The Silver Women

The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project?s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women?s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion.

Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba.

The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women?s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women?s own survival.

"In this beautifully written book, Joan Flores-Villalobos places West Indian women at the very heart of the Panama Canal?s construction. They navigated tremendous contradictions, seen as essential to the project yet facing racist exclusion and marginalization by government officials. Their determination to secure moral and economic independence, Flores-Villalobos shows, profoundly shaped Panama, the Caribbean, and more broadly the history of the Americas. Along the way, The Silver Women illuminates in rich detail the critical role Caribbean women played in creating and sustaining the practices of diaspora."