Box 25

184 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 21 halftones, 3 maps

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7948-8
Published: January 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7947-1
Published: January 2025

Paperback Available January 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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When acclaimed labor historian Julie Greene researched her book The Canal Builders, which went on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, she explored a cache of first-person essays written in 1963 by the Afro-Caribbean people, mainly Jamaican and Barbadian, who migrated to the Isthmus of Panama to work as diggers, track shifters, or domestic servants in the Canal Zone. Held at the Library of Congress and stored in Box 25 of the Isthmian Historical Society Collection, the essays constitute the best primary source in existence on Caribbean workers' experiences during the construction project.

Now Greene returns to this fascinating archive, and in this book, shares what it was like to be a migrant laborer on the construction of the Panama Canal. Caribbean workers faced life-threatening illnesses, accidents, racial discrimination, and culture clashes as well as opportunities to materially improve their lives. Greene offers new details on the strategies of the people who built the canal and examines how colonialism, xenophobia, and racism shaped the process of writing and archiving the testimonies into Box 25.

About the Author

Julie M. Greene is professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park.
For more information about Julie Greene, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Box 25 offers a master class on how to bring back voices from the past to reshape our understanding and provoke new insights. Julie Greene digs deep into the seemingly mundane and long-buried archive to excavate hidden treasure, just as its subjects dug down mountains to create the Panama Canal. It was thrilling to feel these workers and their world come alive again."

—Olive Senior, author of Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal

"Without pretension or jargon, Greene shows us how making good use of the documents in Box 25 required understanding geopolitical power, government personnel records, archival theory, life narratives, and community-engaged public history. A bravura performance, wrapped into an unputdownable read."

—Lara Putnam, author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age

"At once, Julie Greene skillfully shows us the virtues and limitations of one peculiar archival source and the magic of making connections through both our research craft and the histories we write."—Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, author of Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898– 1948

"An extremely powerful text that reframes key touchpoints in the history of the Panama Canal by centering the perspectives of West Indian workers."—Joan Flores-Villalobos, author of The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal

"With a deep dive into Box 25, Greene challenges us to reckon with the power, fragility, and silences of the archives."—Jana Lipman, author of In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates