Ep. 21: The History of the Panama Canal

The Panama Canal was envisioned as a waterway to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans hundreds of years before its construction. When official building began in the 19th century and continued into the 20th century, thousands of  Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean people migrated as laborers to the canal zone. Dr. Kaysha Corinealdi joins us to talk about how their migration transformed Panamanian society and Panama's growing diaspora.

Dr. Kaysha Corinealdi is an Assistant Professor of History at Emerson College. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth century histories of empire, migration, feminism, and Afro-diasporic activism in the Americas. Her forthcoming book, Panama in Black, centers the activism of Afro-Caribbean migrants and their descendants as they navigated practices and policies of anti-Blackness, xenophobia, denationalization, and white supremacy in Panama and the United States. Her research and reviews can also be found in the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the International Journal of Africana Studies, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and the Global South. Dr. Corinealdi’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Follow Dr. Corinealdi on Twitter.

Strictly Facts Reads

·      “A Section for Women: Journalism and Gendered Promises of Anti-Colonial Progress in Interwar Panama” by Kaysha Corinealdi

·      “Colón Man a Come: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration” by Rhonda Frederick

·      “Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal” by Olive Senior

·      “How the Panama Canal Took a Huge Toll On the Contract Workers Who Built It” by Caroline Lieffers

·      “Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century” by Kaysha Corinealdi (Published October 2022)

·      “The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914” by Velma Newton

·      “Tropic Death” by Eric Walrond and Arnold Rampersad

Strictly Facts Sounds

·      Cedella Booker Marley – “Colón Man a Come”

·      Mai-Elka Prado (Feat. La Bruja) – “Cuidao”

·      Melva Lowe de Goodin – “De Barbados a Panamá (From Barbados to Panama)”

·      Valerie Walker – “When I Was In Colon”