Gender, Race, and Migrant Labor in the “Domestic Frontier” of the Panama Canal Zone

Abstract

The cover of Maid in Panama depicts a West Indian higgler as a “mammy.” Her skin is an exaggerated ink-black, her body is large, her face round, and she wears a servant's uniform, including headscarf and apron. The higgler walks across an open field carrying a tray of tropical fruits on her head, with a background of palm trees, a placid river, and fluffy clouds.

The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor

“…Similarly, many historians, in the vein of autonomist feminists, use reproductive labor to refer to feminized labor (including childbirth), mostly but not exclusively domestic, that reproduces labor power (Allman, 1996; Barker, 2021; Brown, 2020; Browning, 2021; Cobble, 2004; Elgersman, 1999; Hicks, 2022; Hill, 1989; Paugh, 2017; Schwalm, 1997; Sheller, 2012; Simonsen, 2015; Turner, 2017). This is the manner in which Andrew Urban (2018) and Joan Flores‐Villalobos (2023) use the term in their recent studies of, respectively, nineteenth‐century immigration to the United States and of West Indian women laborers on the Panama Canal, and this is the manner in which many scholars of Latin American women's history use the term (Allemandi, 2022; Blum, 2011; Milanich, 2011; Olcott, 2011). 15 George Chauncey, in a 1981 study of women's reproductive labor in Zambian (Northern Rhodesian) mines, defines social reproduction as involving “not only the generational reproduction of the working class as a whole, but also the daily reproduction of labor power, that is, the daily maintenance of the worker” and suggests that mining companies strategically harnessed women's reproductive labors to more cheaply and efficiently extract surplus‐value from male mineworkers (p. 135; see also Cheelo Siwila, 2017).…”