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  • Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone by Michael E. Donoghue
  • Atalia Shragai
Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone, by Michael E. Donoghue. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xii, 349 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper).

The first chapter in Michael Donoghue’s Borderland on the Isthmus opens with a stunning scene that took place on the warm nights of January 1964, on the closed border of the US-controlled Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama. Local prostitutes gathered near the fence, while US soldiers, who just a few days earlier had repressed angry Panamanian protesters, were lining up along their side of the wire fence: “In the thick brush the prostitutes knelt and fellated the GIs through the chain-link apertures” (8). Donoghue is quick to deconstruct and complicate the scene, observing that many of the US soldiers involved were probably Puerto Rican, while most of the prostitutes were not Panamanian but Colombian, Venezuelan, and Dominican.

This telling scene of sex through the border fence not only serves as a metaphor for the US sexual hunger for Panama, and its exploitation, as well as the respective role of each state within the power relations; it also brings forward the main argument of Donoghue’s remarkable book. Adopting an approach of borderland studies to analyze the Canal Zone-Panama corridor, Borderland on the Isthmus demonstrates the extent to which the Zone functioned both as an empire enclave characterized by colonial relations with hierarchies of power along the lines of race, nationality, class, and gender and as a borderland. Donoghue focuses on the agency of the various populations in the Canal Zone, aptly demonstrating that the Zone, though established by Washington, was shaped first and foremost by the everyday experiences, practices and identification of its inhabitants, workers, visitors, and poachers.

Borderland on the Isthmus examines the Canal Zone from its construction in 1903 until it was handed over to Panama in 1999. The book’s six chapters adopt a thematic rather than chronological sequence. The first chapter depicts the ongoing expansion and shrinkage of the Canal Zone’s physical boundaries, as well as its symbolic and imagined “frontiers of influence” (13). Three chapters (two, three, and five) are dedicated to the various populations in the Canal Zone — US civilians, known as the Zonians, West Indians, and the US military. Donoghue complicates each of these groups, accentuating their racial, class, gender, civic status, and geographical differences and the friction among them. (With respect to the West Indians, it is unfortunate that Donoghue neglected to address more comprehensively the influence of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which would have enabled him to contextualize their identity making within the broad transnational and Pan-African frameworks of the 1920s and 1930s.) Other chapters reveal two types of interaction in the Canal Zone. Chapter four focuses on various forms of [End Page 227] identification and practices based on gender roles and sexuality — prostitution, concubinage, and intermarriage. Chapter six considers the role of crime — involving both US and non-US populations — as a form of resistance to the Zone regime.

While taking its toll in minor repetitions as well as a lack of clarity with respect to some historical events, the thematic organization of the book enables Donoghue to lucidly demonstrate his people-oriented perspective. Notable, for example, is the way he examines the case of Lester Leon Greaves — a Black Panamanian who was sentenced in 1946 to fifty years in Gamboa penitentiary for raping a young white woman of an established Zonian family — not only through time, but mainly through the lenses of race, gender, and crime in the Borderland.

The dozens of oral histories that Donoghue collected of people of diverse walks of life, race, nationality, and gender are a true treasure: The West Indian plumber who, upon being called to fix the segregated toilet de-segregated it by his own hands, breaking down the partition altogether (123); or the US officer whose duty it was to prevent intermarriages but he eventually facilitated most of them (152). Donoghue’s extraordinary research enables him...

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