Panama Canal stories

It is a barely acknowledged history as it was not on the history syllabus during my schooldays and I imagine even less so today.

Most of us are aware of the mass movement of Caribbean people only through family stories, and with regard to Panama fewer TT people travelled there for the work opportunities offered by the canal’s construction — only 1,427 of the 31,071 West Indian contracted workers were from TT, but that does not include the tens of thousands of not-contracted Caribbean workers.

In the first part of the 1900s, 90,000 Jamaicans and 45,000 Barbadians left their homes to find work, some of them to join the WWI West India Regiment and the banana plantations of Central America, but many ended up comprising two-thirds of the canal- building work force.

West Indians were used to roaming the region to earn a living. Between 1881-89, 84,000 Jamaicans alone left home for work all over the Americas; in the 1850s another previous wave had gone to work on building the railroad in Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Colombia.

The very personal stories of some of the people who fetched up in the new country of Panama (having seceded from Colombia) to work on the canal are captured in an affecting film, Panama Canal Stories.

Based on stories handed down through generations, the lives of different families in the complex society that evolved in the canal building zone are recounted by five different directors in a series of linked short films that start in 1913 and end in contemporary Panama.

We get to see how makeshift communities of islanders were established in extremely difficult circumstances in the building zone where black and coloured West Indians were known as “silver workers,” relegated to second place by the “gold workers” who were white from anywhere, or black Americans.

We witness the shame and anger of the Panamanian people who are treated as second-class citizens by the US authorities who owned and controlled the canal until 1999.

Inevitably, lives interconnect, there is illicit love and friendship, marriage, the birth of children, joy, but also much disappointment, hurt and death — over 4,500 West Indians died in the construction of the canal, from terrible accidents, yellow fever and malaria, although the unofficial figures suggest a significantly higher number.

In her excellent book Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Non-fiction, Olive Senior gives chapter and verse to the lives of the West Indian men and women who built the canal.

Many intended to return home but inevitably many remained, numbering 50,000 in the 1920s, defying several US and Panamanians’ attempts to expel them.

A total of 22,800 West Indians were finally repatriated to the islands.

Senior shows how the experience of living under US segregation rules, hardship and exposure to radicalised thinking meant that these and other migrant workers brought back new ideas, work methods and political leadership that had profound and lasting effects on the West Indian islands as they challenged the prevailing orthodoxies.

Panama Canal Stories is one of the 27 films screened at this year’s CineLit: The Latin American and Caribbean Literary Film Festival that runs at UWI till Saturday and continues at the National Library in Port-of-Spain from tomorrow until April 30 as part of the 2017 NGC Bocas Lit Fest (April 26-30).

The overall winner of the seventh OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature will be announced next week S a t u r d a y at a special event during the festival.