Paul McAllister
My name is Paul McAllister, and I’m a managing editor for “Picturing Black History”. With me today is Dr. Lia Bascomb, the author of the essay, “Black Labor On Board”. Dr. Bascomb, welcome. I’m very happy that you’re able to join us today.

Lia Bascomb
Thank you for having me.

Paul McAllister
Your essay, “Black Labor On Board”, looks at the migration of Barbadian immigrants to Panama and their work on the Panama Canal. And to kind of get at this idea of the codification of narratives, what kind of narratives do you see codified within stories of Black migration in particular, and then specifically Barbados?

Lia Bascomb
I mean, the easiest, and of course, most well-known ideas of Black migration is the Middle Passage. The afterwards, generally in the US focuses on the great migrations from the South to the North, and even those are more nuanced in terms of moving from rural into more city areas, in terms of not just moving north, but the West. But there’s not a lot of talk around the ways in which migrations outside of the US affect us populations, right, and affect the US economy and affect who gets to come into the US and who doesn’t. So I think looking at it in this way kind of opens up a different lane.

Paul McAllister
Got it. With your essay, you kind of touch on issues of kind of labor, and migration. And I was wondering, what kind of similarities and what kind of connections that our readers can make between the subjects you talk about Caribbean history, and Barbados in particular, and themes they might be more familiar with within US history? And I was thinking specifically of the located labor system, you talk about in sharecropping, how you can compare and contrast those two things.

Lia Bascomb
There’s a lot of similarities and a few differences. So in southern sharecropping culture, you have this sense of everything’s on credit, right? So there’s the kind of illusion of independence and the illusion of ownership, but everything’s on credit, and that debt is always not going to be paid. And so it keeps you located in a particular space. In Barbados, within slavery, most folks, most agricultural laborers, most of the enslaved agricultural population, a good deal of what they would eat, they would grow. So they would have plots in the least fertile parts of the plantation where they would do subsistence farming. And so in one way that gave them a little bit more ownership in that they could sell, exchange any excess if you could get excess. But what it meant after the fact, after emancipation, is that you’re kind of stuck, right? If I’ve planted my food here, I can’t go anywhere, right? Or I starve, right? Also, rather than in the US context where there’s the illusion of ownership and illusion of independence, there’s none of that in the located labor system, right? Your house is on somebody else’s land and your rent means you work. So in many ways, it looks a lot like pre-emancipation day to day.

Paul McAllister
Having outlined that system, can you elaborate on more of the risks that many Barbadians were taking in trying to migrate to other places to find work or opportunity?

Lia Bascomb
At the beginning of the migration to the Panama Canal, many planters were okay with it in the sense that there was overpopulation, there were plenty of people to work, and controlling emmigration after emancipation was one way to kind of think about what wages might look like for those who got wages. As more and more people left, and you know, as it says, in the essay, nearly a quarter of the island’s population left, that’s when people wanted to put a little stop to that. So one of the main issues is the same people that are leaving would be the most attractive people to work in agriculture, right, the most able-bodied, the most skilled. And so there was kind of a pull to Panama, and some of the risks for those that are going, the question of return, right, the question of who’s paying for return, and a lot of that was put into some of the contracts early on, but many, many people left without contracts. So the investment itself to pay your own way, and you had to have at least so much money to get in, if you didn’t have a contract, all of that left an uncertainty of will you make enough to be able to come back? Will you even make enough to be able to send back, right? And you’re relying on those who have gone before you and their stories and what their experiences are, but you don’t really know how things are changing in the moment and what you might encounter when you get there.

Paul McAllister
Got it. Yes. So I have two questions that kind of branch off that topic. The first is how did this kind of mass exodus from Barbados affect the dynamics in the population of the island? You kind of touched on it with regards to how it affected labor, but also how did it kind of affect the cultural movements of the island, how people interacted with the space, what happened there?

Lia Bascomb
One of the major effects is, and it’s not just Barbados, but one of the major effects is what’s called Panama money. Another outlet to earn money meant that it shifted the social systems that shifted the socio-economic systems. And most people of color who were able to buy land in the early 20th century, were able to do so because of Panama money. So in the same ways as the old plantocracy is trying to hold on to things, as sugar plantations are, you know, on edge, aren’t making as much money, as folks need to sell off, there’s a new population that can own that, right? And much of that money either allowed for people to come home, allowed for people to get off of other people’s land, and thus have much more independence and agency in their own lives. It also funded migration to other spaces. So it created a generational wealth such that the land that was bought with Panama money, folks would sell a plot to send somebody to school somewhere else, or sell a plot to fund somebody moving to the UK or sell a plot to fund somebody coming to New York. And so it created a sense of generational wealth that really shifted socio-economic and racial landscapes on the island.

