The Silver Women : How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal / Joan Flores-Villalobos.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Flores-Villalobos, Joan, author.

Series:

Politics and culture in modern America.

Politics and Culture in Modern America Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Civil rights--History--19th century.

African Americans.

African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.

African Americans--Political activity--19th century.

African Americans--Politics and government--19th century.

Citizenship--United States--History--19th century.

Citizenship.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (297 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2023]

Summary:

The Panama Canal’s construction relied on the exploitation of a racialized class of workers, Black West Indians who were paid in silver rather than the gold white workers received. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who traveled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion.Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and its racial calculus. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts and had little access to official services and wages. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the racialized migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba.The Silver Women is thus a history of Black West Indian women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Introduction. Women of Silver and Gold

Chapter 1. The Land of Promise?

Chapter 2. "A Scandal on the Isthmus"

Chapter 3. A Moral Battleground

Chapter 4. Labor in the Domestic "Frontier"

Chapter 5. The Value of Death

Chapter 6. Private Honor and Public Lives in Panama City

Chapter 7. A Female Vanguard

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781512823646

1512823643

OCLC:

1350572328