Professor Goodin has done an invaluable service for her country and for the African diaspora globally. It was the African migrant laborers who built the Panama Canal, but, credit is almost always given to Europeans. Their descendants faced American racism on the American-run Canal Zone, and, today, their descendants continue to experience marginalization in the only country most of those who remain have ever known. This readable account of their experience and of their unsung contributions provides an important missing piece in the history of blacks in this hemisphere.
Dr. Melva Lowe de Goodin is educating our last Panama group about the institutionalized attack on blackness by the Panamanian republic. Which is still present and operating in contemporary Panamanian society. Dr. Lowe de Goodin educated us on the museum’s efforts to break through the pervasive anti-black rhetoric that plagues our society.
Congratulations, both to the author, as well as to the Afro Panamanian activists who have fought to make visible what has been kept hidden from Panamanians of all backgrounds.
The telling of history is - most often and too often - from the perspective of the upper social and economic classes. Through this play, Melva Lowe de Goodin takes us into the fascinating lives, heart-rending decisions, despairing moments, romances and precious victories of the African/Black men of Barbados, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands (colonies at the time) who came to build the Panama Canal.