Notable, for example, is the way he examines the case of Lester Leon Greaves--a Black Panamanian who was sentenced in 1946 to fifty years in Gamboa penitentiary for raping a young white woman of an established Zonian family--not only through time, but mainly through the lenses of race, gender, and crime in the Borderland.
Three chapters (two, three, and five) are dedicated to the various populations in the Canal Zone--US civilians, known as the Zonians, West Indians, and the US military.
While Area
zonian urbanism has created new problems of poverty, health, and sanitation in mushrooming shantytowns, the shift has also lessened the pressure of advancing swidden agriculture into pristine forest areas.
But it wasn't long before it became clear that our turn of the century
Zonian house and Lila were a bad match; not only did she refuse to bend, she refused to climb.
government owns not only the Canal but the entire Zone territory, and every
Zonian is a U.S.
Goethals, an accomplished engineer, considered the task of governing the zone's sixty thousand residents ("
Zonians") both more important and more difficult than the technological feats of digging the canal and erecting its monumental locks.
era in Panama, a group of former American residents ("
Zonians") are building a Canal museum and research facility in Florida.
The
Zonians, as American residents of the Canal Zone were called, could live a plantation existence--known euphemistically as the "gold roll"--of American wages, heavily subsidized housing, and cheap servants, segregated from Caribbean blacks and dubiously dark Panamanians, who were banished to the "silver roll." In the 1960s, when Panamanian nationalists entered the zone hoping to fly their flag, they were met and beaten by a crowd of
Zonians.
citizens in Panama (
Zonians) often pursued autonomous agendas counter to those of the governments of both the United States and Panama.