by Julie Greene
IN MARCH 1907 a major riot broke out at a mess hall for Spaniards in the Canal Zone town of Bas Obispo. The hall had just been built to accommodate several hundred Spaniards who came from Cuba to work on the canal, and new government rules had been posted to regulate where people could sit. When one Spanish worker sat in a seat other than the one assigned to him, a West Indian steward instructed him to go to the appropriate spot. Instead of moving, the Spanish laborer punched the waiter, prompting another Spaniard named Angel Negrati to jump onto a table shouting, “Kill the negroes!” Other diners followed Negrati by climbing on tables and throwing plates and glasses while their compatriots attacked and beat the mess hall steward. Police arrived to find the mess hall empty, window screens torn out, lamps destroyed, and “the floor almost entirely covered with stones, cups, saucers, plates, and etc., which had been thrown at the mess steward and his assistants.” On a hillside near the mess hall sat about two hundred Spaniards, a Zone policeman reported, “evidently contented with what they had accomplished.” Police sent the bruised steward over to the hillside to identify the riot leaders. When he pointed out the first man, “the whole bunch of Spaniards arose as one man and said that we could not take him, but we did, after drawing our revolvers and warning them that we would shoot the first man who attempted to rescue the prisoner.” The police then arrested twelve men believed to be the riot’s leaders. That night, more Spaniards congregated at the mess hall and stoned the building until again the police came and subdued them.1
This riot was one of many acts of protest by Spaniards who joined the workforce as silver employees during 1907 and 1908, and it reveals how tightly intertwined issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality were in the Canal Zone. Spaniards owed their very presence on the isthmus to government officials’ beliefs that “whites” would work more productively and energetically than West Indians and thereby solve the nagging labor problems of the construction project. These ideas led officials to go to great lengths to recruit Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, and other southern Europeans. Yet the workers—particularly Spaniards—proved “turbulent,” as one official described them. They rioted, protested working conditions, and went on strike far more often than any other group. Moreover, their resistance flowered into an anarchist movement that spread through the labor camps and towns of the Canal Zone in 1911 at the height of the construction project.2
Yet as the attack on a West Indian steward suggests, the Spaniards’ protests targeted not only the U.S. government but also West Indians. Spaniards inhabited a complex position on the isthmus as “white” men employed on the silver roll alongside black West Indians. In some respects, they received better treatment than other silver workers. At the same time, when they compared themselves with other white workers, most notably the American workers on the gold roll, they felt slighted and victimized by the government’s system of hierarchy and segregation. Ordered around by foremen, excluded from restaurants and clubhouses, Spaniards felt themselves marked as inferior on the basis of race, ethnicity, and nationality. They directed their resulting anger at those below and above them: they railed against West Indians and the competition they presented for jobs, even as they fiercely complained about the ICC policies that had put them there.
