by Julie Greene
Heavy-handed foremen were the cause of many strikes. Spaniards frequently complained of foremen who spoke no Spanish or abused them verbally or physically. In early 1907 an Italian foreman took charge of a Spanish gang near the construction town of Culebra. The Spaniards resented the Italian’s authority over them, and ultimately they attacked the man and beat him. When police arrested a dozen of them and took them off to jail in the nearby town of Empire, about two hundred fellow workers stopped work and headed toward town to liberate them. As the Spaniards marched toward Empire, they attempted to convince other workers to join them, but their effort failed. Instead, police and several foremen met them as they approached town and convinced them to turn back. Of the Spaniards arrested, all but one were convicted and required either to pay a fine or to serve time in jail.18
Italians and Spaniards occasionally collaborated in striking, rioting, or mutinying, and some Italians attended Spanish anarchist meetings, but the two groups often fought bitterly. When officials heard rumors of a large strike planned by Spaniards and Italians, their investigator urged them to relax, declaring that no such strike would take place: “There is no union or cohesion between these two nationalities and they mistrust one another.” There was hostility also between Spaniards and Greeks.El Único, the Spanish anarchist newspaper, complained that Greek foremen in the Zone were treating Spanish workers badly, sometimes causing bloody fights: “Why do these Athenians act so despotically? Are they becoming Americanized?” Such divisions meant that Spaniards usually worked on their own to organize protests and strikes.19
Two other grievances generated bitterness among Spaniards: the poor quality of food and job competition with West Indians. Spaniards repeatedly rioted over food and conditions in the mess halls. They assaulted cooks who failed to prepare meals to their liking, they rioted to protest the absence of Spaniards among the cooking staff in their mess halls, and occasionally they quit work to press their protest about the food. Officials made an effort to hire Spanish cooks for the Spanish mess halls, and they imported special foods for them as well—garbanzos, tomato puree, chorizos. When asked by congressmen if he pandered to the tastes of different races, the official in charge of food supply responded, “Oh, yes, indeed. The Spaniard requires the things he is accustomed to in his own country and will have them as he wants them. The negro we feed according to the way he eats back in his own country.” Yet there remained limits to what officials would do. Major William Sibert, who headed the Atlantic division of the ICC, declared, “The food is better than is ordinarily consumed by people of the class in question.”20
Over time, Spaniards’ racial hostility toward West Indians seemed to grow more intense. Joseph Blackburn, who headed civil administration in the Canal Zone, noted (perhaps disingenuously) that “the southern Europeans, white men—the Greeks and the Spaniards and the Italians—are more insistent upon the observation of color lines than you find among the people of the States here at home.” In particular, Blackburn observed, his police force had experienced major problems when West Indian policemen attempted to arrest an Italian or a Spaniard. Serious riots had broken out, and “therefore, the scope of service of the colored policemen has been by order restricted to practically the colored camps.”21 When grievances over food became enmeshed with racial hostilities—particularly when black West Indians asserted authority over Spaniards, for example, if they dared to correct a Spaniard’s seating choice—the resulting conflicts typically proved even more explosive and difficult for police to handle.22
Trouble likewise resulted when Spaniards worked, lived, or commuted to work too close to West Indians. In 1907 Spanish workers at Pedro Miguel threatened a strike, demanding better food and that “all the negroes [be] taken away from their camp.”23 In 1909 crowded labor trains caused a riot between Spaniards and Barbadians in which both sides used clubs and rocks as weapons. Although normally “white” and “colored” workers were given different cars to ride, Barbadians had begun encroaching on cars normally reserved for whites because their own had become intolerably crowded. Policemen who tried to stop the riot were attacked by the Spaniards, leading to several arrests. In response, several hundred Spaniards refused to work, insisting they would wait for the Spanish consul to arrive. In angry speeches, workers declared the consul must achieve justice or they would call upon “all the Spaniards on the Canal Zone to lay down their shovels and organize for the protection of their common rights.” These workers demanded both that their compatriots be released from jail and that blacks be prohibited from riding on their train cars. The chief of police responded to their complaints, ordering the officer in charge to “see that the white laborers, who I understand are much in the minority, are not imposed upon in any way by the colored laborers.”24
