“Fever and Ague All Day”

Introduction

In 1904, the United States began its Panama Canal construction project.1 Completed in ten years, the canal symbolized a grand feat of American engineering while the control of mosquito-borne illnesses and the “cleaning up” of heavily populated terminal cities like Colón further demonstrated the prowess of modern American medicine.2 This triumph of infrastructure, however, was largely made possible through the third-country labor of Afro-Caribbean men, who composed approximately 60 percent of the workforce.3 An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Afro-Caribbean people arrived during the construction period and, in the Jim Crow–structured Canal Zone, the “gold” and “silver” payment structure served as proxies for race, with white US citizens on the gold roll and Afro-Caribbean workmen the lowest-paid silver workers.4 When writing about this transnational context, scholars commonly address these workers’ exposure to illness and injury, or, as Julie Greene notes, “Accidents, illness and death like everything else in the zone followed the color line.”5

Which bodies are made to pay for progress?6 To address this question, I explore disability in the transnational historical context of the US Panama Canal construction period (1904–1914). Here, two hallmarks of progress—the construction of the canal and the establishment of a white US enclave in the tropics—relied on Afro-Caribbean labor. A successful white US settler colonial project also necessitated transposing the prevailing, familiar system of racial domination to the Canal Zone. In this transnational context, notions of Black hyperability and racialized immunity, “fitness” for hazardous labor or essential care work, worthiness for (re)capacitation, and Black bodies’ value for scientific and medical knowledge creation meant that disability and debility functioned prominently in Afro-Caribbean segregation in the Canal Zone. These boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, in turn, informed notions of American identity and citizenship in this transnational space. Beyond silver status, for example, race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender shaped access to and forms of care for injured or ill Afro-Caribbean laborers differentiating them from both gold white US Americans and other silver laborers. Here, the settler colonial logics of exclusion and elimination functioned in the racialization of Afro-Caribbean workers more exposed to disabling and debilitating circumstances despite the importance of their labor for the success of US American expansion.

In this essay, I turn to infrastructure to explore disability and debility during the canal construction period. The arrival of thousands of Afro-Caribbean peoples, primarily from British Caribbean colonies, exemplifies the construction of transit networks fueling patterns of racialized labor migration prior to movements instigated by free trade. Beyond the canal itself, the United States further established the infrastructures to support a thriving white community in the Canal Zone. I am, therefore, mindful of “soft infrastructure” (e.g., schools, hospitals, and welfare offices) and “people as infrastructure” (support care labor often performed by women) alongside the creation of the Panama Canal as a wonder of global infrastructure of capitalist logistics. The canal’s construction also means attending to infrastructural violence in both the building and destruction or disregard of infrastructure. While the active exclusionary violence of the state is evident in apparatuses like prisons and the police that cause disablement, slow violence also disproportionately produces disabling conditions through infrastructural abandonment and processes of state neglect. For Jina B. Kim, infrastructural violence refers to uneven systems of resource distribution and state-sanctioned racialized resource deprivation.7 In Panamá, the neglect that heightened the likelihood of experiencing illness, injury, and death was an intentional feature of the disbursement of resources along the lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. Circular No. 144 (1907), for example, which stipulated that “all regular employees above the grade laborer, unaccustomed to a tropical climate may be granted fifteen days’ sick leave with pay for each six months,” clearly excluded most canal workmen of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity considered “accustomed” to the Caribbean climate.8 When considering the construction of the canal, it is important to note that the death rate for Black employees was three times that of white employees; the violence of this grand infrastructure project also extended to its construction.9

The Panama Canal and the establishment of the Canal Zone depended on the racialized exploitation of Afro-Caribbean labor. As descendants of enslaved peoples, their value depended on many factors, including disability. Turning to the downplaying of Harriet Tubman’s disability, for example, Janell Hobson notes the failure of Tubman’s enslaver to sell her “unsound” body. Struck in the head with a two-pound weight by an overseer pursuing a fugitive enslaved young man, an adolescent Tubman almost died and then developed epilepsy. During enslavement, however, even those deemed undesirable for purchase because of their impairments still labored. With plantation economies dependent on Black labor, Tubman worked on lumber when it became clear that she was no longer fit to work in the fields.10 Indeed, Nirmala Erevelles explains in her transnational feminist disability perspective that, contrary to the dominant paradigm of disabled bodies possessing little value, enslavement regularly involved the violent mutilation of captive Africans such that the idealized corporeally sound enslaved body was unattainable.11 Though impairments produced hierarchies in worth, enslavement, Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley emphasize, relied on constructions of Black bodies as best suited “for work, and not freedom,” linking Black people’s value with their utility as a productive labor force. As Achille Mbembe makes clear, enslaved people had value as both property and instruments of labor, and, living in various states of injury, they worked, nonetheless.12

Jasbir K. Puar laments that Mbembe does not sit longer with enslaved people living and working in states of injury to consider debilitation—a process that disrupts the binary of living and dying.13 Writing to the Isthmian Historical Society (IHS), Barbadian John Garner shared that he had his “first touch of malaria” in 1909 and, after three days in the rest house and taking enough quinine “to cure two men,” he eventually requested his discharge.14 By considering debilitations of chronicity (i.e., illnesses like malaria that became endemic in Panamá), I attend to chronic conditions, one of many interventions advanced by feminist scholars and scholars of color since disability studies’ formal entry into academia in the early 1990s.15 The field’s roots, which lie in challenges to the medical model of disability, forwarded an identitarian model that framed disabled people as a minoritized group and championed a social model of disability that distinguished between impairment (the medically defined condition) and disability (the related socially constructed disadvantage). Feminist scholars and scholars of color, however, have critiqued disability studies for its perceived preoccupation with the heterosexual, white male bodymind and for the limitations of the impairment/disability divide, which curtail investigations of chronic illness and the possibilities of “collective affinities” among people labeled sick or disabled and who suffer discrimination. Black feminist and women of color disability studies approaches further prioritize understanding disability within the context of white supremacy, focus on the operations of ideologies of ability and ableism, value intersectional analyses that integrate disability, and attend to the disproportionate care work of (often migrant) women of color.16 I consider these interventions and, by including malaria in my analysis, I further draw attention to chronic conditions in transnational historical context. Unlike paradigmatic so-called stable disabilities, chronic illnesses are transitory and unpredictable and, as unpredictable bodies are difficult to accommodate, their ability to be labor-producing—a significant preoccupation for the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC)—is questioned. Attention to malaria as a chronic condition permits an analysis of disability that recognizes the geographic- and historically specific preoccupation of the United States with tropical disease.

