English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Foreign land control and Afro-Panamanian women domestics are mutually constituted and embedded in tourism development in Panama. In this article, I center the racial and patriarchal logics of dispossession informing land control, a process that connects twenty-first-century residential tourism development to twentieth-century U.S. imperial formations in the making of the Panama Canal. My approach blends ethnographic research with historical data collection, newspapers, and development-related policy documents drawn across a variety of research sites in Panama, Spain, and North America. To begin, I briefly trace the contemporary context of tourism-induced land dispossession and the growing tenure insecurities for Afro-Panamanian communities living on the shores of the Panamanian Caribbean. Here I show how residential tourism development reproduces settler colonial landscapes. Further, I place in conversation the concepts of postcolonial intersectionality and  cuerpo-territorio  (Cabnal  2015 ) to illustrate how land control and domestic service are interconnected, punctuating how land is not the only site of colonial governance. I then historicize tourism in Panama through tracing the discursive narratives of imperial formations in the early period of U.S. empire and the construction of the Panama Canal. I trace elite travel narratives, newspapers, and memoirs to link the racialized labor regimes of the Canal to the domestic spaces of the Canal Zone. Finally, I argue that foreign land acquisitions and domestic service are inextricably entangled in tourism development across time and space in Panama.

Racial Geographies of Land and Domestic Service in Panama