The U.S. government generally tried to keep workers segregated by race and citizenship both in transportation and in housing. While West Indians and Europeans often shared the same labor camp, for example, U.S. officials segregated each group to different parts of the camp. Likewise, the government built completely separate mess halls for West Indians and Europeans, but when circumstances prevented complete segregation, conflicts flared. In early 1911 the government assigned a large group of Barbadians to quarters at Cirio camp that had, until that moment, been totally inhabited by Spanish workers and families. Thirty-nine Spanish workers petitioned the U.S. government to remove the Barbadians, saying the latter were thieves and nuisances in terms of “sanitary and moral conditions.” The government conceded that when the Barbadians had first entered the camp, the bathhouses were not clearly labeled according to gender, and in some cases male Barbadians had entered a bathhouse and startled a Spanish female. But the government declined to move the Barbadians out of the camp. By August of that same year, racial animosities had grown more bitter. This time, when Barbadians arrived in the town of Paraiso in need of quarters, police visited Spaniards to inform them that the Barbadians would be housed in their dormitory. Spaniards threatened trouble if the government brought Barbadians into the building. Fearing a major conflict, the police quartered the Barbadians instead in an empty building that lacked beds or bedding, then moved them the next day to quarters in a building filled with East Indians. The East Indians protested fiercely against this arrangement, but with less immediate success. Government officials housed the two groups together for nearly two weeks and then found new quarters for the East Indians.25
“WE SHOULD ARISE WHEN THEY REPLACE US BY NEGROES”
The arrival of Spaniards and other Europeans increased racial tensions in the Canal Zone; as a policeman described the atmosphere, “Race feeling … here is at fever heat and is liable to develop seriously at any moment.”26 What explains this animosity? To some extent, workers brought a sense of racial identity and hostility with them from their country of origin. Racism was hardly unknown in Spain. Reflecting how fluid racial identities can be, Galicians—or, as they are known in Spanish,gallegos—were historically thought to be inferior by other Spaniards. In the mines of Asturias in Spain, which began to receive large numbers of Galician immigrants after 1911, tensions also quickly flared, and Galicians became the lowest group in the racial hierarchy that emerged. The special animosity toward Galicians has been observed in other parts of Spain as well. As the anarcho-syndicalist leader Angel Pestaña, who grew up in Basque and León mining towns, commented, “Where this ‘race hatred’ was most notable was between thegallegos and the rest. … Thegallegos were the butt of all the jokes.”27 In the Canal Zone, U.S. officials regularly referred to Spaniards asgallegos, even though migrants often came from other parts of Spain. Thusgallego seems to have become a pejorative term used for any Spaniard.28
Once Spaniards were in Panama, their racial identity became more complex. One can only imagine how differently they must have felt when enjoying their leisure time away from the Canal Zone, footloose in the entertainment districts of Panama City. There they not only spoke the language but also were living repr
esentatives of the empire that had colonized Panama, Colombia, and much of Latin America. As Europeans, they stood high on Panama’s racial hierarchy, seen not only as white men but as members of a race of conquerors and, as such, as members of a racial aristocracy. In the Zone, however, they were no longer conquerors. They now faced a new imperial power, one that owed its hegemony to victory in a war that had destroyed the Spanish Empire, one that classed them as racial inferiors nearly comparable to people of African descent and yet, contradictorily, left their exact position within the structured racial hierarchy of the Canal Zone distinctly unclear.29
Spaniards’ position in the Canal Zone was also powerfully shaped by the ICC’s labor management strategies. By elevating race and citizenship into key tools of labor management, the silver and gold system encouraged diverse groups to compete with one another for higher status. The system pitted workers against one another as a means of control, bringing them from many different nations for this very reason. As Jackson Smith, who headed the Department of Labor, Quarters, and Subsistence, noted, “It is also imperative to have several nationalities on the work, as these laborers are clannish, and they reason at once that if they are the only people brought here they are the only people that can be secured; and it does not matter whether they are West Indian blacks, Italian, Spanish, or any other, the result would be the same.” For the same reason officials replaced certain skilled white workers (such as firemen) with black West Indians, to the fury of whites. When possible, officials used “our higher grade silver men as pacemakers to shame our high grade mechanics in to doing a fair day’s work.” Foremen likewise would commonly request both a Spanish gang and a West Indian one, so that, as one put it, “I could keep them both on their metal by rivalry between the two.”30
