"Spaniards on the Silver Roll: Liminality and Labor Trouble in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904 to 1914"

Julie Greene

This paper examines the history of the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal, with a focus on one important group: the Spanish workers, numbering in the thousands, who performed unskilled labor on the Canal. Spaniards were by far the most likely workers to engage in strikes or riots, and their labor militancy culminated in an anarchist movement that stretched across the Isthmus during the autumn of 1911. Several factors combined to encourage the Spanish workers' agitation: the government's policies of racial segregation and the injustices Spaniards experienced working and living in the Canal Zone as a result; the political and racial identities they brought with them from Spain; their liminal status in the Canal Zone, which derived from their shifting between empires and possessing a remarkably fluid racial identity; and, finally, the ways these different factors fueled their racial animosities.

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