During the canal construction period, ideologies of ability functioned to displace local communities and disproportionately wrangle Afro-Caribbean peoples into the US settler colonial project in Panamá. Here, the United States’ priorities were building the canal and establishing the Canal Zone as a white US American space. The doctrines of discovery undergirding US American settler colonial logics at the isthmus then led to an overwriting of preexisting colonial relations. The space that became the Canal Zone was neither wilderness nor jungle; rather, it featured municipalities run in accordance with nineteenth-century Spanish American modernity, argues Marixa Lasso. Evidence of the United States’ success in conquering the tropical environment—in the transformation of the landscape to resemble US American standards of urban space—only came after the targeting of “native” towns for depopulation from 1913 to 1916. The area was not empty; rather, as the canal neared completion, the United States exerted more control over land and property.17 Examining how the Lockean understanding of the property relation underwrites notions of accessibility, Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner and Joel Michael Reynolds emphasize that settler colonialism charges nonwhite peoples with lacking sufficient “reason” to properly transform land into property, a relationship of domination required for successful citizenship. It, therefore, defaults to the presumption that these peoples have no right to public or private space.18

At the isthmus, deploying surplus labor, especially Black labor, on the lands of supposedly eliminated Indigenous peoples to expand property already conformed to long-established settler logics. Discussing Asian racialization in North America, Iyko Day observes that though labor frames both Asian and African American relationships to settler colonialism, the hereditary stain of slavery is absent for the former, even if as migrant labor they are not personally “free” and subject to exclusion through immigration policy.19 Largely English-speaking Afro-Caribbean canal workmen, however, were contracted, alien migrants with enslavement’s “hereditary stains,” such as tropes of Black physical hyperability and mental incompetence, and of enslavers’ insistence on working ill, injured, and disabled Black bodies. Canal authorities thought little of recruiting these men and working them to the bone.

If premature or slow death marks debility, the state made clear whose bodies were prioritized for enfolding into life.20 In the Canal Zone, the US government provided gold employees and their families with such substantial amenities that it “raised the cry of ‘socialism,’” with travel writer Harry A. Franck admitting that “there were a number of little points in the management of this private government strip that savor[ed] more or less faintly of the Socialists program.”21 These “little points” included free housing, furniture, light, water, fuel, ice, and garbage disposal services, among other amenities. It was with the considerable aid of the state, then, that white US gold employees arriving in the Canal Zone demonstrated successful citizenship by performing the feat of transforming land into property. As Circular No. 144 demonstrates, these “little points” also extended to the uneven distribution of health-care resources that favored gold employees. The recognition (or disregard) of disability among Afro-Caribbean workmen in the eyes of canal authorities, however, is especially evident in the assumptions of Black immunity or resistance to diseases such as malaria and the subsequent uneven distribution of resources based on this medicalized supposition. Karen Soldatic and Shaun Grech further emphasize nationality in that appeals for disability rights are challenging for those making claims to a nation state of which they are not a citizen.22 Though Soldatic and Grech are addressing limitations in twenty-first-century conceptualizations of disability rights, alien status shaped if and what Afro-Caribbean workmen could claim from the United States and, therefore, if and how they should be (re)capacitated. As the United States engaged in establishing its Canal Zone enclave, providing its white citizens with the means to live and thrive affirmed the settler colonial project. The government, however, had far fewer qualms about exploiting a seemingly ever-replenishing supply of Afro-Caribbean labor that bolstered its claims to land through the construction of the canal, infrastructural improvements to sanitation, and Afro-Caribbean women serving as “infrastructure” for white families. Once the canal was complete, the need to work Afro-Caribbean men’s bodies, even when ill, injured, or disabled, fell drastically with the formal depopulation order to rid the Canal Zone of “native” towns only beginning on the eve of the canal’s completion. The United States had to first construct the labor force. This entailed disability and ideologies of ability, intertwining with the transnational historical complexities of the isthmus, such that Afro-Caribbean men became the bulk of the workforce.

Constructing the Labor Force

The first priority of US Americans at the isthmus was building the canal. To do so, the United States relied on third-country labor, primarily recruiting silver status men from the Caribbean and Southern Europe. Residents of the Canal Zone had to abide by Jim Crow–style regulations along labor divisions of gold and silver that distinguished supposedly skilled (i.e., gold) white US American employees from unskilled or semiskilled silver laborers, largely Afro-Caribbean workmen. Here, residents lived in separate gold and silver towns, had racially segregated schools, recreational facilities, and commissaries, were sent to different hospital wards, and even had segregated cemetery plots.23 As canal authorities endeavored to govern thousands of people from multiple nationalities, the “Memorandum on the Condition of Women and Children in the Canal Zone” described the zone as “a great camp, occupied by people representing various types of humanity, from the semi-civilized of the isthmus itself to the highest type of Anglo-Saxon civilization. . . . Yet the government of this great camp is so regulated that life and property are as well protected here as in the most law-abiding communities.”24 While “Anglo-Saxon civilization” was at the top of the Canal Zone’s racial hierarchy, the government, according to the memorandum, still successfully managed the “various types of humanity.” How were Afro-Caribbean men constructed as fit (enough) for working at the isthmus such that they became the majority of the labor force?

