Joan Flores-Villalobos, "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

New Books in African American Studies · Mar 6, 2023 · 1h 8m

In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation…