The 1925 Tenants’ Strike in Panama: West Indians, the Left, and the Labor Movement

In September-October 1925, there occurred in Panama a tenants’ strike that helped define the development of the left and workers’ movement in that nation. This article presents an overview of the strike—important because no synthetic English-language account exists—and then analyzes the role of black West Indians in the event.¹ West Indians were prominent among the ranks of workers in Panama, and among the slums of Panama City and Colón. Nonetheless, they were not central to the rent strike. This absence reflects the historic relationship between West Indian and Hispanic workers in the isthmus, the effect of the recent defeat of strikes led by West Indians in the Panama Canal Zone, and the lack of attention paid to attracting West Indian support by the Hispanic leadership of the tenants’ strike.² This division between the West Indian population and the broader labor movement in Panama had lasting effects in the history of the Panamanian left, reinforcing divisions between the struggle for Panamanian self-determination and the struggle against racist oppression of West Indians and their descendants in Panama.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, amid industrialization and urbanization, the struggle of poor and working-class people for decent housing intensified throughout the Americas. As Andrew Wood and James Baer argue, a series of tenant strikes, from New York City’s in 1904 through Panama’s in 1925, “challenged the older laissez-faire attitudes that market forces could successfully resolve housing problems.” Wood and Baer focus on the effects that such mobilization had on government policy, but the strike in Panama also played a key role in the development of the labor movement and the left, as this article will show.³

The strike halted most commerce in Panama City and Colón, and the Panamanian government found itself unable to stop the strike on its own. Strikers soon confronted the military might of the United States—and found themselves lacking the power to defeat this enemy. Tenants had no direct connection to the means of production, and Hispanic workers in Panama were concentrated in non-strategic sectors of the economy. The mainly West Indian workforce in the Panama Canal had the power to paralyze the Panamanian economy—and international commerce. Remaining aloof from the tenants’ strike, West Indian workers did not bring this power to bear. The tenants’ movement, absent the West Indians, was channeled into nationalism, a nationalism defined in such a way as to exclude black West Indians.

This not only divided the West Indian population from the struggle for national rights, but deprived the struggle for self-determination of the power of West Indian workers. Rather than creating the basis for working-class unity between West Indian and Hispanic workers, the rent strike cemented the division at the center of the Panamanian proletariat. This division was rooted in the history of Panamanian society, which had at its inception been divided into an outright US colony (the Canal Zone) and a republic dominated by the United States. But this division also reflected the lack of attention given to the issue by Panamanian leftists, including what would become the nucleus of the Communist movement.

The Liga de Inquilinos

In February 1925, Panama’s national assembly approved Law 29, which modestly raised taxes on rental gains, to the dismay of landlords, who comprised a key sector of the Panamanian ruling class, the so-called oligarchy, along with merchants and rural landowners.⁴ Landlords, who had been underreporting their profits, shifted the burden of the new taxes onto their poor and working-class tenants, sometimes tripling rents. In response, the Liga de Inquilinos y Subsistencia (Tenants’ Subsistence League) agitated against rent increases and poor living conditions.⁵ The Liga de Inquilinos had been organized in late 1924 by the Sindicato General de Trabajadores (SGT), a left-wing split from the more conservative Federación Obrera de la República de Panamá (FORP). Its leadership drew on the Grupo Comunista, a circle of radicals including Spanishborn anarchist José Ma...