In recruiting workers, canal authorities made evaluations about the abilities of different bodyminds and about fitness, which included considerations of ethnicity and nationality alongside race. US officials deemed the small Panamanian population insufficient and less suitable than Afro-Caribbean laborers for strenuous work, and they were mindful of preserving good relations with Panamá. By contrast, canal authorities believed silver roll Southern Europeans—Spaniards, Greeks, and Italians—to be more efficient. Better paid than their Afro-Caribbean counterparts because of their race but nonetheless on the silver roll because of their nationality, many Spaniards became dissatisfied with working under white gold US bosses who spoke no Spanish, and they left the canal project, entering Panamá or other Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. Eventually, the recruitment of Europeans ended in 1908.25 And what of African American labor? If racial exclusion constitutes the primary form of colonial exploitation against African Americans, for the ICC, their presence at the isthmus caused an administrative headache. While their race relegated them to the silver roll, their citizenship should have ensured gold roll benefits. This led to an uncomfortable blurring of inclusion and exclusion where silver roll African Americans, unable to be fully excluded, received higher pay and special privileges unavailable to their Afro-Caribbean counterparts. For a white settler colonial project, this ambiguity, coupled with fears about potentially disrupting the labor supply across the US South, meant that few African Americans worked at the isthmus.26

Afro-Caribbean people, however, had long been involved in isthmian infrastructure projects hastening territorial expansion, including the Panama Railroad venture of the 1850s and the disastrous French canal construction effort of the 1880s. These projects deployed stereotypes developed in slave economies of Black physical hyperability and insensitivity to pain and Black fitness for tropical labor, especially Black workers’ supposed immunological capacity to resist tropical disease, as justifications for their recruitment practices.27 In Panamá, US officials relied on these tropes alongside climatic determinism and Afro-Caribbean colonial subjecthood to racialize them in relation to African Americans. If unproductive African Americans required management, this was especially necessary for tropical Afro-Caribbean peoples. When questioned about Afro-Caribbean labor in the Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, Theodore Shonts, chair of the ICC, insisted that “troublesome” attributes of African Americans such as lack of foresight, laziness, and talkativeness became accentuated the farther south one traveled.28 For canal administrators, less productive tropical Afro-Caribbean men were nonetheless “accustomed” to working more than eight hours a day “at the plantation,” were “cheap,” and “st[ood] the climate.”29 Canal authorities further cast Afro-Caribbean people as more docile. In slave economies, evaluations of Black “fitness” included controllability, with “incorrigible runaways” deemed unproductive.30 Therefore, while impairment did not necessarily prevent enslaved people from being used as instruments of labor, incorrigibility was potentially disqualifying. In Panamá, canal authorities claimed that, though they needed motivation, Afro-Caribbean people were “the most peaceful and law-abiding people imaginable” and even “childlike.”31

While the United States engaged in formal recruitment from the Caribbean, many Afro-Caribbean men arrived informally, leaving depressed island economies in search of work or to join friends and family already living in established Afro-Caribbean communities at the isthmus. In the British West Indies, ICC recruitment stipulations highlighted canal authorities’ preoccupation with Afro-Caribbean men’s physical fitness, favoring the most able-bodied men for migration, inspecting potential workers for disease, vaccinating those selected, and rejecting those that looked ill or were deemed too old. Indeed, William C. Gorgas, chief sanitary officer, instructed recruiters to only accept men aged eighteen to forty-five.32 “We arrived in Colón August 31st 1906,” wrote Albert Peters in his IHS letter, “I was 21 years.” As surplus Black labor arrived to complete the canal, an ambitious infrastructural feat of capitalist logistics, canal administrators expressed loathing for having to pay wages to the descendants of enslaved people. Afro-Caribbean workmen’s migrant status did not mean that they escaped the legacy of “property” and, therefore, falling outside the ideal figure of the wage laborer, there was debate as to whether their compensation was too high! “If I had the privilege of working those people ten hours a day,” declared chief engineer John Stevens, “I should not pay them 20 cents an hour, because it is more than they are being paid anywhere else.”33 In this statement, Stevens found both Afro-Caribbean men’s wages and the limitations on “working” these men and managing their productivity irksome, disregarding the debilitating effects of long working hours and performing strenuous tasks in dangerous conditions.

After recruiting this large workforce, canal authorities had to care for and regulate the lives of laborers. The (de)valuation of Afro-Caribbean laborers as noncitizen, English-speaking surplus Black labor did not occur as an afterthought but was ingrained in the regulations of the Canal Zone. Apparent in the soft infrastructure of the Canal Zone and the strategies of control and surveillance, these exclusionary regulations informed Afro-Caribbean workmen’s disproportionate experiences of debilitating chronic malaria.

Malaria, Soft Infrastructure, and Debilitation

At the beginning of the canal project, engineering matters constituted the primary preoccupation for US officials. An outbreak of yellow fever in late 1904 then prompted US Americans to flee.34 This led to the funneling of life-sustaining resources toward yellow fever’s elimination rather than malaria, a disease acknowledged as more detrimental to isthmian infrastructure projects. Weston P. Chamberlain, chief health officer of the Canal Zone during the 1920s, identified malaria as the cause of “chronic disability” during the French construction era, and, in 1907, Gorgas admitted that though malaria would cause a “larger rate of inefficiency,” he knew of “no disease that causes the panic among the whites that yellow fever does.”35 Since a thriving white US community at the isthmus could not be imagined until the disease was eradicated, the state disbursed resources toward this goal. With white US Americans enfolded into life, it was only after the techniques for taming the tropical environment proved successful that the US government could proceed with encouraging white US women’s migration through providing gold employees with substantial amenities.

