This study investigates the remaking of Panama into a nexus of the global economy. It draws on Spanish and English-language sources from archives in Panama, Colombia, and the United States to reveal the importance of micro-level struggles in the creation of new circuits of capital, people, and ideas. Driven by the desire to reach California quickly, thousands of North Americans crossed Panama during the Gold Rush. This influx of people unleashed struggles over the transit route, land, and the role of race in Panamanian society. Through analysis of a riot in Panama City in 1856, the Watermelon Slice Incident, the thesis exposes how new relationships were forged among Panamanian boatmen, West Indian railroad workers, shipping magnates, intellectuals in Bogota, and forty-niners bound for California. While the Gold Rush raised hopes across Panamanian society, those hopes were mostly dashed by the mid-1850s, as a U.S. railroad company tightened its control over the Panamanian transit economy. Born in part out of those disappointed hopes, the riot of 1856 alarmed political leaders in Panama and elsewhere in South America, some of whom called upon novel notions of Latin unity to halt U.S. expansion. By linking events in Panama and California to the diffusion of Latin America as a geohistorical category, the dissertation reveals how experiences of space were transformed on multiple levels in the Americas during the Gold Rush era.Ph.D.American historyLatin American historyModern historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126044/2/3016916.pd
