Who Built the Panama Canal?

A young man named Edgar Llewellyn Simmons sailed out of Carlisle Bay, Barbados, on a Royal Mail boat in January 1908 to work on the Panama Canal. After a two-week journey, he reached Colón and construction officials found him a place to sleep for the night. The whistle blew at 6:00 am the next morning. When Simmons lined up, the boss picked every other man and gave each a pick and shovel. Simmons thought he would get a better job, since he’d not been chosen yet. Then came “one of our own West Indian fellow men” who took him to a dump car filled with coal, handed him a shovel, and told him to get to work unloading it all. The bosses called him “Shine.”

So begins the story of Edgar Simmons, one of the tens of thousands of men and women who traveled to Panama during the construction decade from 1904 to 1914. They left homes in Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, and other Caribbean islands. Simmons’ story is held in Box 25 of the Isthmian Historical Society Collection at the Library of Congress along with 111 other first-person testimonies by canal workers. The testimonies resulted from a competition in 1963 for the “Best True Stories of Life and Work” during the construction of the Panama Canal. As the 50th anniversary of the Panama Canal’s completion in 1914 approached, Ruth C. Stuhl, president of the Isthmian Historical Society, designed a competition open to all non-U.S. employees. She wanted to capture the experiences of laborers from the British Caribbean.

The historical society placed ads for the competition in newspapers in Panama, Jamaica, Barbados, British Honduras, Trinidad, Antigua, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Grenada, and sent notices about the competition in several thousand food packages distributed to disability relief recipients. The straightforward instructions declared that the historical society wanted to gather true stories of life and work on the Panama Canal during its construction. It noted that little had been written about the experiences of West Indians, and that officials wanted to generate remembrances before time ran out. People who had trouble writing or were not literate might ask a friend or family member to write for them. Stuhl declared upon completion of the competition that “the Society is most grateful for all the entries and we regret that there could not be a prize for everyone.”

Men of African descent from the British Caribbean wrote nearly all the testimonies. Their entries ranged in length and detail: some were mere fragments, a few sentences long, while others were six or more pages in length. The writers in Box 25 constitute a small sample of the West Indian men and women who exerted a tremendous influence on the history of the Americas. Constructing the Panama Canal was a ten-year undertaking that generated several waves of migration and proved to the world that the United States was a dominant power in the Caribbean and Latin America.

People migrated from dozens of countries around the world to build the canal, but the largest numbers came from British Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Barbados. The majority were men, many of whom signed labor contracts with the U.S. government, while others traveled on their own to the isthmus to seek a job. Over time several thousand women joined them, working often as laundresses or domestic servants. Some brought children with them, and others gave birth in the Canal Zone, so gradually family life shaped the canal experience for many. These Afro-Caribbeans tended to be rural, leaving harsh lives working small pieces of land or laboring for large landowners. They boarded a ship for the isthmus in hopes of earning more money, acquiring new skills, or simply wanting to see the world. Many people think of these workers as providing the brutal, unskilled labor demanded by the canal project, and to be sure a great number worked as diggers and dynamiters. But over time Afro-Caribbean men often received training and began working at jobs originally limited to white North Americans, for example as carpenters or machinists. Movement had long been important in Caribbean history, but this vast wave of migration to the Panama Canal Zone changed the Americas forever.

Many migrants settled permanently in Panama, making that young republic a profoundly Caribbean-and African-descended nation. Tens of thousands more moved onward across Central and South America, the Caribbean, and often farther along to the United States after the canal construction was completed. The origins of the Caribbean American community in the United States are owed predominantly to the impact of these forefathers and mothers who traveled to Panama to work on the Canal. And as they moved, their culture and political perspectives — a hybrid of African diasporic influences and the impact of British colonialism — migrated along with them. For a relatively impoverished migrant group, they were unusually cosmopolitan and quite sophisticated politically, more likely to have received some education and to have navigated across different empires and work regimes.

