Red White And Blue Paradise

The construction, maintenance, and defense of the Panama Canal brought Panamanians, U.S. soldiers and civilians, West Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans into close, even intimate, contact. In this lively and provocative social history, Michael E. Donoghue positions the Panama Canal Zone as an imperial borderland where U.S. power, culture, and ideology were projected and contested. Highlighting race as both an overt and underlying force that shaped life in and beyond the Zone, Donoghue details how local traditions and colonial policies interacted and frequently clashed. Panamanians responded to U.S. occupation with proclamations, protests, and everyday forms of resistance and acquiescence. Although U.S. "Zonians" and military personnel stigmatized Panamanians as racial inferiors, they also sought them out for service labor, contraband, sexual pleasure, and marriage. The Canal Zone, he concludes, reproduced classic colonial hierarchies of race, national identity, and gender, establishing a model for other U.S. bases and imperial outposts around the globe.

Provides a comprehensive overview of the political and economic developments in Panama from 1980 to the present day.

Panama is a country whose geopolitical importance outweighs its size because of the volume of trade that passes the Central American isthmus through the canal. For nearly a century, the United States occupied and controlled the Panama Canal Zone and its shipping operations. In 1999, control was passed to Panama’s Canal Authority. This peaceful transfer was a result of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The Weak and the Powerful studies how a weak country negotiated the Cold War and how a strongman navigated between competing power blocs. Omar Torrijos took power in Panama through a 1968 coup d’état and ruled that country until his death in 1981. He committed his country to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which purported to stand for noninterference and against imperialism. Jonathan C. Brown looks at how Torrijos and the NAM were able to mobilize world opinion of the weak against the powerful to pressure the United States to live up to its democratic and international ideals regarding sovereignty of the canal. The author also demonstrates how world opinion was unable to address the problems of ideologically motivated warfare in neighboring Central American states.

This book speaks to all Americans in one way or another. It is a true story of Americas beginning, and Gods divine providence. We are founded upon a principle that believes in the worship of the true God. It was and still is our belief that He designed this country to be a light and a savior for the world. This is evident by the fact most people are trying to come here, or seek our help. America has had its share of internal problems; the enslavement of the Black Africans, the killing of the Native Indians, the suppression of women, and the harsh treatment of Black Americans (Africans). Through all of this, God caused her to prosper. This book is the only book that states emphatically that in 1492, God designed a plan for many people from across the globe to make this country their home, and it gives the proofs as evidence. The means of getting us into this country may not be understood, but the ends can not be denied and are much appreciated. Every American needs this book. This book will help us to become better Americans. This book teaches us the importance of our citizenship; The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty and the Flag (which embodies all that we are). It shows us where we came from and where we are going. There is a divine guidance system at work in America. America is the Promised Land. The poem engraved on Lady Libertys pedestal epitomizes this very philosophy. This book is a correspondence panacea to heal the past wounds of the Blacks, the Indians, the Women and the Whites in America. As we forgive the past, we can enjoy the spiritual and material prosperity that God promised to us through Abraham.

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821. Contributors. Rina Cáceres Gómez, Lowell Gudmundson, Ronald Harpelle, Juliet Hooker, Catherine Komisaruk, Russell Lohse, Paul Lokken, Mauricio Meléndez Obando, Karl H. Offen, Lara Putnam, Justin Wolfe

In 1958, angry Venezuelans attacked Vice President Richard Nixon in Caracas, opening a turbulent decade in Latin American–U.S. relations. In Yankee No! Alan McPherson sheds much-needed light on the controversial and pressing problem of anti-U.S. sentiment in the world. Examining the roots of anti-Americanism in Latin America, McPherson focuses on three major crises: the Cuban Revolution, the 1964 Panama riots, and U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. Deftly combining cultural and political analysis, he demonstrates the shifting and complex nature of anti-Americanism in each country and the love–hate ambivalence of most Latin Americans toward the United States. When rising panic over “Yankee hating” led Washington to try to contain foreign hostility, the government displayed a surprisingly coherent and consistent response, maintaining an ideological self-confidence that has outlasted a Latin American diplomacy torn between resentment and admiration of the United States. However, McPherson warns, U.S. leaders run a great risk if they continue to ignore the deeper causes of anti-Americanism. Written with dramatic flair, Yankee No! is a timely, compelling, and carefully researched contribution to international history.

Sovereign Acts explores how artists, activists, and audiences performed and interpreted sovereignty struggles in the Panama Canal Zone, from the Canal Zone’s inception in 1903 to its dissolution in 1999. In popular entertainments and patriotic pageants, opera concerts and national theatre, white U.S. citizens, West Indian laborers, and Panamanian artists and activists used performance as a way to assert their right to the Canal Zone and challenge the Zone’s sovereignty, laying claim to the Zone’s physical space and imagined terrain. By demonstrating the place of performance in the U.S. Empire’s legal landscape, Katherine A. Zien transforms our understanding of U.S. imperialism and its aftermath in the Panama Canal Zone and the larger U.S.-Caribbean world.