Alongside building the canal, it was Afro-Caribbean men that undertook much of the public dirty work to render the Canal Zone habitable. Although “there were of every nationality and race on this Isthmus,” shared Reginald Beckford in his IHS letter, “the West Indians made up the majority . . . [They] were first employed as sanitary men.”36 Here, the presumed reduced cognitive abilities of Afro-Caribbean laborers made them fit for performing various forms of sanitation labor. Writing about mosquito control, assistant chief sanitary inspector A. J. Orenstein insisted that “a few days of instruction suffice to teach even the decidedly stupid West Indian negro laborer how to find and destroy mosquitoes,” while “unlettered West Indian laborers at a compensation of ten cents an hour, the lowest wage,” did this work in “an entirely satisfactory manner.”37 Alongside spraying oil and sulfurous insecticide without protective gear, Afro-Caribbean men upgraded sanitation infrastructure, laying drain pipes and sewage systems as part of the canal authorities’ efforts to curb mosquito breeding. In his letter, Aaron Clarke shared that he “dug ditches, dropped mosquito oil, made drains [and] dug graves,” working with the sanitary department.38 While the last case of yellow fever in Panamá was recorded in 1905, malaria was never fully eradicated at the isthmus.

For Afro-Caribbean peoples, malaria was not an unknown risk. “My parents were against the idea,” shared Albert Peters. “They told me about the Yellow Fever, Malaria and Small pox.”39 In addition to tales shared by returnees, Rhonda Frederick points to the work of song in spreading information among both literate and illiterate people, increasing their awareness of diseases at the isthmus.

In Barbados, the above lyrics, referencing “ague” or malarial fever, were sung by migrating men. Ultimately, however, malaria did not deter migration. Knowledge about injury, illness, and death had long been part of Afro-Caribbean labor migrations to the isthmus. Frederick argues that the willingness of West Indians to face potential dangers lay in the imagined possibilities of canal labor.41 Though extraordinary success was atypical, remittances from prior infrastructure projects did have benefits in the colonies. Successful canal workers, earning higher wages than in the colonies, also gained a measure of cultural capital such that men hesitated to return home if they could not present an image of prosperity.42

That malaria, however, emerged as such a common concern and experience among Afro-Caribbean peoples points to the political decisions made by canal administrators about living and work arrangements, disease eradication priorities, and medical care. In the Canal Zone, uneven resource distribution occurred along the lines of gold and silver status, which served as the primary (though not exclusive) markers of inclusion and exclusion. At the start of the construction period, Afro-Caribbean workmen’s living conditions facilitated the spread of various diseases, with canal administrators housing single men in train boxcars before building newer, yet cramped, “bachelors” quarters where illness like pneumonia could spread rapidly.43 Living quarters for “colored” workers were also less likely to have mosquito screens, as indicated in a 1906 report to the National Council of Women.44 Tellingly, after receiving a 1907 request for netting for silver quarters, Stevens’s successor, George Washington Goethals, declared it unnecessary because “‘it is generally admitted . . . that the colored people are immune.’”45 Grenadian Philip McDonald recalled in his IHS letter having such a “terrible night with mosquitoes” at the Lower Cabello Viejo camp that he went in search of relief.46 As a non-US citizen, however, McDonald’s nationality and ethnicity informed his exposure to the potentially disease-carrying insects; he had to specifically request to stay with the “Colored Americans” possessing ambiguous citizen-based privileges.

Though Goethals steadfastly held to notions of Black immunity, with “various types of humanity” now at the isthmus, other high-ranking officials discussed the resilience of the peoples in their employ and found Afro-Caribbean people wanting. Reporting on the health of Spanish laborers in 1906, Gorgas informed Goethals’s predecessor John Stevens that “they stand the climate very much better” than Black laborers.47 Stevens, later relaying Gorgas’s letters to ICC chair Shonts, declared, “I have been convinced . . . that any white man . . . will stand this climate very much better than the blacks who were supposed to be immune practically from everything, but as a matter of fact, are subject to almost everything.”48 On the one hand, ensuring mosquito-protected quarters for Afro-Caribbean workers was wasteful, considering that their natural immunity to malaria meant that they could not be harmed by the disease anyway. On the other hand, the sturdy constitution of white yet silver Gallegos affirmed a racial hierarchy valuing white (re)capacitation over Black people disappointingly “subject to almost everything” anyway.

That racial and economic privileges, citizenship, and various medical accommodations shaped (re)capacitation is evident in the uneven distribution of health-care resources. Hospitals, rest houses, and other forms of health-related soft infrastructure were sites where canal authorities made manifest the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as Canal Zone medical policies displaced ill or injured Afro-Caribbean canal workers in ways that signaled their difference. Not only was sick leave reserved for “regular employees above the grade laborer, unaccustomed to a tropical climate,” a report from the Department of Health of the Panama Canal (1914) further attributed the “the much higher admission . . . rate for whites as compared with blacks . . . to the fact that the whites receive pay for 24 days per year while sick from disease, while the blacks do not.”49 Silver and gold divisions shaped the where and how of health care. “Notes on Sanitation-Isthmus of Panama” (1909) explained that “gold employees . . . are sent to either Colon or Ancon Hospital or are attended by the District Physician at their residences. . . . Laborers . . . are sent to the sick camp or the local hospital . . . [and] discharged as well or sent to the terminal hospitals.”50