Paul McAllister
That was a really rich answer. Thank you for that. Because it even reminds me of what you see in places like, I guess, the Philippines now where people go elsewhere to work and save and send money back home in order to amass a kind of intergenerational wealth. And I think you see that in a lot of different places today. In your essay, you talk about how the canal’s construction continued, and I’m paraphrasing here, continued a tradition in which Black and Indigenous labor built the infrastructure that maintained empire. You’ve already touched on this, but how did the workers understand their work on the canal and other places in relationship to colonialism and empire in general? How do they negotiate those things?

Lia Bascomb
Well, especially for folks who were coming from the West Indies into Panama, and especially because the Panama Canal Zone was this kind of buzzy space in terms of ownership, right? It created, it created, in some ways, a sense of statelessness for those who were coming. So they’re British subjects from a Barbadian government living in a US owned, or rather, Panamanian owned but US run space without at first Panamanian citizenship or US citizenship, but understanding their importance to both spaces, right? So I think part of how we can see their relationship to empire are the beginnings of the labor movement that happened there, right? So, some of the early strikes that happen, you know, striking for better conditions, striking for better schools, the demands for schools, right, as you have more generations there, the demands for social clubs, all of which were highly racialized on a US. kind of. Jim Crow system, even as the US is moving away from that within the states. And so I think the, the push for better conditions for themselves, and who they’re asking, right? They’re not asking Barbados to make this happen. They can appeal to the British console, but they’re like, No, the US needs to do this, because we’re working in this space, right? So I think in that way, and even the push for US citizenship for those who worked on the canal, all of that showed an understanding of them knowing their worth to the US and to this larger empire.

Paul McAllister
Got it. On November 30, of 2021, so basically this time last year, Barbados removed the British Monarchy as the head of state, thus becoming a republic, remaining part of the Commonwealth but still a republic. How does your exploration of the Barbadian migration and what you just discussed this, this kind of sense of agency among the migrants kind of tie in to that search, both, I guess, as a sense of identity among those who have left but also those who remained on the island or went back to the island after having experienced kind of more of the broader world?

Lia Bascomb
That’s the big question. I think this happens both in the moment of the Republic and in 1966, and the years upcoming to independence, right? So, one, many of the framers, and by framers I mean the politicians, the statesmans, the laypeople who put the ideological frameworks in play for independence had traveled abroad, right? Many of them were war veterans, many of them had gone to school abroad, had worked abroad, and came home. Two, the politicians, specifically, Errol Barrow, who was the first independent Prime Minister was very clear in terms of the economic impacts, right? He was very clear that remittances from abroad, supported Barbados, right? He was also very clear, in terms of Barbados’s support for the UK, right? The ways in which the migration schemes, specifically men working on the transport board and women working in health care systems, had sustained the UK in ways that couldn’t have been possible without that labor, right? So, the understanding of worth that Barbadian migrants had in that moment in the Panama Canal never stopped. Each migration, right, people understood what their labor meant in that space. In terms of becoming a republic, a lot of that push is to push that sense of agency and that sense of worth even further, right? Not just for those who’ve gone abroad, but for those who are still there. In a space where you have, for instance, the royal police force in an independent nation, understanding that you are your own and have always been in some ways, is a powerful, symbolic and ideological push towards more agency. So although the actual running of the government, the queen had nothing to do with that for decades, being able to have that clear break and see yourself as a republic and not have a symbolic head of state that is somewhere else, right? I think that continues the tradition of declaring self worth on an international stage.

Paul McAllister
Okay, thank you for that. Very big question, and you clarified my question wonderfully. So thank you for that as well. I guess closing, narrowing back down to the specifics of your essay, the image you chose for the piece shows the US Ancon, a steamship that has a host of migrants standing on its deck. Why did you choose this picture, and what is the significance of that ship in particular?

Lia Bascomb
So in going through the Getty Images, I knew I wanted to focus on Black labor on the canal. And there were a number of different images I could choose from, from the US version of the canal, the French version, even the Panama railroad. But I think this particular photo, one, shows the magnitude of movement, this is just one ship, but you’re already seeing 1500 people come at once. It shows, there’s some personality to the people in the photos, right, you get some close ups and some far, you see the conditions of movement, right? The fact that they’re quote, unquote, “deckers”, everybody’s on deck, you’re kind of exposed to the elements, and you show a little bit of how they viewed themselves, how they dressed, right, how they presented themselves. The ship itself, as I say in the essay, had only recently been purchased, right? So not only do you have a population that is accustomed to work and is accustomed to being part of world systems, even in local spaces, but you have the actual infrastructure of the ship, has been, you know, doing this work in some way. So the ways in which they come together in this one moment in this one picture, and the fact that that’s the ship that officially opens the canal later in 1914, I thought that that was important.

Paul McAllister
Yes, thank you very much for that. This has been Dr. Lia Bascomb, talking about her essay, “Black Labor On Board”. Dr. Bascomb, thank you for joining us.

Lia Bascomb
Thank you for having me.