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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Flores-Villalobos, Joan,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Politics and Culture in Modern America
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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