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Two major themes dominate Black Labor on a White Canal . The first is the settlement of over 100,000 black West Indians in the small Central American republic of Panama. Many of these people were hired as the unskilled work force for the isthmian canal that the United States began to build in 1904. The second is U.S. labor policy on the canal from that date until the United States began to relinquish its control over the waterway by the Carter­Torrijos Treaty of 1977. Each in turn forms part of a larger f the concern. The West Indian experience in Panama has been a microcosm oof the African diaspora in which blacks have been scattered abroad by the forces of slavery, poverty, and white supremacy. Canal labor policy was likewise a key element in the colonial relationship between the American colossus and its tiny Panamanian client-state. Black Labor on a White Canal traces the history of the West Indian predicament on the isthmus under Indians both American and Panamanian masters. The climax came when West and Panamanians began to come to terms with one another and of when Washington acknowledged that its prized outpost at the crossroads of the Americas was an anachronism in a largely decolonized world.

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CHOICE Review

Conniff's book traces the history of some 100,000 West Indian blacks who came to Panama early in this century as labor for construction of the Panama Canal. The book's villains are the US authorities who ran the canal. Because these men hired few US workers (who were unionized and too expensive), and relatively few Panamanians, Conniff says the canal authorities used a ``third-country'' labor system. The imported West Indians were in a weak position so far from home, and were initially deferential to white employers; predictably, intense friction developed between hispanic Panamanians and the black West Indians. Conniff argues that the canal administration developed a Jim Crow dual payroll, with blacks earning much less and receiving relatively fewer benefits than their white counterparts. The Jim Crow nature of the dual payroll is hard to prove, however, as canal administrators claimed the two payrolls only divided skilled from unskilled or US from non-US workers. Conniff's scholarly study is one of few monographs treating the subject of American jurisdiction over its quasi-colony, the Canal Zone. College and university libraries.-S. Cresswell, University of Virginia

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Michael Conniff, emeritus professor of history at San José State University, earned degrees at UC Berkeley and Stanford and has published 10 books and many articles on modern history, most recently Modern Panama (2019, with Gene Bigler) and A New History of Modern Latin America (2017, with Lawrence Clayton and Susan Gauss). He has lived overseas more than a dozen years, held several post-docs (including three Fulbright tours), and served in the U.S. Peace Corps. He lectures often in Portuguese and Spanish. He taught history at the University of New Mexico and later created Latin American studies programs at Auburn University and the University of South Florida. He also founded the Global Studies program at San Jose State and its Global Studies Initiative.