In recalling their experiences with malaria, Afro-Caribbean workmen described this sick camp/hospital boundary, as well as divisions within hospitals, along the lines of race, ethnicity, and citizenship. Declared accustomed to a tropical climate, stereotyped as immune or resistant to tropical disease, and more exposed to mosquitoes, many Afro-Caribbean workmen experienced malaria as an unpredictable affliction. The disease could recur frequently and sporadically as first bouts with the chronic illness often foreshadowed future attacks. Unlike epidemic yellow fever, which canal authorities prioritized for eradication, malaria became endemic, wearing away at Afro-Caribbean workmen over time. During his first encounter with malaria, John Garner spent three days in the rest house and later refused transfer to the hospital.51 When in hospital, Afro-Caribbean workers generally occupied wards segregated both along the lines of silver and gold and by race and ethnicity. During one of his bouts with malaria, Albert Peters surprisingly found himself on “the European ward with the Italians.”52 In his IHS letter, George Martin recounted the harrowing effects of debilitating malaria. Writing “About the Fever,” he shared, “Sometimes walking on the Monte-Lirio Stretch, you would meet men coming and going. . . . In a sudden you look . . . one or two of the gang on the ground flatten . . . one dead long time.”53

Canal authorities, however, remained bent on working Afro-Caribbean laborers and turned to various medical interventions and techniques of surveillance and control to render their labor more predictable. With malaria so rife, canal authorities (over)dosed workers with quinine to prevent and treat it. Constantine Parkinson recalled “drink[ing] quinine every day so as to combat fever.”54 Whether to prevent malaria or (re)capacitate the ill, the wanton use of quinine, however, could cause further impairment. In high doses, the drug led to impaired hearing, which could then lead to further injury or even death. In the documentary Diggers, John W. Bowen shared that he “wasn’t long in the country” when he contracted malaria and left the hospital “deaf as a bat.”55 IHS entrant Harrigan Austin further observed that “quinine was prescribed until many persons couldn’t even hear when the engineer blew the engine whistle to get them off the railroad track, and many were killed.”56

At the isthmus, the entanglements of state violence and health care were evident in the application of loitering and vagrancy laws to criminalize illness. As contracted migrant laborers with time-based terms, Afro-Caribbean men could be subject to exclusion for daring to rest. In addition to lacking paid sick leave, being plied with deafening doses of quinine, and having stints at rest houses before accessing hospitals, Afro-Caribbean men contended with regulations that compelled the unwell to return to work. After 1908, workers received camp checks during dinner, without which they could not enter the barracks.57 Under increased geographic surveillance within the camps, many left the Canal Zone for the “bush,” or Panamá, or faced loitering fines and vagrancy convictions if found in the camp during work hours.58 “Men would be sick and dying,” wrote James Ashby, “and still had to report on the job and work for if one did not work, they could not sleep in the camp. . . . Police officer would take them to jail.”59 If Afro-Caribbean people did seek freedom from strict Canal Zone regulations and its segregationist policies by moving to Panamá proper, they remained at the mercy of a predatory Panamanian police force working closely with their counterparts in the Canal Zone.60

The (lack of) care and treatment of Afro-Caribbean workmen reflected the Jim Crow organization of the Canal Zone, long-standing tropes of Black “fitness” and immunity, and the priorities of the ICC in whose life and property should be more protected. Though Black labor was abundant, ICC recruitment stipulations indicated a preference for contracting the most able-bodied men to complete a risky infrastructure project in a place where the state-sanctioned deprioritization of their health and safety and the criminalization of illness meant the wearing away of many laborers’ bodies, if not their deaths. While race was an important factor in the construction of Afro-Caribbean workmen as well-suited to laboring at the isthmus, their ethnicity also played a part in casting them as able to withstand all tropical climates and, therefore, being in less need of care. As they labored on the canal and modified sanitation infrastructure—projects advancing white US settler claims to property—many Afro-Caribbean workmen stricken with malaria encountered forms of soft infrastructure and state violence that did not account for, ignored, or downplayed its debilitating effects.

Profit, Disability, and Afro-Caribbean Women as Infrastructure

The United States constructed the Panama Canal through racialized labor exploitation. While the Afro-Caribbean hands that built this wonder of infrastructure were cheap labor, Puar invites us to consider the ways that debility is harnessed for profit and to capacitate the settler state.61 Not only were Afro-Caribbean workmen generally the lowest-paid silver workers, the government’s cost-saving also came in the form of forgoing mosquito-proof quarters for these supposedly malaria-immune or -resistant men while disease within Afro-Caribbean communities enabled public health officials to create supposed knowledge and engage in the long-standing practice of medical experimentation on Black bodies. In Panamá, Gorgas and his medical staff sidelined malaria and instead researched the admittedly more deadly pneumonia but did little, in practice, to treat it.62

The uneven distribution of resources eventually left many Afro-Caribbean people frustrated. At the isthmus, as workers became dissatisfied with poor housing and food and married couples faced fierce competition for space in a limited number of buildings, many Afro-Caribbean people sought accommodation outside of ICC housing and away from the segregationist policies of the Canal Zone. Without providing a detailed explanation, the “Memorandum on the Conditions of Women and Children in the Canal Zone” (1906) simply reported that the ICC “ha[d] not been in a position to provide quarters for all of the families of negro laborers.”63 As Joan Flores-Villalobos observes, by poorly resourcing the bulk of their labor force, canal authorities passed off their responsibility to provide for Afro-Caribbean workmen onto Afro-Caribbean women whose labor as higglers, laundresses, boarding house keepers, and domestics sustained the building of the canal and other related infrastructure projects.64

Afro-Caribbean women’s labor became infrastructure for both white households in the Canal Zone and Afro-Caribbean men. Turning to AbdouMaliq Simone’s “people as infrastructure,” Kim expands infrastructure to include women’s care, service, and maintenance labor, as well as the informal networks distributing resources to account for the shortcomings of the state—all frequently provided by women of color.65 In Panamá, Afro-Caribbean women, largely uncontracted workers, provided much of this labor. Why were these women more likely to lack contracts? Early in the construction period, fears of Black women’s sexuality shaped their status as informal labor. In 1905, an attempt to formally recruit almost three hundred women from Martinique ended in scandal, discouraging further attempts to transport women from Caribbean colonies. While the ICC insisted that Afro-Caribbean women were needed as domestics in white American households, and as wives for West Indian men, critics accused the ICC of indecency and ferrying these women over for prostitution.66

The over 150 affidavits of the recently arrived women included in the Investigation of Panama Canal Matters provide some insight into the lives of Afro-Caribbean women at the isthmus.67 These translated and edited responses configured these women’s “archive of visibility,” writes Flores-Villalobos, “with a criminalizing and degrading logic,” with interviewees’ responses further shaped by their awareness of the attacks on their character.68 These brief affidavits are among the few firsthand accounts from Afro-Caribbean women providing snippets into their experiences of “fever,” their living arrangements, and the kinds of work they performed.

