Abstract

"Submerged Property: Land, Dispossession and Flooding at the Panama Canal, 1904–1913"

Nicolay Duque-Robayo, Columbia University (nd2757@columbia.edu)

Concurrent with the construction of the Panama Canal in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) purchased privately-held property in the inland of the country. Acquisition of these territories served a specific infrastructural purpose: the submersion of the land for damming the Chagres River. Key for the ICC’s pursuit of its engineering solution, the Gatun Lake reservoir enabled the passing of ships across the isthmus and provided a source of potable water for Colon and Panama City ports. At face value, archival records present contracts-for-sale between private land holders and the ICC as uncomplicated transfers of property from one party to another. However, a closer examination of the records foregrounds the peculiar transformation of land into property—property then intended to be destroyed. This presentation argues that the construction of the Panama Canal as a transportation passageway thus hinged upon a number of transformations of the land, mediated through market and legal dispositifs. Where historians have noted the dispossession of property resulting from flooding in the same inland towns of Panama, this presentation brings forth the aesthetic and technical representations which enabled the flooding. By attending to the written and visual descriptions of this inland region through the framework of property, an aesthetic formation circulates within the mechanisms for extra-territorial land acquisition. Beyond tracing semantic shifts, the case of the submerged lands at the Panama Canal foregrounds the simultaneous production and destruction of financial values when land becomes synonymous with property through paperwork. Vis-à-vis the ICC, the US government inscribed financial value by assessing the improvements made to the land in order to purchase it. Functioning in opposition to the eighteenth-century tradition of physiocratic value, the territory inland of the isthmus was most productive to the Canal when it stopped being productive at all.