Racial Geographies of Land and Domestic Service in Panama

Sharlene Mollett

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023, vol. 113, issue 7, 1573-1588

Abstract: Foreign land control and Afro-Panamanian women domestics are mutually constituted and embedded in tourism development in Panama. In this article, I center the racial and patriarchal logics of dispossession informing land control, a process that connects twenty-first-century residential tourism development to twentieth-century U.S. imperial formations in the making of the Panama Canal. My approach blends ethnographic research with historical data collection, newspapers, and development-related policy documents drawn across a variety of research sites in Panama, Spain, and North America. To begin, I briefly trace the contemporary context of tourism-induced land dispossession and the growing tenure insecurities for Afro-Panamanian communities living on the shores of the Panamanian Caribbean. Here I show how residential tourism development reproduces settler colonial landscapes. Further, I place in conversation the concepts of postcolonial intersectionality and cuerpo-territorio (Cabnal 2015) to illustrate how land control and domestic service are interconnected, punctuating how land is not the only site of colonial governance. I then historicize tourism in Panama through tracing the discursive narratives of imperial formations in the early period of U.S. empire and the construction of the Panama Canal. I trace elite travel narratives, newspapers, and memoirs to link the racialized labor regimes of the Canal to the domestic spaces of the Canal Zone. Finally, I argue that foreign land acquisitions and domestic service are inextricably entangled in tourism development across time and space in Panama.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2150596

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