“THEY ARE WHITE MEN, TRACTABLE, AND CAPABLE OF DEVELOPMENT”
Although most silver employees came from the Caribbean, many traveled to the Canal Zone from southern Europe, from India, and from other parts of Latin America. The 1912 census included as employees of the ICC or the Panama Railroad one thousand Panamanians, eight hundred Italians, thirteen hundred Greeks, thirty-five hundred Spaniards, and smaller numbers of East Indians, Portuguese, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Colombians, Mexicans, Hondurans, Costa Ricans, and Nicaraguans. The vast majority of these individuals worked as common laborers on the silver roll. They shoveled coal, shifted and laid tracks, cut through the jungle bush with machetes, and worked as pick and shovel men in Culebra Cut.3
The decision to recruit European laborers grew out of government officials’ dissatisfaction with West Indians and their belief that “white” men would do a better job. ICC chairman Theodore Shonts was a strong proponent for the recruitment of Spaniards because, he declared, “they are white men, tractable, and capable of development and assimilation.” John Stevens agreed, since he felt that West Indians’ laziness and lack of ambition would prevent them from working effectively on the canal. If nothing else, these officials believed, Europeans would at least spur West Indians to work harder and more productively. As it turned out, an easy labor source immediately manifested itself amid transformations generated in Spain by the War of 1898. After the war, Spanish immigration to Cuba soared.Peninsulares, as the Spanish immigrants were called, enjoyed many privileges in Cuba, often getting the best-paying jobs and other opportunities unavailable to Creoles or people of color. They could be found working in every sector of the economy, as businessmen and merchants or as skilled workers in urban industries like cigar making. The majority of them, however, flooded into rural areas to take jobs in railroad construction or, more commonly, in the burgeoning sugar industry. Those Spaniards who ended up in rural occupations found the working conditions harsh and the pay lower than they’d hoped and were therefore most susceptible to the pitches of U.S. recruiting agents.4
In 1907, ICC labor recruiters learned of a road construction project in Cuba that was relying on laborers from northern Spain. Ten thousand Spaniards had built 347 miles of road in Cuba in only sixteen months, and the foreman declared he “had great success in handling them—that they were intelligent to a degree, docile, tractable, good workers, and had enough ambition.” Recruiting agents visiting Cuba sought one thousand men, but U.S. employers in Cuba fought bitterly not to lose their workers. In the end, canal officials succeeded in bringing only about five hundred men to the Canal Zone. Officials confessed to high hopes that these men would solve the labor problem.5
The first Spaniards who came to the Zone from Cuba in 1907 so impressed officials with their energy and efficiency that recruiting agents headed directly to Spain and to centers of migrant labor such as Marseilles and Bordeaux, France, to round up several thousand more. They also sought out Italians, Greeks, Frenchmen, Portuguese, and Armenians, but Spain emerged as by far the most common source of European laborers. ICC recruiters found, for example, that one syndicate in Italy controlled the emigration of all laborers from that country and placed a tax on each person so high as to seem like debt peonage. Most of the Italians in the Zone therefore came on their own, either from the United States or from South America.6
In Spain, agents focused their efforts in large cities and the economically troubled regions of the northwest. Most came from Galicia, a depressed area in northwestern Spain where subsistence agriculture could not support the growing population. Many others came from nearby Asturias, the Basque Country, or Andalusia, an impoverished southern region of large estates and landless peasants.7
The migrants traveling to Panama formed one part of a mass exodus from Spain to the Americas between 1870 and 1914. Spanish immigrants rarely journeyed to the United States, preferring to land in Cuba, Panama, Argentina, or Brazil. Galicia contributed more immigrants to the Americas than any other region of Spain at the turn of the twentieth century, losing roughly half its population between 1850 and 1930. The rise of commercial agriculture and industrialization and the tumultuous changes associated with it explain this mass migration. Those who migrated were typically not the most indigent, but rather working people with some resources and ambition who saw in the vast changes around them an opportunity to make a better life. The historian Jose Moya found, for example, that those who left were often more literate than those who remained behind and that a fierce desire to save money and return home to purchase the land they rented influenced many immigrants.8
Once they arrived in the Canal Zone, Spanish workers were surprised by the harsh conditions and poor treatment they received. Recruit
