"Intimate Hospitality: Black Boarding-House Keepers in U.S. Empire"

This presentation explores the role of Afro-Caribbean women as boarding-house keepers in sites of U.S. imperial capital investment at the turn of the 20th century, with a particular focus on the Panama Canal. These boarding houses were sites of Black women’s care labor and of Black women’s entrepreneurial modes of survival. Black women’s carework lubricated the movement of contracted Caribbean laborers to places like Panama during the canal construction, providing lodging, laundry services, food, and community to displaced migrants. These women navigated racialized spaces of empire to secure income and build independent businesses. On the one hand, these women were capitalist adepts of necessity, plying their trade to survive, exploiting the limits of U.S. state capacity, and competing with company services. On the other, they were subject to precarious income, potential violence, and acute demands on their hospitality including physical intimacy and the expectation of sexual comforts. Drawing primarily from legal cases in Panama City and the U.S. Canal Zone, this presentation explores the unique conditions of Black boarding house keepers to consider the imbrication of sexual intimacy with business, as experienced by Black boarding house keepers whose labor was saturated with racialized ideas of Black female criminality and sexual availability.