo. The Spanish outposts at Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa form another example of noncontiguous borderlands; see Carabaza and de Santos, Melilla y Ceuta. 7. Diener and Hagan, Borderlines and Borderlands. 8. LaFeber, The Panama Canal; Conniff, Panama and the United States; Major, Prize Possession. 9. Census of the Panama Canal Zone, 1960; Annual Report of the Panama Canal Company and the Canal Zone Government 1960. 10. Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions, 1. 11. Geertz, “Thick Description,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–29. 12. For the role of memory in historical constructions, see Burke, “History as Social Memory”; Hutton, History as the Art of Memory; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance.

Chapter 1: Borderland on the Isthmus 1. For sex through the fence, James Reid, U.S. businessman in Panama, interview with author, Balboa, Republic of Panamá (RP), April 30, 2001; Enrique Cantera, retired laborer, interview with author, April 16, 2001; William Thrush, retired U.S. Army sergeant, interview with author, Balboa, RP, November 21, 2001; Memorandum: “Prostitutes Near Zone Borders,” Jeffries to Randolph, February 10, 1964, File 250.1 (Unusual Incidents); Office of the Provost Marshal (opm), Record Group (rg) 349, National Archives and Records istration (nara), College Park, Maryland. 2. For Puerto Rican presence in the Panama garrison, see Memorandum: Puerto Rican Recruitment in U.S. Army Caribbean,” July 1, 1960, Headquarters U.S. Caribbean Command