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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
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ERASED
The Untold Story of the Panama Canal
The untold history of the Panama Canalfrom the Panamanian point of view. Sleuth and scholar Marixa Lasso recounts how the Canal's American builders displaced 40,000 residents and erased entire towns in the guise of bringing modernity to the tropics.
Central America. Cutting a convenient path from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the backbone of the republic.
Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal's displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the erased cities and townsa space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and peoplewhich served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburban towns built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.
Marixa Lasso teaches history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Prior to that she was a tenured Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University. She received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center to support her research on this book. She has also held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. In 2016 Lasso was the Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her work has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish.
Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal's displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the erased cities and townsa space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and peoplewhich served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburban towns built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.
Marixa Lasso teaches history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Prior to that she was a tenured Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University. She received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center to support her research on this book. She has also held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. In 2016 Lasso was the Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her work has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish.
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Book
Published 2019-02-01 by Harvard University Press |