The men and women who chose to submit testimonies to the competition were working people, often landless laborers or craftsmen. They traveled to the Canal Zone to escape harsh environments on islands across the Caribbean, where most earned wages so low as to be near starvation. They had heard about well-paying jobs helping build the Yankees’ canal. Surely, they knew, it would be far more than they could earn in St. Lucia, Barbados, or Jamaica. They hoped they could save enough money to return home and buy a piece of land or open a shop. The men worked as carpenters, blacksmiths, railroad workers, gravediggers, salesmen, waiters, hospital attendants, janitors, and of course, diggers and dynamiters. The women most often worked as domestic servants in the homes of white officials or skilled workers from the United States. When the canal opened to great acclaim in 1914, Afro-Caribbean canal workers found other jobs. Some, including most of the Box 25 authors, kept working for the Isthmian Canal Commission, helping maintain the canal operations, while others moved home or onward to plantations across Central America, or saved their money and headed to New York City. Decade upon decade passed by, and in 1963 when the competition was announced, the original canal builders were now aged men and women.

Those who submitted testimonies were most often male workers who had spent their lives in Panama or the Canal Zone. No longer working, typically confronting severe poverty as well as the ravages of time on their bodies and souls, dealing with disability and disease and sometimes the approach of death, they looked to this competition as a possible lifeline. They wrote up their memories or asked a son or daughter to write for them. They placed stamps on envelopes and sent in their testimonies with hopes the prize money would afford them a few days of comfort.

When Afro-Caribbeans disembarked from their ships and entered the Canal Zone in the early twentieth century, they confronted a sea of white faces. Their white bosses and supervisors were tough task masters.

The United States developed the Canal Zone into one of the most modern and industrialized places on earth and sought to discipline Afro-Caribbeans into an efficient army of labor. U.S. officials and foremen saw their Caribbean workers as childlike creatures who needed to be prodded constantly to work hard. The official government archives lump many thousands of workers together, melting away important cultural and geographical differences. Official government records, for example, typically labeled all these workers “West Indians” instead of noting that an Antiguan and a St. Lucian might not see eye to eye, or that Caribbean foremen and policemen, usually from Jamaica, were feared and held in contempt.

Officials’ lack of deep understanding of their workers makes their writings of limited use. The testimonies in Box 25, by taking us into life and work in the Canal Zone through the eyes and souls of Caribbean workers rather than their supervisors, provide an opportunity to recreate the experience from the perspective of laborers. Like any archive, the testimonies in Box 25 emerged from a complex process in which personal experiences became entangled with the power dynamics of the larger world — in this case the colonialism of the United States and Britain, global capitalism, and the racial, gender, and class structures that resulted. 

The canal builders left few accounts of their experiences, despite their numbers and their major role in building the canal. Most archival sources regarding Afro-Caribbean male and female workers flatten their experiences or erase altogether the complexity wrought by the diverse cultural and socioeconomic characteristics of their home islands. Government officials, medical personnel, white U.S. housewives, and British globetrotters all published memoirs that bring the construction years to life. We can observe the project through the eyes of visitors like speaker of the house Joseph Cannon or presidents Roosevelt or Taft. We can pore over letters written home by a white U.S. steam shovel engineer or other white working men. We can follow a census taker turned policeman as he crisscrossed the zone, sharing his opinions about details small and large, thanks to the book he wrote. But for those Afro-Caribbeans who so dominated the labor force, we have very little.

In St. Louis, Missouri, the U.S. government keeps personnel records it collected over the centuries on its employees, including the hundreds of thousands of Afro-Caribbean canal workers. I looked at thousands of records there, and with some digging I found many of the Box 25 authors — including Edgar Llewellyn Simmons. The U.S. government had in most cases tracked and surveilled these workers for decades. Placing those personnel records in dialogue with the testimonies illuminated their lives and the stories they told. It also became possible, in many cases, to see photos of these workers whose words I had analyzed, bringing them more vividly to life. The personnel records thus created a wholly different lens for analyzing workers’ lives, viewpoints, and the struggles they faced. When we examine official government archives like the personnel records collected by the United States, we have to look through the haze of colonial condescension to reveal the lives of working men and women.

Officials saw workers as a means of production to be managed, disciplined, surveilled, and then disposed of as easily as possible. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jennifer Morgan, Marisa Fuentes, and other scholars have explored the complex history of archival production, the ways archives emerge out of existing power relations, and the silences built into them. They note the need to read archives carefully to comprehend fully the agency, subjectivity, and experiences of working people caught in the surveilling power of official archives. As Fuentes puts it, we must “account for the conditions in which they emerge from the archives.”