In the Canal Zone, marital status, patriarchal supervision, and forms of labor all factored in evaluations of Afro-Caribbean women’s morality. As the United States carved out its settler colonial space at the isthmus, one of the supposedly proper places for Afro-Caribbean women harkened back to enslavement, where systems of gendered servitude determined both Black women’s work and their whereabouts. Though some women worked in ICC-run hotels, most did not have such formal employment, and in the Jim Crow–structured Canal Zone, many found work under the moral influence of white US Americans within their homes, caring for and sustaining white families. In their affidavits, both Janie Louisa and Ononia Johns shared that they worked with the same American family, and while Louisa observed, “They all seem to love me when I am working. I do nursing for the baby,” Johns highlighted that she “like[d] the man, wife and children” and that she received “$10 gold a month.”

The hiring and managing of Afro-Caribbean women in their households enabled white women in the Canal Zone to engage in the shared national construction of a US American space. At the isthmus, canal authorities’ efforts “to make things pleasant and easy” for gold employees and their families shaped women’s domestic work, and this labor produced distinctions of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality.69 Importantly, the supposed socialism of the Canal Zone enabled married white women to displace much of their domestic responsibilities onto Afro-Caribbean women. As largely uncontracted workers, however, Afro-Caribbean women outside of the ICC’s purview did not have to abide by a rigidly regulated wage structure, enabling them to negotiate for higher wages and to be more flexible and discerning with their labor.70 Kim calls the privatization of care “one of the most fundamental elements of disability oppression,” with the enclosure of resources both undermining disabled survival and eventually leading to disability.71 With resources disproportionately distributed to their benefit, white gold households were best set up to thrive and be (re)capacitated in the event of illness or injury. However, Afro-Caribbean women’s domestic and care labor fell outside of formalized wages, and it was here that white households felt burdened. “The only wail,” travel writer Willis J. Abbott wrote, “heard on the Isthmus about the increasing cost of living, had to do with the wages of servants.”72

Outside of white households, Afro-Caribbean women treated as infrastructure made up for the shortcomings of the US government. In their affidavits, married women arriving from Martinique described “helping” their husbands, mostly in financial terms. Afro-Caribbean women sustaining Afro-Caribbean men meant less spending for the ICC, even though these women charged white US American families high rates. Care work, however, especially within families, is commonly expected of women as a “labor of love.”73

Constantine Parkinson’s IHS letter and his interview in the documentary Diggers cover Black women’s care labor and the “absented presence” of Black womanhood, the isthmus as a “laboratory” for policy and an opportunity for profit, and the operations of state violence and health care in the exclusion of Black labor and in the imagining of a nation in the bodies prioritized for (re)capacitation. Parkinson was born at the isthmus in 1894, prior to Panamá’s independence and ten years before the United States began its construction project, “at a place called Playa de Flor now by the name of Fort Sherman.” In his “little town” were “mostly Jamaicans and a few native Panamanians.” Parkinson began working as “a boy of fifteen years” and was a brakeman at the time of his “Lost Story.”74 In his letter, Parkinson recounts the details of his accident clearly. “I got injured on July 1913 on the 16th at 5 pm . . . causing the loss of my right leg and left heel.” After his operation, he “noticed all kinds of cripples around my bed . . . telling me to cheer up, not to fret, we all good soldiers.”75 After losing his leg, Parkinson was “laid up for injuries” and was on crutches until he received an artificial leg in 1914.

The production of artificial limbs was another space where debility was harnessed for profit during the construction period. The dangerous working conditions proved fruitful for businesses like the A. A. Marks Company, which innovated products for use. The production of prosthetic limbs spurred by workers’ injuries, however, did not mean that all were evenly (re)capacitated. In her work, Caroline Lieffers notes how race and ideologies of ability shaped perceptions of who should have access to these products, with Afro-Caribbean workers struggling to receive or be given replacement prostheses. Why? As chief health officer Charles Mason stated in 1914, “The West Indian Negro . . . has not sufficient intelligence to care for and use properly an artificial limb.”76 Lacking sufficient reason, Afro-Caribbean laborers were more likely to receive pegs.

In this letter, Parkinson names his supervisor and the doctors that performed his operation. Absent, however, but recounted in his Diggers interview, is his unnamed grandmother. That Parkinson chose to omit his grandmother from his letter is surprising, given her advocacy for her grandson. “My grandmother went to Governor Goethals,” he told the interviewer, and asked him “what compensation is he [Parkinson] going to get?” Goethals’ response is telling: To Parkinson’s grandmother, he said, “‘My dear lady, Congress did not pass any law for aliens to get compensation.’”77 For which country, then, was the isthmian-born Parkinson a “soldier”? In the Canal Zone, white US gold employees and their families possessed the best health care and privileges of supposed US socialism enfolding them into life and more on the side of (re)capacitation. Americans from across the United States, not only the South, lived according to this Jim Crow–like racial project. Since “gold” and “silver” operated as stand-ins for race, the modern Canal Zone effectively worked as a site for testing forms of racial discrimination not legally grounded in race (although canal authorities spoke openly of racial discrimination). In the “so regulated” camp of the Canal Zone, health care functioned in the imagination of a consolidated US whiteness over a decade before US immigration laws like the Johnson-Reed Act (1924) would collapse various white ethnic groups.78 Here, not only did the isthmian-born yet alien Parkinson have no rights to compensation, but, in a move that predates “workfare,” Goethals advised Parkinson’s grandmother “not to fret, your grandson will be taken care of as soon as he is able to work even in a wheelchair.”79

