Monthly Archives: January 2007

Interview With a Panama Canal Zone Silver Roll Survivor

Posted on January 31, 2007 by | 4 Comments

My beloved grandmother, Fanny Elizabeth Reid.

The following is the first part of an interview with Mrs. Fanny Elizabeth McKenly de Reid, conducted in the month of May of 1977, in the corregimiento or district of Rio Abajo in the City of Panama, Republic of Panama. What started out for us in the family as a genealogical study ended up being more a part of our overall Westindian history. In this part of the interview we have excerpted parts that would help us understand the kind of people who appeared in our country at the turn of the twentieth century. Continue reading →

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Posted in Panama Canal, Silver People of Panama, West Indian Panamanians

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Panama’s Black Westindian Worker

Posted on January 31, 2007 by | 7 Comments

An early photo of West Indian workers chatting.

Historians have reported that the way of life in the country of Panama had not changed since those years of the decade of 1790, when groups of black foreigners speaking English first stepped off ships on to the docks of Panama in the late 1840′s. The native Spanish speaking blacks or “alquilones” were just as wage-earner minded as the newcomers were. Continue reading →

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Posted in West Indian Panamanians

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Enter the Westindians

Posted on January 2, 2007 by | 1 Comment

This post is intended to begin telling the story of Panamanian Westindians. For the Black Spanish speaking people of Panama of the era in which the first Westindians, as we know them here in Panama, appeared on the scene, they seemed to have emerged from depths of the Caribbean Sea overnight. To the Black natives with a history of serving pirates and buccaneers, those Westindian men seemed as foreign as the old buccaneers and the yellow men from Asiatic countries who, like them, had followed what was to become the first railroad project their eyes would ever witness. Continue reading →

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Posted in West Indian Panamanians

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