The Box 25 testimonies tell a story of transimperial relationships, of Caribbean canal workers who moved through a terrain marked by the British and U.S. empires but haunted as well by the legacy of the Spanish and French empires. The influence of the Spanish empire remained in the legal, political, and cultural structures of the Republic of Panama, while the tragic French efort to construct an ocean-level canal had trans- formed the landscape of the isthmus in ways that continued to shape the U.S. project 20 years later. Afro-Caribbean workers carried with them a personal history of colonialism, manifested via the impact of disease and the remnants of scars from their labor, their bodies a “secret archive of harm,” as one novelist phrased it. By examining the historical production of archives related to Caribbean labor, this project calls into question the assumed stability of the official colonial archive. It asks how officials’ misunderstanding of their workers as well as the demands of colonialism and global capitalism shaped the creation of the archives. 

The Isthmian Historical Society, a social club founded in 1956 by prominent white residents of the Canal Zone, brought the testimonies of Box 25 into existence. The society’s constitution noted its objective: to “promote and inculcate interest in, and appreciation, study, and knowledge of the history of the Isthmus of Panama.” The society organized events that celebrated the history and legacy of the zone, honoring Theodore Roosevelt, for example, or bringing Maurice Thatcher (who headed the Department of Civil Administration for some years during the construction era) to give a public lecture. In 1958, to mark the centennial of Theodore Roosevelt’s birth, celebrations were held across the zone to honor white U.S. canal workers. Dozens of them returned to the isthmus for the event. As part of the celebrations, the Isthmian Historical Society interviewed thirty-five Roosevelt Medal Holders on tape, then transcribed the interviews and donated them to the Panama Canal Zone Library-Museum archives. The interviewees — male clerks, engineers, postmasters, and some of their wives — mostly recounted their employment history and a few vivid memories such as the exploding of Gamboa Dike that marked the completion of the canal. The interviews perhaps inspired a young librarian, Ruth Stuhl, to undertake a very different project a few years later: to collect memories of Afro-Caribbean canal workers.

Of the 112 entries, Ruth Stuhl chose sixteen contenders for best essay and forwarded copies to the three judges. Many of the essays provided illuminating reflections on the construction era — in general they were far more informative than the tape-recorded sessions with “old-timers” from 1958. Judge Loren Burnham noted the themes he saw repeated most often in the testimonies: a pride of workmanship, pride at being part of the “great Canal enterprise,” difficulty of supporting a family on low pay, and “satisfaction and a feeling of teamwork with ‘good’ bosses.” 

The society awarded first prize ($50) to Albert Peters, originally from Nassau, Bahamas, but living in Cristobal; second prize ($30) to George H. Martin of Barbados, living in the Canal Zone; and third prize ($20) to Alfonso Suazo of Honduras, living in Panama at the time of writing. Each of these three individuals wrote stirring essays of several pages in length. Peters’ entry eloquently told a harrowing tale of illness, interactions with doctors and nurses, and their successful efforts to treat him. Martin notably quoted from contemporary songs and included quite a bit of detail about everyday life. Suazo, one of the very few who wrote a testimony in Spanish, described the difficulties of life on the job. Clearly the job of judge involved subjective evaluations — there were many other essays as eloquent as these three. It’s very possible that in awarding one of the prizes to a Latin American, the judges were acknowledging the continued importance of Spanish heritage in Panama. The prize money would have made a difference in the men’s lives. Adjusted for inflation, fifty dollars awarded in 1964 would be worth nearly $500 today.

The testimonies remained in the zone as part of the Canal Zone Library-Museum until 1999, when the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama was completed. At that point the entire holdings of the Canal Zone Library Museum moved to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Today Panamanian scholars must travel to the United States to unearth their country’s history, to visit the vast holdings at the U.S. National Archives or the original copies of the Box 25 testimonies at the Library of Congress. To some Panamanians, the fact that the Box 25 testimonies reside in the U.S. capital rather than in Panama vividly suggests the continued legacies of colonialism.

From Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal by Julie Greene. Copyright © 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

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