Conclusion

The Panama Canal is remembered and revered as a marvel of infrastructure. Soft infrastructure and people as infrastructure, however, were also integral to white US settler claims at the isthmus. Here, the United States depended on the racialized exploitation of Afro-Caribbean labor for the building and operation of the various infrastructures marking the Canal Zone as a white, US American space. Afro-Caribbean workmen’s race, ethnicity, class, and colonial subjecthood informed both their overrepresentation in the labor force and their disproportionate exposure to injury, illness, and disability. In the Jim Crow–structured Canal Zone, these men experienced marked exclusion in the uneven distribution of health-care resources and, in turn, marked debilitation in, for example, their repeated bouts of malaria. For largely uncontracted Afro-Caribbean women, their highly paid domestic labor and care work ran counter to the supposed socialism of the Canal Zone. As infrastructure, they sustained white families and offset the costs of supporting large numbers of Afro-Caribbean men for the ICC. These boundaries of inclusion and exclusion shaped both Afro-Caribbean experiences in the Canal Zone and the formation of white US American identity and community, reinforcing the alien status of Afro-Caribbean people and the citizenship of white Americans by differentiating those more enfolded into life and (re)capacitation from those marked for debilitation.

Danielle LaPlace is assistant professor of global gender and sexuality studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her work centers US imperialism in the Caribbean, disability, and public health.

Notes

1. 1. After supporting Panamá’s independence from Colombia, the United States acquired the Canal Zone, a stretch of land ten miles wide running from the Caribbean Sea to the Bay of Panamá, and the right to construct an isthmian canal via the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty.

2. 2. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009), 9, 133; Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard University Press, 2019), 7.

3. 3. In this essay, I use Afro-Caribbean to refer broadly to Black Caribbean peoples. The term West Indian, however, is commonly used in historical records. Michael L. Conniff identifies the labor regime during the US canal construction period as a third-county labor system, as nationals beyond the United States or Panamá undertook most of the work. See Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 5, 35.

4. 4. West Indians received $0.10 gold per hour (at a rate of $0.20 Panamanian silver); Panamanians and Colombians, $0.13; and Europeans and African Americans $0.20. See Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal (University of the West Indies Press, 2014), 183.

5. 5. Greene, Canal Builders, 132. See Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal; Kaysha Corinealdi, Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2022); Greene, Canal Builders; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 147, 154, 155.

6. 6. Jasbir K. Puar poses this question in The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017), 13.

7. 7. I draw on Jina B. Kim’s expansive understanding of infrastructure and infrastructural violence in Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025).

8. 8. Circular No. 144, George W. Goethals, September 28, 1907, 2-H-15 Part I, General Correspondence I.C.C. 1905–1914, Disability and Sick Leave Correspondence 1905–1909, Request for Medical Leave Treatment, Sick Leave, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

9. 9. Joan Flores-Villalobos, The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 152.

10. 10. Janell Hobson, “Of ‘Sound’ and ‘Unsound’ Body and Mind: Reconfiguring the Heroic Portrait of Harriet Tubman,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 40, no. 2 (2019): https://doi.org/10.5250/fronjwomestud.40.2.0193.

11. 11. Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (Palgrave McMillan, 2011), 38.

12. 12. See Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley, “Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework,” Gender and Society 33, no. 1 (2019): 24, 25; Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Corcoran (Duke University Press, 2019), 75.

13. 13. Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017), 137.

14. 14. For men’s firsthand accounts, I draw from the Isthmian Historical Society’s 1963 Short Story Competition letters gathered to mark the canal’s fiftieth anniversary. See John Garner to Isthmian Historical Society Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work on the Isthmus of Panama During the Construction of the Panama Canal, Letter, 1963, University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries Digital Collections, https://dloc.com/AA00016037/00115 (hereafter Isthmian Historical Society).

15. 15. For Susan Wendell, chronic illnesses usually do not go away on their own within six months and cannot be reliably cured but will not necessarily kill the patient. Puar further notes that illness, once associated with loss of productivity, is now implicated in the biopolitical power to “make live.” Turning to malaria, I consider how canal authorities are concerned with laborers’ productivity, seeking to render them well enough to work but not necessarily to eradicate the disease. See Susan Wendell, “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 163; Puar, Right to Maim, 139.

16. 16. See Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim, “Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 1 (2020); Bailey and Mobley, “Work in the Intersections.”

17. 17. President William Howard Taft ordered the depopulation of the Canal Zone in 1912 by executive order. Approximately, forty thousand people were expelled with US policy characterizing Black Panamanians as “natives” and questioning the desirability of Afro-Caribbean communities within the Canal Zone. See Lasso, Erased.

18. 18. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner and Joel Michael Reynolds, “Roots of Access: Un-Lock(e)ing Coalitions for Indigenous Futures and Disability Justice,” Radical Philosophy Review 27, no. 2 (2024): https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev2024107148.

19. 19. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016), 24, 31.

20. 20. Puar attends to Israel’s deliberate maiming of Gazans as a depopulation strategy that targets populations for eventual death but not killing (i.e., debilitation). Puar, Right to Maim, 139.

21. 21. Willis J. Abbott, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (Syndicate Publishing Company, 1913), 325; Harry A. Franck, Zone Policeman 88: A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and Its Workers (Century Co., 1913), 204.

22. 22. Karan Soldatic and Shaun Grech, “Transnationalising Disability Studies: Rights, Justice and Impairment,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2014): https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v34i2.4249.

23. 23. Corinealdi, Panama in Black, 15; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 106, 108.

