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Author: Marixa Lasso Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674984447 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
The Panama Canal's untold history—from the Panamanian point of view. Sleuth and scholar Marixa Lasso recounts how the canal’s American builders displaced 40,000 residents and erased entire towns in the guise of bringing modernity to the tropics. The Panama Canal set a new course for the modern development of Central America. Cutting a convenient path from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the backbone of the republic. Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal’s displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the lost cities and towns—a space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and people—which served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburbs built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.
Author: Noel Maurer Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691248079 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
An incisive economic and political history of the Panama Canal On August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened for business, forever changing the face of global trade and military power, as well as the role of the United States on the world stage. The Canal's creation is often seen as an example of U.S. triumphalism, but Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu reveal a more complex story. Examining the Canal's influence on Panama, the United States, and the world, The Big Ditch deftly chronicles the economic and political history of the Canal, from Spain's earliest proposals in 1529 through the final handover of the Canal to Panama on December 31, 1999, to the present day. The authors show that the Canal produced great economic dividends for the first quarter-century following its opening, despite massive cost overruns and delays. Relying on geographical advantage and military might, the United States captured most of these benefits. By the 1970s, however, when the Carter administration negotiated the eventual turnover of the Canal back to Panama, the strategic and economic value of the Canal had disappeared. And yet, contrary to skeptics who believed it was impossible for a fledgling nation plagued by corruption to manage the Canal, when the Panamanians finally had control, they switched the Canal from a public utility to a for-profit corporation, ultimately running it better than their northern patrons. A remarkable tale, The Big Ditch offers vital lessons about the impact of large-scale infrastructure projects, American overseas interventions on institutional development, and the ability of governments to run companies effectively.
Author: Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 0857452401 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
Panama is an ethnically diverse country with a recent history of political conflict which makes the representation of historical memory an especially complex and important task for the country’s museums. This book studies new museum projects in Panama with the aim of identifying the dominant narratives that are being formed as well as those voices that remain absent and muted. Through case analyses of specific museums and exhibitions the author identifies and examines the influences that form and shape museum strategy and development.
Author: Andrew S. Zimbalist Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520075016 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
In December 1989, the United States invaded Panama, deposed its government, and established another in its place. While this act of violent intervention brought Panama to public attention, the justifications for it obscured the underlying instabilities that have plagued the country throughout its history. Although a stated purpose of the invasion was to remove one man, Manuel Noriega, from power, Panama at the Crossroads demonstrates that the crisis sweeping Panama in the late 1980s was not caused by one man, but in fact derived from the history of U.S. domination and the nature of Panamanian society itself. Panama is located at a crucial geographic crossroads, a fact that has greatly influenced the country's history since the sixteenth century. Labor scarcity and inhospitable terrain, joined with its location, contributed to the mercantile orientation of Panama's economy. Accordingly, the country's politics and economics have been consistently dominated by foreign trading interests, first from Spain, then Colombia and the United States. Now in the 1990s, Panama stands at a historical and economic crossroads, and according to Zimbalist and Weeks its traditional entrep�t institutions are no longer able to promote and sustain growth. Before building the basis for long-term economic expansion, Panama must first undo the devastating economic and political damage engendered by nearly three years of U.S. economic sanctions and the U.S. invasion. In this timely book, Zimbalist and Weeks document the origins and characteristics of this crossroads. Their analysis points the way to a more encompassing and equitable strategy for Panama's economic development.
Author: Robert C. Schwaller Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806176768 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
From the 1520s through the 1580s, thousands of African slaves fled captivity in Spanish Panama and formed their own communities in the interior of the isthmus. African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama, a primary source reader, edited by Robert C. Schwaller, documents this marronage in the context of five decades of African resistance to slavery. The self-sufficiency of the Maroons, along with their periodic raids against Spanish settlements, sparked armed conflict as Spaniards sought to conquer the maroon communities and kill or re-enslave their populations. After decades of struggle, Maroons succeeded in negotiating a peace with Spanish authorities and establishing the first two free Black towns in the Americas. The little-known details of this dramatic history emerge in these pages, traced through official Spanish accounts, reports, and royal edicts, as well as excerpts from several English sources that recorded alliances between Maroons and English privateers in the region. The contrasting Spanish and English accounts reveal Maroons' attempts to turn European antagonism to their advantage; and, significantly, several accounts feature direct testimony from Maroons. Most importantly, this reader includes translations of the first peace agreements made between a European empire and African Maroons, and the founding documents of the free-Black communities of Santiago del Príncipe and Santa Cruz la Real—the culmination of the first successful African resistance movement in the Americas. Schwaller has translated all the documents into English and presents each with a short introduction, thorough annotations, and full historical, cultural, and geographical context, making this volume accessible to undergraduate students while remaining a unique document collection for scholars.
Author: Margarita Engle Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 0544109414 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
As the Panama Canal turns one hundred, Newbery Honor winner Margarita Engle tells the story of its creation in this powerful new YA historical novel in verse.
Author: Gloria Rudolf Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 1487594712 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
Esperanza Speaks examines a century-long process of socioeconomic change in rural Panama through the experiences of one woman, Esperanza Ruiz, and four generations of her family. The intimate narrative shows how ordinary people, through their choices and actions, are affected by and, in turn, can affect how history unfolds. Readers see Esperanza’s family as both victims and protagonists in their own histories. Born into rural poverty with limited options, they still find small openings to try to improve their lives. Sometimes successful, sometimes not, they survive by drawing on their only abundant resource: each other. Based on twenty field visits over the course of fifty years, Esperanza Speaks is the result of a dedicated anthropologist’s long-term engagement with the individuals of a single community, and a beautiful example of ethnographic storytelling.
Author: Ashley Carse Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262028115 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
A historical and ethnographic study of the conflict between global transportation and rural development as the two intersect at the Panama Canal. In this innovative book, Ashley Carse traces the water that flows into and out from the Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama's cultural and physical landscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracing rivers upstream across the populated watershed that feeds the canal, he explores the politics of environmental management around a waterway that links faraway ports and markets to nearby farms, forests, cities, and rural communities. Carse draws on a wide range of ethnographic and archival material to show the social and ecological implications of transportation across Panama. The Canal moves ships over an aquatic staircase of locks that demand an enormous amount of fresh water from the surrounding region. Each passing ship drains 52 million gallons out to sea—a volume comparable to the daily water use of half a million Panamanians. Infrastructures like the Panama Canal, Carse argues, do not simply conquer nature; they rework ecologies in ways that serve specific political and economic priorities. Interweaving histories that range from the depopulation of the U.S. Canal Zone a century ago to road construction conflicts and water hyacinth invasions in canal waters, the book illuminates the human and nonhuman actors that have come together at the margins of the famous trade route. 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the Panama Canal. Beyond the Big Ditch calls us to consider how infrastructures are materially embedded in place, producing environments with winners and losers.
Author: Michael L. Conniff
Author: Michael L. Conniff
Author: Marixa Lasso
Author: Noel Maurer
Author: Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws
Author: Andrew S. Zimbalist
Author: Robert C. Schwaller
Author: Margarita Engle
Author: Gloria Rudolf
Author: Ashley Carse
Author: Ronald H. Cole