Denationalization and Historical Memory: The Panamanian Case

In this text inspired from her book Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (2022), Kaysha Corinealdi retraces the five years that led to 50,000 (mostly Black) Panamanians who were stripped of their citizenships in the 1940s.

Beginning in 1941 and through 1946, over 50,000 Panamanians were stripped of birthright citizenship. How is this possible? How did the first constitutionally-sanctioned case of denationalization in the Americas slip into oblivion? These questions haunted me when I wrote my book. This text is an opportunity to share a bit of that history, but more importantly, to get at the heart of what we chose to forget, when we choose to remember, and why this matters at our present historical conjecture.

As I see it, there are three core reasons for the apparent amnesia connected to mass scale denationalization in Panama. The first has to do with when this is all taking place. The 1940s was marked by bloody world wars, genocides, and the rise and embrace of fascist movements. When Panama appeared in international discussions it was mainly due to the Panama Canal joining the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea (and by extension the Atlantic Ocean) and the presence of the US military’s Southern Command. What was happening, internally, in Panama, received little if any attention.

Another important factor shaping this silence is the hemispheric-wide discrimination targeting migrants and citizens of African and Asian descent in the Americas that was the norm throughout the first half of the 20th century. Those targeted for denationalization in Panama were the descendants of Black migrants from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean whose ancestors had been kidnapped from the African Continent and enslaved in the plantation, as well as the descendants of Asian migrants mainly from China. A focus on recruiting white European migrants to “improve the nation” and campaigns targeting the “enemies from within” likewise typified the policies and agendas of governments from Argentina to Canada.