24. 24. Memorandum on the Condition of Women and Children in the Canal Zone, June 9, 1906, 37-E-15 Part I, General Correspondence, Inquiries and Statements Regarding Health Conditions and Sanitary Work at the Isthmus, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

25. 25. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, 26, 35; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 180, 183.

26. 26. Patrice C. Brown, “The Panama Canal: The African American Experience,” November 21, 2017, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/panama-canal; Vaughan Cornish, The Panama Canal and Its Makers (T. F. Unwin, 1909), 103.

27. 27. Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 27, 70.

28. 28. US Congress Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters. Hearings Before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals of the United States Senate in the Matter of the Senate Resolution Adopted January 9, 1906, Providing for an Investigation of Matters Relating to the Panama Canal, Etc. . . . [Jan. 11, 1906–Feb. 12, 1907] (Government Printing Office, 1907), 485.

29. 29. Statements from John Stevens and Major Hugh J. respectively in Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, 52, 143.

30. 30. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020), 25.

31. 31. Statements from John Stevens in Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, 81.

32. 32. Conniff, Black Laboron a White Canal, 27; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 128–29.

33. 33. Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, 52.

34. 34. Rhonda D. Frederick, “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration (Lexington Books, 2005), 32; Paul S. Sutter, “ ‘The First Mountain to Be Removed’: Yellow Fever Control and the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Environmental History 21, no. 2 (2016): 254, 256.

35. 35. Weston P. Chamberlain, Twenty-Five Years of American Medical Activity on the Isthmus of Panama, 1904–1929 (Panama Canal Press, 1929), 8, 14, 15; William C. Gorgas, Sanitary Work on the Isthmus of Panama During the Last Three Years (William Wood and Company, 1907), 6.

36. 36. Reginald Beckford to Isthmian Historical Society.

37. 37. A. J. Orenstein, “Mosquito Catching in Dwellings in the Prophylaxis of Malaria,” American Journal of Public Health 3, no. 2 (1913): 108, 109.

38. 38. Aaron Clarke to Isthmian Historical Society.

39. 39. Albert Peters to Isthmian Historical Society.

40. 40. Frederick, “Colón Man a Come,” 39.

41. 41. Frederick, 7.

42. 42. Frederick, 40, 42.

43. 43. Flores-Villalobos, Silver Women, 46; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 154.

44. 44. Manager of the Branch of Labor and Quarters to Rufus A. Lane, June 21, 1906, 37-E-15 Part I, General Correspondence, Inquiries and Statements Regarding Health Conditions and Sanitary Work at the Isthmus, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

45. 45. Cited in Greene, Canal Builders, 135.

46. 46. Philip McDonald to Isthmian Historical Society.

47. 47. William C. Gorgas to John Stevens, October 9, 1906, 37-E-15 Part I, General Correspondence, Inquiries and Statements Regarding Health Conditions and Sanitary Work at the Isthmus, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

48. 48. John Stevens to Theodore Shonts, October 11, 1906, 37-E-15 Part I, General Correspondence, Inquiries and Statements Regarding Health Conditions and Sanitary Work at the Isthmus, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

49. 49. Chas F. Mason, Report of the Department of Health of the Panama Canal for the Month of May, 1914 (Department of Health, 1914), 6.

50. 50. Notes on Sanitation-Isthmus of Panama, May 10, 1909, 37-E-15 Part I, General Correspondence, Inquiries and Statements Regarding Health Conditions and Sanitary Work at the Isthmus, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

51. 51. John Garner to Isthmian Historical Society.

52. 52. Albert Peters to Isthmian Historical Society.

53. 53. George Martin to Isthmian Historical Society.

54. 54. Constantine Parkinson to Isthmian Historical Society.

55. 55. Roman J. Foster, dir., Diggers (Roman J. Foster Productions, 1986), 38:00.

56. 56. Harrigan Austin to Isthmian Historical Society.

57. 57. Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 232.

58. 58. Greene, Canal Builders, 139, 140; Senior, Dying to Better Themselves, 232.

59. 59. James Ashby to Isthmian Historical Society.

60. 60. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, 37; Flores-Villalobos, Silver Women, 46, 50.

61. 61. Puar, Right to Maim, 144–46.

62. 62. Greene, Canal Builders, 136.

63. 63. Memorandum on the Condition of Women and Children in the Canal Zone, June 9, 1906, 37-E-15 Part I, General Correspondence, Inquiries and Statements Regarding Health Conditions and Sanitary Work at the Isthmus, RG 185, National Archives, College Park, MD.

64. 64. Flores-Villalobos, Silver Women, 47, 50.

65. 65. AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407–28; Kim, Care at the End of the World, 7.

66. 66. Sofía Betancourt, Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics (Lexington Books, 2022), 43; Flores-Villalobos, Silver Women, 56.

67. 67. These were included in the Investigation of Panama Canal Matters.

68. 68. Flores-Villalobos, Silver Women, 55.

69. 69. Abbott, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, 325.

70. 70. Flores-Villalobos, Silver Women, 118.

71. 71. Kim, Care at the End of the World, 11.

72. 72. Abbott, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, 335.

73. 73. Grace Chang, “Inevitable Intersections: Care, Work, and Citizenship,” in Disabling Domesticity, ed. Michael A. Rembis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 168; Schalk and Kim, “Integrating Race,” 46. See also Bailey and Mobley, “Work in the Intersections.”

74. 74. Foster, Diggers, 33:10.

75. 75. Constantine Parkinson to Isthmian Historical Society.

76. 76. Caroline Lieffers, “Artificial Limbs on the Panama Canal,” in Making Disability Modern: Design Histories, ed. Bess Williamson and Elizabeth E. Guffey (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020), 68, 69.

77. 77. Foster, Diggers, 34:00.

78. 78. See Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2014).

79. 79. Foster, Diggers, 34:00.