The government placed Spaniards in a complicated position relative to West Indians. Officials had originally justified paying Spaniards more than West Indians on the grounds that they worked more efficiently. As time went on, however, officials ruefully noted that West Indians’ productivity had gradually increased while the Spaniards were doing less work and causing more trouble. This led officials to start replacing Europeans with West Indians during the final years of construction. Over time, Spaniards began to suspect a plot underfoot to replace them altogether with West Indians.31
All these factors came together in 1911 as a wave of labor militancy exploded among Spanish workers. The strikes and riots of that year demonstrated the links between labor protest, anarchist politics, and racial hostility. In July, Spanish laborers working in Culebra Cut refused to do certain kinds of work and demanded the right to eat on the job. Culebra Cut had been the site of many previous struggles. As one subforeman put it, Culebra Cut was “the hardest place in the Canal to work on. Nine times out of ten you got to work noon hours, or got to work night time. You got to work hard, because the Canal is sliding in there. … [W]e got to work the men hard—sometimes in mud and water up to their waist—and it is pretty hard.”32
Insubordination quickly spread among Spanish workers in the following days. More than three dozen gangs refused to follow orders, sat down on the job when prohibited from eating, or otherwise showed their determination to improve working conditions. Although striking workers had complaints to varying degrees against all the foremen, they increasingly focused on one American named Pike, the head foreman for about two hundred workers. They accused him of arriving at work drunk, drinking rum on the job, throwing stones at them, verbally abusing them, making them work in heavy rain, and punishing West Indians by kicking or pushing them. The Spanish workers also reasserted their right to eat on the job, a practice that had previously been allowed them.33
After some two hundred workers from Miraflores joined the strike in sympathy, bringing the total number of strikers close to eight hundred, workers began holding mass meetings to decide their demands and strategy. At these meetings Spaniards from construction towns like Las Cascadas, Empire, Pedro Miguel, and Gorgona joined those from Culebra and Miraflores, spoke, and contributed to a petition demanding that the government take action. In response, Goethals decided to temporarily remove Pike as foreman and to allow workers to resume eating on the job. He also instructed foremen to stop using abusive language and ordered officials to interview workers and hear their charges against Pike. After much discussion, the strikers returned to work the morning of August 3, 1911. Soon thereafter the committee appointed by Goethals interviewed a few dozen workers and heard their charges. The committee decided the charges were not sufficiently corroborated, and, perhaps more to the point, they decided that keeping Pike on the job would not result in a significant number of desertions. With Goethals’s approval, they reappointed Pike to his original position. This represented a major defeat for the workers, for by this time the strike had ended and many of the activists had been urged by the government to leave the Canal Zone. Yet other strikes continued to break out across the Zone, almost all of them among Spanish workers.34
Amid this wave of labor militancy, with many strikes defeated but some important demands won, Spanish workers grew increasingly politicized and politically active. Anarchism began spreading as an organized movement across the Zone, winning hundreds of followers among the Spaniards. The politics of Spaniards in the Zone was informed by a rich tradition of rebellion and political protest in Spain, where strategies ranged from violence against property and other spontaneous acts to organized efforts to create associations and build schools. In Galicia, for example, peasants had begun withholding rent payments as early as the eighteenth century in order to fight efforts by landowners to renew their leases. In the early nineteenth century this strategy in Galicia blossomed into a more organized rent strike. Peasants and urban residents similarly rioted against those who charged overly high prices for food. A wave of food riots spread in 1904 and 1905, for example, just before Spaniards began heading to the Canal Zone.35
Anarchism in particular had flourished in Spain after the mid-nineteenth century, especially in Andalusia, and wherever Spanish immigrants traveled in the Americas, it tended to follow them—to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Ecuador, Cuba, Florida, and the Panama Canal Zone, among other places. Spanish immigrants moved amid an international world of radical politics, their ideology, strategy, and tactics shaped not only by their experiences constructing the canal or time spent in Spain, Cuba, and similar sites of international migration but also by the ideas of a vibrant social and political movement.