ing agents had blanketed their towns with leaflets promising spacious houses, pleasant hotels, special housing for married workers and their families, healthful food, and a variety of recreational activities. In reality, as an investigation carried out by the National Civic Federation elaborated, much of this was patently false. Canal officials rarely provided them with married housing, but gave them ragged or torn window screens (allowing insects and disease into their homes), foul water, stale food, and no recreational opportunities. Spaniards learned that the pleasant hotel pictured in the leaflet excluded all but white U.S. citizens. On the job, they found foremen who typically spoke no Spanish and who insulted and mistreated them, long hours (days of twelve hours or more were common), an expectation that they would work even in the heaviest downpours and accept dangerous working conditions without protest, no provision made for families of injured or killed workers, and, of course, grave inequalities in terms of the benefits afforded to gold and silver employees.9
A further indignity was the fact that Spaniards’ racial identity in the Zone was ambiguous. Whether they would be considered white or nonwhite shifted according to diverse circumstances. Sometimes U.S. government officials referred to them, along with Italians or Greeks, as “semi-white.” At other times, especially when compared with black Caribbeans, they were seen as “white.”10 These notions of race were closely linked to the legacy of empire. The U.S. government consistently perceived Spaniards as common, low, and only questionably civilized, a prejudice in large part derived from the War of 1898, when U.S. journalists had vividly reimagined Spaniards as “monstrous brutes,” as uncivilized, or as weak and effeminate, any of which made it easier to perceive them as less than white.11
Spaniards chafed at their status as “white” men working on the low-status silver roll, an employment category often defined as being for nonwhites. And it must have been difficult for them to be excluded from hotels, restaurants, and clubhouses reserved for white U.S. citizens, or forced to stand in the line for “coloreds” at the post office. Overall, Spaniards had more in common with West Indians than with white Americans. Like West Indians, they lacked union representation, they could not appeal to the U.S. Congress, and they could not threaten canal officials by saying they would quit, since there was such a surplus of unskilled workers. Spaniards, like many West Indians, did very hard manual labor, most commonly as tracklayers and shifters. Occupational opportunities were actually much more limited for them and other southern Europeans than for West Indians. Thousands of the latter acquired skills and worked as artisans. Spaniards, on the other hand, were rarely allowed to work at jobs other than those demanding simple manual labor. The contrast most likely derived from the French construction period, when many West Indians held positions as craftsmen or their helpers. Spaniards had been recruited to serve specifically as unskilled laborers, and they remained limited to that occupation.
Despite such limitations, Spaniards made as much in wages as most West Indians working as artisans, and sometimes even more. The ICC used a complex pay scale for its silver workers that differentiated them not on the basis of the job they did but according to their race, ethnicity, and nationality. Unskilled West Indians were categorized as “Laborer A” and paid the equivalent of ten cents U.S. currency per hour; Colombians, Panamanians, and other Latin Americans were classified as “Laborer B” and paid thirteen cents per hour (West Indian laborers were explicitly excluded from this category); “Laborer C” received sixteen cents, and the category was reserved for a “European or other white laborer or black American laborer” who came to the Canal Zone on his own, that is, without an official ICC labor contract; Europeans with a contract were classified as “Laborer D” and received twenty cents per hour. Further complicating this hierarchy, the ICC also created classifications of “Artisan C” and “Artisan D” to cover West Indians performing skilled labor; these groups were paid the same amount as Laborers C and D. In other words, a typical unskilled Spanish laborer was paid twice as much as an unskilled West Indian, and as much as or more than a skilled West Indian artisan. These were literally, to adapt W. E. B. DuBois’s famous phrase, “the wages of whiteness.” Yet in the Canal Zone there were also different shades of whiteness, due mostly to nationality, and, with them, different levels of privilege.12
THE “EXCITABLE NATURE OF THE EUROPEAN”
Caught uneasily between West Indians and white U.S. citizens, sensing that their whiteness was somehow a help and yet not helpful enough, Spanish laborers sought support from the one governmental resource they did have: the Spanish consul. His name was Juan Potous, and he responded to workers’ complaints much more energetically than did his British and French counterparts. Potous regularly petitioned the U.S. officials with concerns about accidents, demanded investigation into various problems, and asked for compensation to the families of Spaniards killed on the job. In October 1907, for example, a gang of Spaniards at Miraflores loaded a railroad car with large timber while several workers stood atop the pile of logs. To unload the car, the foreman attached a rope to a log near the bottom and pulled it out, bringing down all the logs, along with the workers standing on top of them. Several Spaniards were hurt. One of them was dragged by the logs and broke his neck and one arm. Consul Potous demanded an investigation. U.S. government officials complained privately about the “continual interference of the Spanish Consul with the laborers.” They worried he was hurting discipline and encouraging Spanish workers to believe they would win better treatment by going to an outside authority. Publicly, officials responded that the workers’ carelessness caused such accidents.13
