2025/03/01 by Jana K. Lipman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Cuban History and Society #Latin American and Latino Studies #Caribbean history, culture, and politics
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11521374
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
While there are many books on the construction of the Panama Canal, Joan Flores-Villalobos is the first to focus on the experiences of Black West Indian women. The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal argues that Black women’s labor was central to the construction of the canal, and she skillfully analyzes untapped sources and reads others against the grain to reveal the contours of their work and family lives. This book is an important contribution to histories of US empire, Caribbean migration, and women’s history, and it will be read alongside Julie Greene’s The Canal Builders, Kaysha Corinealdi’s Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World-Building in the Twentieth Century, and Jason Colby’s The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and US Expansion in Central America.More than a generation ago, Cynthia Enloe challenged scholars to recognize the centrality of women’s work in buttressing US militarism and empire. She narrates the discovery of her own “feminist curiosity” by asking how our understanding of war might shift if we considered who did the laundry (Cynthia Enloe, Anita Lacey, and Thomas Gregory, “Twenty-Five Years of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe,” Sustainability and Social Justice 52, no. 3 [August 2016]: 537–50). Flores-Villalobos takes up this challenge. As she writes, “West Indian women took care of white American children and cleaned white American homes, physically maintaining the image of an orderly domestic sphere. In short, West Indian women’s labor made the United States’ imperial project possible” (3). In other words, she makes scholars look closely at who was doing the laundry in the Panama Canal Zone.Black West Indian women navigated an economic landscape that was fairly distinct from that of their male counterparts. Most West Indian men arrived on contracts and worked on the “silver rolls” (as compared to the “gold rolls,” which were almost exclusively manned by white American and European workers). In contrast, women generally entered Panama as individuals, not on contracts, so they were able to navigate and negotiate multiple economic relationships. Moreover, some worked for white American families, while others profited through their work for West Indian workers. Almost none of them were directly employed by the US government or the Canal Zone. Rather, they worked for themselves, often at the whims of their white American employers, but they also exercised a fair amount of autonomy and advocated for their rights and respect.Flores-Villalobos begins the book with an overview of West Indian women’s labor in the years after emancipation. She emphasizes that their experiences as entrepreneurs and workers pre-dated their migration to Panama. West Indian women worked as higglers (market women), domestic servants, and laundresses long before they left for the Canal Zone. In addition, she provides the social landscape whereby common law marriages and cohabitation among heterosexual couples was far more common than legal marriage practices. Both of these factors would shape West Indians’ experiences in the Canal Zone and construction era. West Indian women who sought economic advancement in Panama were likely to work for themselves in a range of informal sectors, namely domestic service, laundry, and marketing, and they were unlikely to be legally married.Given the limited sources where Black women speak for themselves, Flores-Villalobos draws on records related to criminality and sex work and looks to documents written by white women where they published fantasies of docile Black servants. She uses these sources skillfully, explaining the context of their creation, and she provides a close reading of the moments that might have ruptured the Canal Zone’s facade of total control and white women’s dreams of imperial nostalgia.I was particularly impressed by her analysis of how West Indian women, both in Panama and in their home islands, petitioned for their partners’ death benefits. Flores-Villalobos here dwells on the violence and constant risk of death and injury for the male canal builders. She also examines how women wielded their position as British subjects to gain the pensions from their common-law husbands. This work complements Jorge Giovannetti-Torres’s scholarship on West Indians in Cuba, where he argues that they also called on their British subjecthood to gain rights and respect. Likewise, Flores-Villalobos argues that women “asserted the dignity and worth of their loved ones in the face of a bureaucracy that devalued them while also rerouting owed wages and leftover money back to family and kin who depended on them” (165). She demonstrates how West Indian women used the law and imperial bureaucracies to gain the economic security they felt owed to them.She concludes by underscoring the importance of the Canal Zone to the broader currents of West Indian migration within the Caribbean and North America. She notes that the mothers of prominent twentieth-century intellectuals like Paule Marshall, Maida Springer Kemp, and Kenneth Clarke were all in Panama before migrating to the United States. Here we see Black West Indian women as central to the migratory and intellectual routes that stretched from Barbados to Panama to Cuba to New York City.Flores-Villalobos concludes reiterating her central claim: “In many ways, the story told in this book is straightforward: West Indian women migrated to Panama and provided the essential labor of social reproduction that buttressed the construction of the Canal and subsequent Caribbean migrations.” And she adds knowingly, “Any West Indian could tell you that” (226–27). Despite her recognition that Black women’s labor was popularly acknowledged, Flores-Villalobos is the first scholar to mine the archives and document it in a scholarly text. This is no small feat. Flores-Villalobos successfully argues that women’s labor, their entrepreneurship, and their economic acumen shaped a generation and, arguably, an empire.In conclusion, Flores-Villalobos succeeds in placing West Indian women at the center of the story of the Panama Canal. She consults archives in the United States, United Kingdom, Caribbean, and Panama, finding Black women’s voices and reading against the grain. These original and provocative interpretations demonstrate the centrality of West Indian women to the making of US empire and to their own communities. It turns out that who does the laundry tells us a great deal about empire, and scholars of gender, sexuality, the Caribbean, and US empire will turn to Flores-Villalobos to explain how and why.