In both Spain and Cuba, anarchism became the dominant ideology among workers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were close ties between the anarchist movements in each country, and Spanish anarchist periodicals were distributed widely in Cuban cities. Anarchists in Cuba built effective unions, led strike movements, created schools and workers’ associations, and published newspapers. They strove to build unity between workers in different industries and of different skill levels, and they were unusually supportive of women’s struggles. They also made antiracism into an important part of their movement, taking an unprecedented stand for solidarity amongpeninsulares, Creoles, and people of color. In the Canal Zone, anarchism evolved differently in one important respect. As the example of Cuba suggests, the ideology typically emphasized building solidarity across boundaries of skill, status, race, ethnicity, and nationality. In the Panama Canal Zone during the construction era, anarchism became a movement limited to one group—unskilled European immigrants, almost all of them Spaniards—and it never developed antiracism as a part of its ideology.36
According to U.S. officials, a belief in the principles of anarchism arrived in the Canal Zone along with the very first Spanish workers in 1907. It became a widespread organized movement only in 1911 as the wave of labor protests climaxed. By the autumn of that year, anarchist clubs existed in Rio Grande, Pedro Miguel, Las Cascadas, Corozal, Culebra, Empire, Gatun, Libertador, and Gorgona—in short, in almost every town where a significant number of Spaniards resid
ed. One close observer of the movement believed it had some eight hundred members in the town of Rio Grande alone, and, he noted, “But for requiring members to pay dues their organization would undoubtedly be much larger than it is.” This group in Rio Grande called itself “The Invincibles.” Even the chief medical officer, William Gorgas, commented on the ubiquitous movement, observing that hospitalized Spaniards always had anarchist pamphlets among their reading materials.37
Bernardo Perez, a Spaniard who had previously spent time in Cuba, stood at the center of this anarchist movement. Perez published an anarchist newspaper,El Único, in Colón and was, according to a police spy, “an excellent orator, a well educated man, and one who appears to have a great deal of experience along this line.” He possessed a vast knowledge of labor conditions and anarchist organization around the world and used this to educate and motivate crowds of listeners at protest meetings. Aquilino Lopez, a younger man, assisted Perez. Lopez had been in the Zone for only three months, and “while he is very enthusiastic in the propaganda, very earnest in his efforts to convince, it can be seen that he is young in experience, and lacks the training of his comrade, Bernardo Perez.” Lopez demonstrated his enthusiasm when he tried to convince a government official that anarchists were not the bomb throwers suggested by their enemies. He described anarchists as deeply opposed to the Catholic Church and to drunkenness, gambling, war, and prostitution; they advocated reading and education, international peace, and vegetarianism.38
In mass meetings and in the pages ofEl Único, Perez sounded fiercer than Lopez. Seeking to recruit more readers, he promised that by supporting his newspaper, “you will have contributed to burying the clericalism that poisons your conscience, capitalism which sucks your blood, and the State which chokes your life.” In another article he declared, “We are the junior brothers of those who were hung in Chicago, Vergara, Paris, … and of those who were shot in Warsaw, Barcelona, Buenos Ayres and in Japan,” thereby placing the Canal Zone’s anarchist movement within an international context. He also attended to the specific concerns of canal workers. He demanded public meeting rooms for their organizations, decried deportations of strikers, and attacked the U.S. government for allowing its foremen to abuse workers, for overcrowding them, and for treating them like slaves. Contradicting his own internationalism, he echoed the concerns of most Spanish workers by focusing attention on the threat black Caribbeans seemed to represent. Declaring that “we should arise when they replace us by negroes,” Perez argued that the government had already begun moving on such a plan. If Spanish workers failed to unite, West Indians would gradually overtake them, and they would “have to go about the Isthmus begging.” Other speakers developed similar themes. One, in a pointed attack on the government overseeing the canal construction, declared, “We are scorned. The American Government despises us. It spits on us.”39