The British consul, Claude Mallet, observed that “Mr. Potous is zealous in taking up with the canal authorities the complaints, however trivial they may be, of his countrymen employed on the canal works. They consist mainly of disputes about wages, infractions of the sanitary regulations, camp quarrels, and etc., and as the American bosses cannot speak Spanish, and are brusque in manner and impatient when demanding obedience to their orders, it is only natural that there have been frequent misunderstandings.” Potous often attempted to mediate when such conflicts arose, and Mallet believed his Spanish counterpart often acted rashly. In Mallet’s eyes, the fact that the Spaniards remained at work and new ones arrived all the time to join them meant the complaints were unimportant.14
Juan Potous did not agree. He and his government angrily complained about deaths and injuries among Spaniards. Responding to such grievances, the ICC in 1907 hired Giuseppe Garibaldi to represent the interests of Spanish and Italian laborers and, revealingly, to mediate quarrels between the two nationalities. Twenty-eight years old at the time, Garibaldi was the grandson of the famous Italian revolutionary of the same name. U.S. officials hoped that he would mediate between them and the foreign consuls, particularly Potous. Once Garibaldi arrived on the job, officials required that Potous and the Spanish laborers first visit him with any complaints before proceeding to anyone more highly ranked. Garibaldi quickly developed into a disciplinarian, criticizing Potous in particular. He objected to the tone in Potous’s letters as well as to the influence he exerted on labor relations: “The men should not be guided to think that, by appealing to the Consul, they may obtain redress and privileges that they could not get by going direct to the proper Commission authorities.” In general, Garibaldi found it difficult to manage the “rather excitable nature of the European,” and he wished labor recruiters would take more care to contract a calmer group of men.15
If they believed this young Italian with a famous name would help them resolve their troubles with Spaniards, U.S. officials were sadly mistaken. Garibaldi’s presence did not improve matters. In 1908, Potous delivered a fiery report to his government, documenting the miserable living and working conditions Spaniards confronted and the common accidents and frequency of malaria. With particular bitterness he complained that the U.S. government refused to offer compensation to those maimed and left without a way to make a living after
working on the canal. Nearly two hundred Spaniards in the Canal Zone or the Republic of Panama had died during 1908, he declared, about half of them canal workers. More than two dozen had been killed by malaria. The isthmus was unacceptably dangerous to the health of Spanish citizens. After receiving Potous’s report in November 1908, the Spanish government issued a royal decree forbidding any more emigration to the Canal Zone. Although the number of Spaniards declined, as late as 1912 more than four thousand were still working in the Zone.16
Spaniards were happy to ask their consul for assistance, but they relied more wholeheartedly on their own resources, tirelessly resisting the discipline and regimentation of U.S. officials. Immediately upon the arrival of the first group of Spaniards, the chief of police noted that he had been forced to increase the number of Zone policemen by 25 percent because of the “turbulent” Europeans. The records of the ICC are filled with discussions among officials about how to handle such troublesome laborers. In the autumn of 1907, just weeks after some of them had entered the Canal Zone, Spanish workers initiated their first major strike. More than one hundred men laid down their tools, complaining about an abusive foreman and unacceptable food. They described their foreman as somebody they “bear with great patience in spite of his vile language, unfit for an educated man,” and claimed that they “complied with his orders notwithstanding theinsults flung at the Spaniards merely because they are Spaniards.” This same foreman discharged one worker, although the latter had “worked with ardor,” simply because “he complained of the food furnished by the ICC. This food can hardly be compared with that furnished in the penitenciary.” The foreman soon suspended another man for a minor offense, and after such a pattern of “outrage” the strike began. Two days later U.S. officials sent Italian workers to take the place of the striking Spaniards, assigned a cadre of police to prevent any trouble between the two European groups, and threatened to evict the Spaniards from their housing if they were not back on the job by noon of that same day.17