“Laboring Women or Prostitutes?”: Caribbean Domestic Workers in the Panama Canal Zone

• In Event: Questioning the 'Margins' of Labor: The Precarity of Domestic Labor in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

In January of 1906, a New York journalist named Poultney Bigelow reported that a boat with over two hundred Martinican women had arrived in Panama, funded by the US government, to work as prostitutes. The news reverberated throughout the US and Panama, creating a massive scandal for the Canal administration and the American politicians who had heavily invested in the project. The scandal engendered an extensive Senate investigation, where all of the women and each of the police officers, labor recruiters, ministers, and administrators involved in the incident were interviewed.

In their carefully edited affidavits, most of the Martinican women stated their motivation for migrating to the Canal as the promise of domestic service. Yet, on arrival, they were immediately categorized as a racial and sexual threat. In this paper, I question the Senate Investigation, along with the initial article and surrounding press, to consider the multiple meanings “labor” had for these West Indian women in the early years of the Panama Canal construction. Though labor remains a central category in the study of the Canal, women, particularly black women, have been almost completely ignored in the historical scholarship. This presentation attempts to bridge the conversation between “gender” and “labor” in the context of the Canal construction.

Author

• Joan Flores-Villalobos, New York University