"To understand the depopulation of the Zone, it is important to remember the symbolic importance of the Panama Canal at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as US ideas about Latin America, particularly tropical Latin America."

Reading parts of Erased for the school made me want to come back and read the entire book which I did! Erased discusses the creation of the American Canal Zone area by its Panamanian depopulation. Marixa Lasso attempts to reconstruct Panamanian life in the Canal area throughout the book, as well as general feelings on leaving the Canal Zone. To explain how the creation of the American Canal Zone came about Marixa Lasso shows how American Imperialism first had to deconstruct the idea of Panama being modern. Lasso splits up the text into Port Towns, Creation of the Canal Zone, Creation of Canal Zone Towns, depopularization of the Panamanians in the Zone, Different stages of the Canal Zone after is depopularization.

Marina Lasso does a great job of laying out and proving her point to the reader. Lasso says the depopulation of the Panama Canal Area has severed “Panama’s historical connection the isthmian route and any attempt to challenge the idea that the canal was built over a barely habited jungle requires reconstructing the lives of these lost towns.” By losing the narrative of black Panamanians as modern, it is much easier to connect them to the idea of the helpless jungle native. A trope that shows up time and time again in history. The American viewpoint on these subjects as it relates to Panama and the Panamanians come back into time and time again in the narrative. Coming from a western education, seeing American imperialism on full display continues to open my eyes.

I didn’t realize how important Panama was to the international economy, and more importantly the American economy. The Panama railroad played a part in moving miners to California during the Gold Rush, by connecting passage from one ocean to another. I wonder if that was one part of the reason why America decided to take over the canal project, besides wanting to prove themselves to be a world leader. The idea of American superiority leads Americans to believe in others’ inferiority. Lasso shows everything the Panamanians did, was clothed in the naive native narrative by the United States to justify doing what they pleased in Panama.

This quote from chapter two sums up the whole book, “assessments that characterized Zone agriculture as primitive or non-existence erased the connections between Panamanian peasants and their nineteenth-century history and technology in the same way that ideas about black tropical people had erased the membership of black Panamanian citizens in the political history of the nineteenth century…If the deep historical connections between Zone inhabitants and their region had been acknowledged, the decision to depopulate would have been much harder to justify.”